Digital Marketing can sometimes be a daunting area to do business in no matter what level of expertise you hold as the field is constantly shifting and the terms and lingo used by those in the know are constantly changing as well.
 
Therefore, to help educate the masses on all things Digital, Digital Strategy Consultants have compiled a glossary of the most important digital marketing terms out there so that you can refer back and get the help you need at any time.
 
Please note that this lift will be updated frequently and if you would like to find out more about any of the words or terms mentioned below, please get in contact with Digital Strategy Consultants.

Glossary (A-Z)

What is A/B Testing?
A/B testing is the process of comparing two variations of a single variable to determine which performs best in order to help improve marketing efforts. This is done to optimise the conversion funnel.
 
What is Anchor Text?
Anchor text refers to the clickable words which are used in a hyperlink.
 
What is Artificial Intelligence?
Artificial intelligence is an area of computer systems able to perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages.
 
What is Audio Search?
Voice search is a technology that allows users to perform a search on the internet by verbally asking a question on a smartphone, smart device or a computer rather than using the traditional approach of typing the query into a search box. Learn more about audio search.
 
What is an Application Programming Interface?
An Application programming interface, commonly referred to as API, essentially allows platforms to connect to each other and import data which can then be used simultaneously.
 
What is Average Clickthrough Rate?
Average Clickthrough Rate reveals how often people who view your ad end up actually clicking it and entering your website. It is an important metric to understand what users find click worthy.
 
How to calculate Average Cost-Per-Click (Avg. CPC)?
The average amount paid each time an ad is clicked.  Average Cost-Per-Click is calculated by dividing the cost of all clicks by the total number of clicks (Cost of all clicks / # of clicks).
 
What is the Average Page Load Time?
The average page load time for mobile is 22 seconds however if a page takes more than 3 seconds to load, the majority of people will leave the page.
 
What does Average Keyword Position mean?
Refers to the average position that  an ad appears in search results when that keyword is searched. For example, an average position of 1.4 means that an ad usually appears between the 1st and 2rd positions.
 
What is Average Session Duration?
Average session duration refers to how long users are spending on your website. If you had two users, one that spent 3 minutes on your website and another that spent 1 minute, then you would have an average session duration of 2 minutes.
 
How to calculate Average Time On Page?
The average length of time users spend on a page on your website is calculated by dividing the total time spent on a page by the number of visitors to that page.  
 
What is B2B Marketing Definition?
B2B marketing describes a business relationship where companies sell to other companies
 
What is a Backlink?
A backlink is when a website links to any other page via a HTML href code.
 
What is a Bounce in Marketing?
A bounce is when a user’s session only contains a single pageview. The idea is that someone comes to your website and they ‘bounce’ away after only viewing a single page.
 
What does Bounce Rate in Google Analytics Mean?
Bounce Rate refers to the percentage of visitors who enter a website and then leave the website rather than continuing to view other pages.
 
What is a Bot?
A bot is a computerised program that crawls or visits websites.Bot can also be known as a “crawler” or a “spider”.
 
What is a Call to Action?
A call to action is a prompt on a website or app which is used to guide and encourage users along a company’s preferred journey towards conversion. Examples include “continue” buttons, “buy now” buttons and “click here” buttons.
 
How to Calculate Churn Rate?
Churn rate measures how many customers you lose each month as a percentage of total customers. If a company had 100 customers at the beginning of June and only 90 customers at the end , their customer churn rate would be 10%.
 
What does Click Through Rate mean?
Clickthrough Rate is the number of clicks an ad receives divided by the number of times that ad has appeared in a given time. CTR = # of Clicks / # of Impressions.
 
What is Content?
Content is any piece of information that exists for the purpose of being read, engaged with, or shared.
 
What is a Content Strategy?
A content strategy refers to the planning, development, and management of content usually via social media but also on a company’s blog.
 
What is a Content Management System?
A Content Management System (CMS) is a web application designed to make it easy to create, edit, and manage a website. It is used to help users with content editing and funnel management.
 
What is a Conversion in marketing?
A conversion occurs when a visitor to your website completes a specified action. This could be completing a purchase, signing up for an email, subscribing to an RSS feed.
 
Conversion Rate Definition
The rate at which visitors or prospects take a desired action on your site. Desired action steps can involve purchases, leads, contact form completions, newsletters or email sign ups, registration for White Papers, etc. Example: If 100 visitors start a funnel to your site and 21 completes are recorded then your conversion rate would be 21%.
 
What is a Conversion Funnel?
A Conversion funnel is a phrase used in e-commerce to describe the journey a consumer takes from entering a website and then navigating towards a predetermined goal, usually a sale.
 
How To Calculate Cost-Per-Acquisition?
Cost-Per-Acquisition is a pricing model that calculates the cost of getting a visitor to a landing page. For example if you total advertising cost is €1,000 and you get 100 visitors to visit your landing page for this spend, your CPA would be €10.
 
What is Conversion Rate Optimisation?
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the systematic process of increasing the percentage of website visitors who take a desired action or goal.
 
What is Cost Per Click?
Cost Per click, is a model used to drive traffic to websites where an advertiser pays a publisher when the ad is clicked.
 
How to Calculate Cost-Per-Complete-Form?
A pricing model that calculates the cost of getting a visitor from the start of a funnel to a complete. For example if you total advertising cost is €1,000 and you get 100 visitors to visit your landing page and 10 of these complete the funnel, your CPCF would be €100.
 
How to Calculate Cost Per Goal Conversion?
To calculate cost per goal conversion you divide the total amount spent on encouraging users to convert for a particular goal by the number of people who actually convert.
 
What does Data Visualisation mean?
Data visualisation is the process of transforming a data set into a visual representation which is easy to understand. Find out more about reporting and visualisation. 
 
What is a Digital Audit?
A digital marketing audit involves a comprehensive inspection of all the practices, strategies, and outcomes of what a business has been doing to establish and improve its online presence. Find out more about how to conduct a digital audit.
 
What is Digital Analytics?
Digital Analytics is the process of analysing data sets to better understand customer behaviour and conversion. Find out more about our digital analytics services. 
 
What is the definition for Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing involves the marketing of products or services using digital technologies, mainly on the Internet, but also including mobile phones, display advertising, and any other digital medium. Find out more about our digital marketing services. 
 
Direct Search Channel Definition?
Direct search traffic is made up of visits from people entering your company URL directly into their browser.
 
What are Display Ads?
Display Ads are any online ads that may include images, video, flash, and audio which can be seen on blogs, news sites, social media and other places on the web
 
What does Estimated Lifetime Value mean?
The total projected profit from a conversion over the lifetime of a product.
 
What is Email traffic?
Email traffic is a channel which is made up of visits which originate from people clicking on email links in their inbox which bring them directly to your website.
 
What does Engagement Rate mean?
Engagement rate is a social media metric used to describe the amount of interaction (likes, comments, shares) that a piece of content receives.
 
What is Funnel Conversion Rate?
The percentage of visitors that start a funnel and who proceed to complete that funnel.
 
What does Goal Completion mean?
A goal completion occurs when a  user converts for a goal eg subscribe. When a user converts for a particular goal during a session they’ll be counted as a goal completion.
 
What is the Goal Conversion Rate?
The percentage of users who complete a goal or desired action.
 
What is Google Ads?
Google Ads is an online advertising platform developed by Google, where advertisers pay to display brief advertisements, service offerings, product listings, video content, and generate mobile application installs within the Google ad network to web users.
 
What is Google Ads Spend?
Google Ads spend refers to the total cost of running a google adwords campaign.
 
What is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is a web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic and breaks down data into a wide range of reports which can be filtered to provide insightful and accurate information on a websites performance.
 
What is Google My Business?
Google My Business is a free tool from Google that helps business owners manage their online presence across the search engine and offers great impact for brands seeking local exposure. Learn more about how to optimise your Google My Business listing.
 
What is an Impression in marketing?
Impression is a term used to describe the number of times an ad has been viewed.
 
What is an Impression Share?
Impression share refers to the total number of times an ad has been shown as a percentage of the total available reach.
 
What is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing refers to marketing activities that draw visitors in via organic means such as blog posts, rather than marketers spending money on advertising to bring in customers.
 
What is Information Architecture?
Information architecture is the process of strategically organising the content, flow & structure of the website based on data, research & planning. The end goal of the process is to develop a site structure that balances the user’s needs with the brand’s needs.
 
What is a Key Performance Indicator? #
A Key Performance Indicator is used as a measure against current progress used to judge an organisations progress towards meeting a predetermined goal.
 
What is a Keyword?
A Keyword is a specific search term used when a user attempts to find information on a search engine.
 
What is a Landing Page?
A Landing Page refers to the Web page that a searcher arrives on after clicking on an advertisement or link. The more tailored a Landing Page is to a specific query, the better results you will see.
 
What is the Landing Page Conversion Rate?
Landing Page Conversion Rate is the percentage of visitors that arrive on a landing page and who proceed to start a funnel and do not leave or bounce out of your website.
 
What is a Lead in Marketing?  
A lead is a prospective customer of a product or service who has entered the top of the funnel. Companies try to guide leads through the funnel towards conversion.
 
What is Lead Generation?
Lead generation is the process of gathering interest in a product or service and developing a potential customer base. Learn more about our lead generation services.
 
What does Lifetime Value mean?
A prediction based on past performance of the value of a customer to a company over the course of their lifetime
 
What is Machine Learning?
Machine learning is a subset of Artificial Intelligence which involves the study of algorithms and statistical models that computer systems use to effectively perform a specific task without using explicit instructions.
 
Calculate Marketing Return on Investment?
Marketing Return on Investment is measured by how much return you receive from your online marketing investment. An example would be if you spend €1000 on Pay Per Click ads and you make €2000 in profit from sales, then your Return on Investment would be 100%.
 
What does Mobile First Design mean?
Mobile First Design refers to designing for mobile version of your website first and then enhancing the content as the size of the device increases
 
What is Mobile Optimisation?
Mobile optimisation refers to designing and formatting your website so that it is easy to read and navigate from a mobile device.
 
What is Native Advertising?
Native advertising is the use of paid ads that match the look, feel and function of the media format in which they appear.
 
What is Off-Page SEO?
Off-Page SEO focuses on Search Engine Optimisation techniques such as link building, securing mentions on other websites, promoting content with email and social media rather than making changes to the site itself (on-page SEO).
 
What is On-Page SEO?
On-Page SEO refers to tactics used to improve a websites search engine ranking by making changes to the website content such as optimising title tags, meta descriptions and incorporating keywords into the conte
 
What is an Organic Search?
Organic search results are the web page listings that appear when you type a query into a search engine. The results displayed closely match the user’s search query.
 
How are Organic Search Positions determined?
Non-paid search engine results. Organic search positions are calculated with complicated algorithms unique to each search engine. Positions are based on a mix of SEO, relevance and location.
 
What is a Pageview?
The total number of times a single page has been viewed.
 
What does Pages Per Visit mean?
Pages Per Visit is a top-level metric for user engagement showing the average number of pageviews in each session.
 
What is Paid Search?
Paid search is a marketing channel where search engines allow advertisers to show ads on their search engine results pages.
 
How to calculate the Percentage of New Sessions?
Percentage of New Sessions refers to the number of sessions which originate from first time visitors to your website as a percentage of total sessions. New Sessions / Total Sessions.
 
What is Predictive Analytics?
Predictive analytics is a term used to describe a variety of statistical and analytical techniques used to develop models that predict future events. To learn more about predictive analytics CLICK HERE.
 
What is a Quality Score?
A quality score is a numerical score assigned by Google AdWords in their Pay Per Click platform. The Quality Score is determined by an ad’s clickthrough rate, keyword relevance, Landing Page relevance and other factors. Combining the ad’s Quality Score with your maximum Cost Per Click and advertiser competitiveness determines your ad’s position and what you end up paying per click.
 
What is Referral Traffic?
Referral traffic within Google Analytics lets you know from where the visitor clicked on a link that led to your website.
 
What is Responsive Design?
Responsive design is an approach to web page creation that makes use of flexible layouts and flexible images. The goal of responsive design is to build a website that can detect a visitors screen size and match the output accordingly.
 
What is Pay Per Click?
Pay Per Click refers to when an advertiser puts an ad inGoogle AdWords or Facebook and pays each time a visitor clicks on the ad.
 
What is Return Visits Share in marketing?
The percentage of users who have visited your site before and return for more. If someone has visited your website within the past two years and returns from the same device, they are marked as a Returning Visitor in Google Analytics.
 
How to calculate Return Users as a percentage of the Total?
The percentage of users who have visited your site before and are back for more. Calculated by dividing return visitors / total visitors
 
What is Search Engine Optimisation?
Search Engine Optimisation is the practice of enhancing a websites position in search results. By adjusting on-page and off-page SEO factors, marketers can significantly influence how a website appears in search engine results.
 
What is a Session?
A session is a single visit to your website, consisting of one or more pageviews, along with events, ecommerce transactions and other interactions. The default session timeout is 30 minutes, which means that if someone is inactive on your website for over 30 minutes, then a new session will be reported if they perform another interaction, for example, viewing another page.
 
How to calculate Sessions Per User
Sessions Per User refers to the average number of times users have visited your website over a given period. Divide the total number of sessions / user
 
What does Sessions Per User by Channel mean?
Refers to the average number of times users have visited your website over a given period broken down by channel type
 
What is the definition of a Social Channel?
Social channel traffic refers to traffic coming from social media, including Twitter Linkedin and Facebook etc.
 
What is a Unique Page View?
A unique Page View is when a page is counted once even if it was viewed multiple times within a single session. For example, if someone landed on your homepage, then viewed the ‘about us’ page and then navigated back to your homepage, the homepage would have 1 unique pageview
 
What is a User Persona?
A User Persona is a fictional representation of a company’s ideal customer based on market research and customer data.
 
What does User Experience mean?
User experience refers to how users interact with and experience your website, services or products.
 
What does User Interface mean?
User Interface refers to the software or web applications that facilitates the convenient and efficient use of a website or application.
 
What is an XML Sitemap?
An XML sitemap lists a website’s important pages, making sure Google can find and crawl them all, and helping it understand your website structure.
 
What is Web Design?
Web design is the process of creating websites. It encompasses several different aspects, including webpage layout, content production, and graphic design. Learn more about our web design services.
 
What is a Webform?
A webform is a form on a web page which allows users to enter data which is then sent to a server for processing. Webforms are used to collect contact information and to sign up readers to newsletters.  
 
What is a 301 Redirect?
A 301 Redirect is a method that permanently redirects a visitor from one web page to another web page.
 
What is a 302 Redirect?
A 302 Redirect is a method used to temporarily redirect a visitor from one page to another web page and is predominantly used in temporary situations.
 
What is a 404 Redirect?
A 404 error occurs when a visitor goes to a web page that does not exist, then 404 Error message appears.
 
About the Author
Mark O’Connell is a digital expert working at Digital Strategy Consultants. He has a passion for strategy and for assisting organizations achieve their online goals through best practice techniques and priming them to drive competitive advantage through early adoption of emerging digital technologies. Mark holds a LL.B (BS) (Hons) in Law & Business (TCD), MSc in Data Intelligence (Fordham University, New York) and a MSc in Marketing Strategy (Antwerp Management School). His current research interests are in the field of analytics and strategy and how these disciplines can be used to drive competitive advantage.