Glossary
A
A/B testing A process that shows the user one web page (A) to compare with another page (B) for the purposes of tracking behavior based on which version of the page the user has seen. Traditionally, the A page is the landing page that is currently in use, and the B page is an entirely new page.
Above the fold A term traditionally used to describe the top half of a newspaper. A digital ad or search engine ranking is said to be above the fold if it is on the first page and can be seen without scrolling. While screen resolutions vary, the fold is generally considered to be between the fifth and sixth places on the results page of a search engine. Traffic is much higher for listings that are above the fold.
Anchor text The words that a user clicks when following a link. The anchor text of a link is important for SEO because search engines often look at the anchor text to determine what the landing page is about.
Attribution The process of understanding and measuring which marketing campaigns, tactics, or touches contributed to achieving goals such as conversions or leads. The main types of attribution are fractional (e.g., all credit to either last touch or first touch) and incremental (where credit is split among multiple touches in a variety of ways). Incremental attribution is far superior but is also more complex.
B
Behavioral targeting A term used to describe the technique that online publishers use to increase a campaign’s effectiveness. Information on a user’s search patterns and web-browsing behavior is collected. This data can be used alone or coupled with other forms of targeting such as demographics.
Below the fold A term traditionally used to describe the bottom half of a newspaper. A search engine ranking is said to be below the fold if it is on the first page but cannot be seen without scrolling. While screen resolutions vary, the fold is generally considered to be between the fifth and sixth places on the results page of a search engine. Traffic is much lower for listings that are below the fold.
Bounce rate The percentage or quantity of users that visit a website and do not view any other pages within that site before exiting the site.
Buying funnel The multistep path or process that a consumer takes in order to purchase a product or service. This is also known as a sales funnel. The funnel can start with completing a lead form or accepting a sales offer and end at a finished contract or a deal transaction.
C
Call to action Content intended to convince users to perform a particular action.
CAN-SPAM A U.S. law regulating commercial email (e.g., email marketing). The acronym stands for the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003.
CAPTCHA An abbreviation of Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart. A CAPTCHA system contains a graphical representation of several letters, and a field in which users must enter those letters. The intention is to prevent automated systems from accessing an area of a site.
Click-through rate (CTR) The number of visitors to a website divided by the number of potential visitors, expressed as a percentage. It is generally calculated in connection with a particular advertisement or keyword. For instance, if 10,352 people view an advertisement and 268 click it, the click-through rate is 2.59 percent.
Contextual advertising Delivering customized advertising to a user based upon their behavior or preferences. Paid search advertising is a form of contextual advertising.
Conversion action The actions that advertisers want users to take once they arrive on a landing page or website. This can include making a purchase, completing a lead form, commenting on a blog post, or signing up for a company newsletter. It also can include signing up for offers or requesting more information about the company’s products or services.
Conversion rate The number of website transactions (generally either sales or leads) divided by the number of website visitors, expressed as a percentage. This is often calculated for particular advertisements or keywords.
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) The process(es) by which conversion rate (CR) is increased. There is a variety of approaches to improving conversion rates, most of which can be grouped into qualitative approaches (e.g., heuristic, persona-driven) and quantitative approaches (e.g., A/B testing, multivariate testing). CRO is often one of the highest ROI projects in the marketing pantheon but typically is underutilized.
Customer relationship management (CRM) Technology and processes used to organize, automate, and synchronize multiple customer-facing business activities—principally sales activities but also those for service, support, and marketing. At a high level, the goals of a CRM strategy and the underlying technology platforms are to attract new customers, retain existing customers, win back former customers, and reduce the overall costs of the organization.
D
Demand generation/lead generation Demand generation is the practice of employing targeted marketing programs to drive awareness, interest, and action around a company’s products and/or services. Commonly used in longer sales cycles, demand generation involves multiple marketing channels. There are multiple components of a stepped demand generation process. By contrast, lead generation is a term used to describe the generation of interest or inquiry and is often confused with demand generation. In reality, lead generation is a subset of demand generation, because it doesn’t encompass the full range of demand generation activities.
Display advertising In the online world, a form of advertising that can appear many places on a web page and in many forms (traditionally including web banners). Display advertising typically involves text and graphics and, occasionally, rich media such as video and/or animations. Most ads currently called display were formerly called banner ads.
G
Geotargeting The advertising method of determining a physical location (geolocation) of a visitor and subsequently delivering content related to that visitor’s location. This can be based on a visitor’s state, county, region, zip code, IP address, or other information.
H
Head terms Search terms or keywords that are short and popular. These terms received the name head terms from a bell-curve distribution of keyword usage generated by users. The usage displayed the most popular or most-used words at the “head” end of a bell-curve graph.
The opposite of a head term is a long-tail term, named for the long end of the bell curve. These terms are searched by fewer people.
Home page The first page of the website. The function of the home page is to welcome visitors and direct them to other pages on the site.
The home page typically collects the majority of the PageRank score since most other sites will link to its URL. Other names for the home page include main page and front page.
I
Impression One view of an Internet ad. Generally, ad reports will display how many impressions or views a particular ad received. This data reveals how many times a search engine served the ad when users entered specific search keywords. It will also record how many times a user has viewed the content on a web page containing those specific keywords.
Inbound link A link coming into a site from another site. The opposite of an inbound link is an outbound link.
Indexability How well a search engine can crawl or index a website. Search engines must be able to index a site in order to include it in search results. If a site is not indexable or if a site has experienced a reduction in indexability, it becomes extremely difficult to get its associated URLs included in search results.
Infographic Though they’ve been around for many years (since cave drawings, perhaps), information graphics, or infographics, have picked up serious steam on the Web recently. Often serving as a terrific form of link bait or an ideal way to encourage social sharing, an infographic represents data in a graphic format designed to be easily understandable at a glance.
Integrated marketing An approach to marketing aimed at unifying different marketing methods such as PPC, SEO, email, display, and traditional (direct mail, phone calls, and so on). The objective is to complement and reinforce the impact of each method, learn from the data generated by one method to enhance the efficacy of another, and achieve a whole greater than the sum of its parts. With the long and considered sales cycles of B2B, integrated marketing properly done almost always produces a far superior ROI.
K
Keyword The basic unit in search engine marketing. Keywords are the terms a user types in at a search engine. Keywords relate to paid search marketing: ads are attached to specific keywords as marketers attempt to achieve higher rankings on the search engine results page.
L
Landing pages Pages created for specific audiences, on specific topics, intended to be the first page a visitor sees on a site. Landing pages may be used for paid search advertising, search engine optimization, email campaigns, or any other online marketing activity that has a controllable web destination.
Lead nurturing The practice of continually communicating with leads who aren’t yet ready to make a purchase or, in many cases, who aren’t yet ready to interact with sales at all. The most common tactic for nurturing involves consistently sharing content via email.
Lead scoring The process of qualifying and prioritizing leads through a scoring system, often automated somewhat these days, that also involves customer relationship management.
Link architecture The internal linking of a website. This structure is what connects the various pages of a website to each other. Link architecture includes navigation menus, site maps, and internal linking via anchor text, among other things. Effective internal linking helps search engines crawl the entirety of your website and helps users easily navigate your website.
Link bait An item added to a website to encourage linking from other websites. In many cases, the more controversial the link bait is, the more effective it might be.
Link building The process of getting quality websites to link to your site to improve search engine rankings. Techniques can include buying links, implementing reciprocal linking, or entering barter arrangements.
Link popularity The total number of links pointing to any particular URL. The two types of links are internal and external. If one site has more links than its competitors, it is said to have link cardinality or link superiority.
Long tail A type of statistical distribution where a high-frequency population is followed by a low-frequency population that gradually “tails off.” The events at the far end of the tail have a very low probability of occurrence. Long-tail keywords utilize this concept.
M
Marketing automation The use of technology to help manage and automate marketing processes, most specifically those that focus on the scheduling and tracking of marketing campaigns, usually but not always involving email. This is a subset of customer relationship management (CRM).
Metadata HTML data on a web page that describes the content on the page and provides keywords. This information is used by search engines to determine what the page is about. The search engines then index the page according to their algorithms.
Multivariate testing A testing methodology where more than one variable is examined at once. The variables are tested in random combination to determine which combination of the variables is most effective.
Multivariate testing is extremely useful in online marketing, particularly paid search advertising, because it allows the interrelations of various factors to be tested and understood.
N
Natural search A term referring to the so-called free side of a search engine and the search engine optimization techniques required to rank there. This is also known as organic search.
Negative keyword In Google AdWords, allows an advertiser to eliminate unrelated keywords from their bidding strategy. For instance, if an advertiser has an ad running on the term mathematics software and a negative keyword for free, then the ad would not show for queries on free mathematics software.
O
Online reputation management (ORM) The process of actively optimizing web pages in order to help eliminate or greatly reduce negative search results. The goal is to “push” the negative results off the first or second page so that most users will not see them. Often, this process includes creating positive news articles or press releases, and/or creating websites. Reputation management works to build, maintain, or save/repair a brand’s image.
Organic search A term referring to the so-called free side of a search engine and the search engine optimization techniques required to rank there. This is also known as natural search.
P
Paid search An advertising method where a marketer purchases traffic to a site from search engines. Advertising is attached to individual keywords and is generally purchased via a pay-per-click financial model.
Q
Quality score A number that is assigned by Google to paid search ads in a hybrid auction that ultimately determines each ad rank and ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs). These quality scores will affect the ad’s historical CTR, keyword, and landing page relevance, as well as several other aspects that Google may consider.
R
Remarketing/retargeting A form of online marketing that uses tracking technology/cookies to serve ads for a particular company or item that a prospect may be interested in, based on that prospect having previously visited a company’s website, clicked their ad, opened an email, and so on. Retargeting is a subset of behavioral marketing and is usually accomplished with display advertising. Remarketing is Google’s term for retargeting.
Rich media Media with embedded motion or interactivity.
S
Sales funnel See buying funnel.
Search engine marketing (SEM) The marketing of a website through a search engine, whether through paid search or search engine optimization.
Search engine optimization (SEO) Techniques used to improve a website’s rankings in the search engines. This consists of on-page optimization, indexing improvements, and link building.
Search engine results pages (SERPs) The pages returned by a search engine when a user performs a search query. They generally consist of both paid search and natural search listings.
Site map An overview of an entire website, often structured like a table of contents. Site maps make it much easier for a search engine to fully index a website.
Social media optimization The marketing discipline of promoting a website, company, or organization within the online social networks and tagging systems. Many consider social media optimization a form of search engine optimization. While there is some overlap in skills and activities with SEO, it is better considered a discipline of its own.
U
Unique visitor The number of individuals who visit a website. If one user visits a website four times, the statistics will show that one user has visited.
URL shortener URL shorteners are used to turn long URLs (click-through link text) into click-through links that are substantially shorter in length. They are particularly common with Twitter, given its 140-character limit, and also with other social media sharing sites. Many websites can provide shortened URLs, with perhaps the most popular being bit.ly.
Usability The measure of how simple it is for a visitor to complete a desired task on a website. Generally, sites with high usability or user friendliness are more popular and successful than sites that are difficult to use.
V
Visitor A unique individual on a website. Unfortunately, some people, either uninformed or, worse, unscrupulous, equate visitors with leads so that whenever someone clicks an advertisement, they claim a new lead has been acquired. This can make comparing cost per lead from different people or companies confusing.