Digital Marketing Jargon Explained Digital Marketing Jargon Explained

The digital marketing landscape is awash with acronyms and terms that to someone just starting out can seem like another language. Trying to fathom out what your agency is saying, or what a speaker on a webinar REALLY means can leave you feeling frustrated and like you’re missing out on some big secret.

The most important thing is to acknowledge you don’t need to understand every term out there! And if you can put aside some time to learn a few of the more prominent ones, you’ll be well on your way to deciphering your next educational blog or agency proposal.

We’ve curated a selection of the most popular terms and acronyms for you to digest below; print them out, pin them to your office wall and dip in and out for a little tutorial each day, you’ll be clued up in no time!

A/B Testing

This tactic is used to compare and contrast against two different versions of the same advert, determining which one is reaping better results and therefore more effective at delivering against your campaign objective. For example, you may split test a Facebook ad, one with a single image and the same copy, and one with a video and the same copy with the objective of increasing traffic to your website. Whichever generates the highest CTR (click-through rate, we’ll come to that later!) is your winner!

Backlink

Any link on a website that directs the user to another website is known as a backlink. Backlinks are seen as a reinforcement of confidence to your website, and also help your sites organic SEO (search engine optimisation, again more on that later on!) The more backlinks you have on your site between trusted resources, the more popular and trustworthy your website will appear.

Click-through rate (CTR)

A click-through rate details the effectiveness of your email, web pages or adverts by dividing the number of people who click on any of the above by the total number of people that have viewed them.

 Engagement 

An engagement rate refers to the percentage of people that interact with your content in some way. For example, likes, shares and comments on a Facebook post are all considered types of engagement. By looking at this data, you can easily identify what sorts of content are the most popular amongst your online community, to tailor the types of content you put out moving forwards. Other factors like opens, reactions and more are also covered under this term.

Hashtag 

This little symbol ‘#’ is used to precede specific keywords and terms to increase the visibility of content on social media platforms (mainly Twitter and Instagram as of today). Using hashtags in your personal or business-related posts increases the chance of getting your content seen, and they can also be used and followed to keep track of similar content and topics.

Impression

Every time an advert is shown to a user, this is counted as an impression.

Keyword

A term or phrase that describes the content on a page is known as a keyword. If you want your website to rank in search engines for a specific page, for example, you would optimise the page using your selected keyword, which could be used within the copy of your page to increase your page’s visibility for that term.

Landing page

As the name would suggest, a landing page is the first page that a user lands on when they visit your website. Paid for advertising campaigns like Google AdWords or Facebook advertising will often use landing pages as part of their strategy to encourage users to take a particular course of action such as downloading a white paper/PDF or subscribing to a newsletter.

Meta description

A meta description is a string of HTML code that sits in the header of a web page and summarises its content. The code is not visible, but it can show up in search engine results pages and also on social media if you share content from a website there. Because of this, it’s essential to ensure meta descriptions are written in a clear way that encourages users to click through.

Organic traffic

Organic traffic refers to any user that lands on your website after running a search in Google or another search engine. In contrast, paid traffic works on the same principle; however, the user will have landed on your web page via a paid-for ad instead.

PPC

Pay per click advertising or PPC occurs when advertisers pay a set amount of money each time a user clicks onto their ad.

Retargeting

Retargeting allows you to reconnect with prospects that have already engaged with your business online in some way. For example, you can retarget Facebook adverts to people that have previously visited your website using a Facebook Pixel (a piece of code generated by Facebook to track visits between the platform and another page on the web) and increase the chances of them buying from you.

SEO 

Search engine optimisation or SEO as it’s more widely known uses tactics created to increase your site’s visibility in a search engine.

To conclude

We could go on! But hopefully, the terms explained above will leave you feeling a little more confident when it comes to talking the language of digital marketing. Need some help making sense of your marketing strategy? Get in touch today and see how we can be of assistance!

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