Marketing Terms A-Z

Digital Marketing can be a minefield of jargon, and that goes against everything we stand for at Red Quokka. So, we have put together this handy jargon-buster to help make understanding marketing terms just that little bit easier.

A

A/B Split Testing: This is essentially sending out two different versions of the same message to see which one is most effective. This can help you to understand what your target audience likes and dislikes about whatever it is you are testing, whether that’s your website, social channels or advertising platforms. Pro tip: Use A/B split tests on your e-mail newsletters and Facebook ads- this can save you spending serious amounts of time and money on future ads and newsletters that won’t be effective.

Above The Fold: This refers to the content a user will see when a page first loads before they scroll down the page, both on web and mobile.

Ad Manager: A Facebook tool used to create, publish and monitor adverts published on the platform.

Algorithm Update: Google regularly updates its algorithm to ensure that users are receiving the most relevant and trustworthy search results. Historic algorithm updates include the Google Penguin update, which penalised websites for buying links, and Google Panda, which targeted spammy and “thin” content. More recent algorithm updates have focused on mobile-friendliness and page speed, as well as broader consideration around E-A-T. Pro tip: You’ll never find out exactly how Google’s algorithm works, but it’s certainly worth researching the latest updates to get some hints before making any major website or content decisions.

B

B2B: Business to Business: companies which trade solely with each other, and not to the public.

B2C: Business to Consumer: companies who trade to the public.

Backlink: This is an external link which leads back to your website. An example would be an online publication linking to your website from an article. Building backlinks to your site, known as “link building”, is often regarded as one of the most important Google ranking considerations along with content and technical. Pro tip: Reach out to influential bloggers and see if you can partner up and add links to each other’s websites on your blogs. The more ‘authority’ or influence they have, the greater the boost should be on your Google ranking.

Black hat: Get on the naughty step. ‘Black hat’ SEO essentially describes practices which fall outside of Google’s guidelines such as keyword stuffing and paying for links from a spammy site, etc. If you indulge in this activity, you’ll likely be penalised by Google’s ranking system. Pro Tip: Don’t cut corners with SEO, it’s just not worth it. If you think improving your Google ranking will bring you more business, it’s worth investing in an expert to do it for you.

Bounce Rate: The percentage of users who visit your site and leave without engaging with any other pages. This percentage can be used to improve the relevance of your content and can be applied at both page and site-level.

Brand Identity: The persona and reputation of your company which is established through the tone of your copy, your logo, colour palettes etc. Pro tip: As it so happens, we’re experts at building brand identities through fantastic, engaging content. Hope over to the Red Quokka website to see how we can help you today.

Breadcrumbs: In website design, breadcrumb navigation is a way to show your users their location and how they got there. It also helps users find higher-level pages faster if they landed on your site from search or a deep link. For example: Home > Kitchen > Small Appliances > Toasters

C

CMS: Content Management System. These are the platforms that make adding and editing your website content easier. For example: WordPress, Magento, Drupal.

Conversion: This refers to the completion of a desired action on your website by a user. It is commonly used to describe the purchase of a product, but for lead generation websites, it could be the completion of a contact form or a telephone call.

Conversion Funnel: The journey a consumer takes from finding your brand to navigating an e-commerce website and finally converting to a sale. The AIDA model is perhaps the most common conversion funnel framework, identified by four distinct steps, i.e. Awareness, Interest, Desire and Action (or Conversion). This conversion funnel can be optimised on-site through Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO), in which the user journey is analysed and improved, or via several touchpoints throughout your owned and earned media. Pro tip: be sure to re-engage clients who have converted so that they purchase again. A step often missed but is extremely important for e-commerce businesses.

Conversion Rate: A Conversion Rate is the percentage of website visitors who have completed an action on a site, such as buying a product or signing up for a newsletter or lead generator. Pro Tip: High conversion rates are not always positive and could mean that prices are too low and you’re actually missing out on revenue, or that you’re tracking a meaningless action as conversions.

Cookies: Text files containing small amounts of data that are created when you arrive on a web page and are stored in your internet browser automatically. Cookies are used to tailor the experience of a specific website to a certain user. This information is encrypted, so only the website and your web browser can access it. In digital marketing, cookies can be used to retarget a user through paid marketing, to encourage them to purchase an item which they have previously viewed.

Copywriting: The process of writing content for your website. When writing with SEO in mind, copywriting involves using relevant keywords, headings and many other tricks of the trade. Pro Tip: Don’t spend the day cursing a blank screen, ask us to write an SEO-optimised blog for you to maximise the effectiveness of your content, and save yourself oodles of time.

CPA: Cost Per Action (or acquisition) is the average amount of money you would need to spend on a particular advert before it leads to a sale (or action). It is calculated by dividing the total amount spent on advertising or marketing activity by the total number of conversions.

CPC: Cost Per Click is the price an advertiser pays when a user clicks on their advertisement once.

CPM: Cost Per Thousand (M being the roman numeral for 1,000) is a set price for displaying an ad 1,000 times. PS, if you can think of a more confusing abbreviation, for anything in the world, tweet us and we may well send you a prize!

Crawling: The discovery process in which search engines send out a team of robots (known as crawlers or spiders) to find new and updated content. Content can vary — it could be a webpage, an image, a video, a PDF, etc. — but regardless of the format, content is discovered by links. This is important as, in order to show up in search results, your content needs to first be visible to search engines. It’s arguably the most important piece of the SEO puzzle.

CRO: Conversion Rate Optimisation is a system for increasing the percentage of visitors to a website that convert into customers, or more generally, take any desired action on a webpage.

CSS: Cascading Style Sheet is used to format the layout and appearance of a web page. For example, you can define text style, font colour and tables using CSS.

CTA: Call to Action — this may be a button or statement which encourages users to get in touch or buy your product/service on a web page or email.

CTR: Click-Through Rate is the number of times that users have clicked on a desired hyperlink, versus the total number of users who view the page where the link is situated.

D

Digital Garage: A free online learning platform by Google that helps you to learn more about everything digital and will help you to understand other Google tools.

Digital PR: An online marketing strategy used by businesses to increase their online presence. Digital PR agencies network with journalists, bloggers and influencers and send online press releases to gain high-quality backlinks, social media mentions and improve their SEO.

Direct Traffic: When a user types your URL directly into the search bar or clicked on their saved bookmark. This does not count as ‘Organic Traffic’.

Do-follow link: These allow Google (and other search engines) to follow them and reach your website giving you link juice and a backlink. If a webmaster is linking back to you with this link, both search engines and humans will be able to follow you. (see also No-follow links)

DR: Domain Rating is a links metric created by the marketing platform, ‘Ahrefs’ to define the authority and ranking potential a website holds. A similar metric to this is DA, or Domain Authority which was created by Moz, another marketing platform. The higher the domain rating, the more authority and ranking potential a website has.

E

Evergreen Content: Content that doesn’t go out of date. It revolves around a topic that is always relevant to readers, regardless of the current news cycle or season

E-A-T: Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness. These are said to be the three main features the Google algorithm uses to rank websites. Of course, there’s a lot more to it than that, but these three things are definitely worth demonstrating over and over again in your content.

F

Featured Snippet: Short snippets of text that appear at the top of Google’s search results in order to quickly answer a searcher’s query. The content that appears inside of a Featured Snippet is automatically pulled from web pages in Google’s index.

G

Google Analytics: A free tool from Google used to track the performance of your website. You can see the number of visitors to your site, how they found the website, the pages they viewed, and much more.

GoogleBot : The name of Google’s two web crawlers (user agents): a desktop crawler and a mobile crawler.

Google Search Console: (previously known as Google Webmaster Tools) This service allows website owners and marketers to check the organic performance of their website on Google web search and provides suggestions towards optimising its visibility.

GTM: Google Tag Manager is another free tool from Google that allows you to manage and implement tags (snippets of code) on your website, without having to modify the site code. It is commonly used to make user behaviour tracking easier.

Growth Hacking: Often used by small businesses or start-ups — getting creative with free marketing methods like social media, SEO, viral marketing and content marketing

H

H1 Tag: The <H1> HTML tag is usually used for the title of a page or post and it is the first header visible on a page. The formatting of an h1 usually differs from the rest of the header tags found on a page (H2 — subheading, H3, H4 etc)

HTML: Hyper Text Markup Language is the code which is used to build web pages and to arrange the layout of the page.

HTTPS: Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure is used for a secure connection over a computer network. Communications over a webpage are encrypted using Transport Layer Security (TLS), or its predecessor Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). If your site isn’t secure, it will display HTTP, meaning that your data isn’t encrypted and could be open to attack from cyber criminals.

Hyperlocal: Using GPS data to geographically target audiences and provide location-based advertising.

I

Impression: These are the number of times your website is viewed according to search engine results. It can also be used to describe the number of times an advert or post was seen by your target audience on a marketing and advertising platform or social media.

J

JavaScript: A programming language used to create interactive effects on a web page. It is commonly embedded within the HTML code in <script> tags.

K

Keyword: Ideas and topics that define what your content is about. In terms of SEO, they’re the words and phrases that searchers enter into search engines. As a website owner and content creator, you want to use keywords on your page that are relevant to what people are searching for so they have a better chance of finding your content among the results. Pro Tip: Google has its own keyword planner you can use to find out the most popular search terms for your product or service.

L

Landing Page: A standalone web page, created specifically for a marketing or advertising campaign. It’s where a visitor “lands” after they click on a link from an email or ad. Unlike web pages, which typically have many goals and encourage exploration, landing pages are designed with a single focus or goal (CTA).

Lead: A customer expressing an interest in your product or service. Qualified leads are those which have been identified as likely to result in a sale.

Link Building: The process of acquiring hyperlinks from other websites to your own. Link building is considered to be one of the most effective ways to grow your organic visibility along with on-site content creation.

Link Equity/Link Juice: A term which describes the authority a link can pass from one page to another. The authority can be passed through both internal links (from the same website) and external links (from another website). PageRank was Google’s original algorithm which took link equity and the overall link graph into consideration when ranking websites for users. However, there are now multiple other factors which also affect page rankings.

Long Tail: These are keywords with a lower search volume but a higher search intent. For example, ‘Ice Cream’ will have a really high search volume. ‘Ice Cream shop central London’ will have less volume, but better conversion rates.

M

Metadata: In the context of digital marketing and web development, metadata refers to a page’s “hidden information” that’s typically stored in the <head> of a document.

For SEOs, metadata that is of particular interest is the title tag and meta description as these are the components that appear in a search result. They can give users a concise overview of what they will find on a page while promoting higher rankings when optimised correctly.

N

No-follow link: An attribute that can be added to the HTML element to instruct some (or all) search engines that they are not to follow either a specific hyperlink, or all hyperlinks in a page. This ensures that the link target’s (the website that you’ve linked to) ranking will not be affected in the search engine’s index. This is usually used if it’s not a trusted link, if it’s a paid link or prioritising where you want the search engines to focus on.

O

Off-Page Optimisation: Refers to the factors that are outside of your control or the control of the coding on your webpage. An example of off-page optimisation is link popularity and page rank: Both of which occur outside of your direct influence. You can however use digital PR, social media and customer review sites to promote trust and authority thus improving organic performance.

On-Page Optimisation: The factors that are controlled by you or by the coding on your page that contribute its SERP (search engine results page) ranking.

A lot of factors contribute to on-page optimisation, including HTML code, meta tags, title tags, keyword placement and density, outbound links, relevant content and word count.

Organic Traffic: This is the number of people who visit your website through natural search engine listings, i.e. without clicking an advertisement or a referral link. Similarly, you can also receive traffic through Organic Social — again, via users who found you on social media through unpaid means — though this is often tagged simply as “Social” through analytics platforms.

P

PPC: Pay Per Click is a type of online advertising in which the advertisers pay a fixed price every time a user clicks on their advert. Platforms that use this model include Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising.

Q

Quokka: Ok, so this isn’t specifically digital marketing related, but in case you were wondering what a Quokka is — check out this little dude: