in INFORM
Complete: Digital Marketing Glossary
Here is a complete glossary for digital marketing, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Affiliate Marketing, Social Media Marketing (SMM), Email Marketing, Content Marketing, and every other thing in-between.
A
The process of selling another person’s (or company’s) product for a percentage of the sale.
Say, for a product of $20, you have an agreement with the product owner that for every 1 sale, you get an instant 30%, so when you sell 5 pieces, you make $6 x 5 = $30.
The act of increasing the awareness of a product, service, or brand by paying to get it in front of a public or really large audience than you could without paying, to make more sales.
The act of carrying out an inner analysis of how good or bad a website, service, or app is performing based on some metrics, like SEO.
A detailed examination and breakdown of the performance of a website over a specified period.
The set of people that could have an interest in your product or service. Say, gamers will have an interest in PS5, and Bloggers will have an interest in AdSense.
Alternative text for images. Displayed on mouse over or when an image fails to load.
Fulfillment by Amazon allows you to send your products to Amazon’s fulfillment centers to pick, pack and ship them for you, provide customer service and support, and everything else.
Optimizing product descriptions and title tags to improve their visibility on search engine result pages.
Marketing steps are taken to improve the number of sales of a personal or affiliate product listed on the Amazon marketplace.
A shortened form is used to mean advertisement.
The calculation of the overall score of a website everything being equal, but also mostly based on backlinks count.
Relative estimation of a website’s position on a national or global reach based on the number of visitors to a website over a period of time, by Alexa.
A text on a web page with a clickable link.
A setup by a product owner that allows affiliate marketers to promote such products for commission in the percentage of the sale price.
The count of the times the display of an ad (on load time) on a publisher’s website.
Documented agreement between two parties (the product owner and affiliate marketer) to form a mutual business partnership of, ‘sale my product and get a pre-agreed percentage for every of your sales’.
A computer program that automates welcome emails, replies, and follow-ups.
…. if you have more that were not covered here, do well to drop them in the comment box below.
The person in charge of managing an online affiliate program for each affiliate marketing merchant.
A piece of write-up about a given topic.
Website owner or blogger allows advertisements to be placed on their website to get paid for the exposure.
B
Percentage representation of the number of visitors that click away after visiting only one page of a website.
A piece of write-up about a given topic or niche, published on a blog.
The act of writing about a niche or an industry to make money, or for another course.
A link to a website that no longer exists at that location.
The link points from a webpage to the webpage of another external website. A link that references another website.
Resources that identify a company or entity, are shaped over time.
These are advertisements that have an image, some text, and advertisement links.
Restriction of access to an IP address that is believed to not be trusted or share spam.
C
The entire decision-making phase of making a customer off an ordinary web visitor that only had an interest in a product or service.
A pre-determined charge is paid to a marketer for actions taken by a customer, like making a purchase
Percentage of visitors that converted.
The people in the same space/niche with you, and do the same thing you do.
Billing advertiser(s) based on the number of ad clicks.
When a visitor completes a specific action on a website.
Powering websites and applications over the cloud on multiple servers for speed and efficiency.
A review or opinion visitors drop after reading a blog post.
Delivering different versions of content, one to the user, and the other to search engines for the purpose of ranking. Note that this is considered bad practice.
The automatic discovery of a new or updated website/page or blog by search engine bots and then indexing them to the search engine’s database for ranking.
Backlinks that are placed within a blog post or among other texts on a webpage.
An advertisement on a website tends to blend into the feel and branding of the website and is related to the discussed topic on the content it appears.
A marketing recommendation to a prospect is to take some actions by either filling out a form or completing a purchase.
The measure of the cost of acquiring one paying customer on a campaign.
How much it costs in ad spend to get a subscriber
Representation of the rate of conversion over a period of time, in a chart or tabular form.
How much money it costs to get a completed product order.
Storing some website data locally in a device’s memory for a faster load time to a website on revisit. The practice of serving a pre-generated version of your page when requested, rather than having the server process and generate the page on demand.
How long some cookies could live before being erased or updated.
Locally saved automatically generated web text files containing important pieces of information about a user such as a username, password, history of interactions, and behavior on the internet over a long or short period of time.
Creating and sharing the content of any form of content, such as blog posts, infographics, videos, etc, to create awareness for a brand and get exposure.
An affiliate marketing network of digital products, affiliate marketers, and product vendors.
Compensation (in the percentage of a product sale price) is earned by affiliate marketers for every sale they make.
An online tool for building high-converting sales pages.
This is a measure in percentage (%) of the number of people that saw your ads, product listing, or website versus the number of people that clicked on it.
Any material that conveys valuable and relevant information, either in the form of images, infographics, videos, or something else.
D
This refers to any marketing that is carried out online. It’s like an umbrella that shelters all the other smaller marketing techniques that take place online.
This is a website domain metric, developed by Ahrefs to measure the strength of a domain based on the total number of backlinks to it, on a scale of 1 to 100.
These are the two types of backlinks that indicate to search engines that they are allowed to use the link for page ranking calculations thereby adding link juice and authority to a website.
On the other hand, no-follow backlinks are the opposite of DoFollow backlinks.
Promotions that appear solely online and on electronic devices, no prints.
Content that appears (in part or full) on a different website.
A short descriptive public awareness note, mostly on websites that promote affiliate products.
Developed by Moz, this is a scoring mechanism of 1 to 100 of a website’s strength to rank higher than competitors on search engines, based on the quality and quantity of its backlinks.
Metric to calculate how much time visitors spend on a site per visit, before leaving.
Web hosting service that gives a single dedicated physical server to a client, not shared with any other persons.
E
The buying and selling of digital or physical products electronically over the internet.
Process of gathering email addresses of interested website visitors, for creating quality content, or exchange for a goodie.
Links that belong to another website other than the one they display on.
A marketing strategy that tries to get people genuinely interested in a product and hence cause them to begin interacting either with you or themselves.
A form of high-converting digital marketing model done through an email list of prospects and old customers.
The amount of money earned by a publisher compared to the volume of clicks ads on their platform generated.
F
The short description or definition of a term (from one of several of Google’s valued websites) that tops the first page of every Google search.
A public (or private) platform where users share ideas and their views on any given topic. E.g: Quora
An email marketing campaign that follows based on subscribers’ interaction with a previous campaign or product.
Social media marketing runs Facebook that targets users based on their location and profile information.
G
A marketing model that allows publishers and bloggers or website owners to earn money by displaying ads in-content or overlay ads.
An SEO practice that is not really frowned upon, but not recommended practice. You’re better off with a white-hat practice.
A search engine is provided by Google for faster discovery of information and sites they live in.
Targeting users in a specific location.
The process of writing blog posts for another website but in the same niche, to drive more traffic and improve website quality through do-follow backlinks.
H
The count of real human visits to a pitch/sales page.
I
These are the links that Google has found and added to their database and are ready to show up on search pages.
Optimizing an image by reducing the size for SEO benefits or faster website load speed.
A link from one page of a website to another page of the same website.
Collection of a list of websites’ data/content or products with reference to their source.
Visual representation of data in the form of charts, diagrams, tables, and other visuals that enhance post-absorption and engagement.
Another name for backlinks. These are links from other sites to your site, or, from your site to another site (s).
J
K
A score that visualizes how difficult it is to rank on a search engine for a particular keyword.
Excessive use of a keyword(s) trying to manipulate a website’s rank on search engines.
This is the search for the best phrases and terms (keywords) that people are looking for and is also easy to rank for on search engines.
The number of times a key phrase appears on a given blog post or webpage.
Keyword in digital marketing means the important phrases and terms in content to rank for.
A measure of the performance of a business compared to her business success goals and objectives.
L
A phrase that is typically longer than usual (5 – 7 words+), is utilized to narrow down to as close to specific user’s search queries as possible.
Exchanging backlinks with other websites in the same niche.
Search engine optimization technique that allows a business to rank higher in local search results.
Geo-specific search mostly to find product or company listings within a locality.
The contact of an individual who is most likely to buy your product or service recommendation.
The process of getting many contacts of potential customers. People who have an interest in the product you sell or are an affiliate of, and are likely to buy from you.
Keywords that are conceptually related to one another that search engines use to analyze and understand the main topic of a blog post.
Informed move to increase a website’s number of backlinks.
A webpage made mostly to transform new visitors into leads by providing a form filed for visitors’ contact details (and sometimes a freebie to download to boost conversion rate).
Percentage of converted visitors out of the total number of website visitors over a period of time.
Content aims at generating backlinks.
M
An act of promoting and selling a service or product; advertisement.
Snippets of text in a website’s HTML source code that describe the main keywords of a website.
A plan and pattern of promoting a product or service that has proven to work well in a product or niche.
The strategies, software, services, or resources used to make marketing more effective.
A short (sometimes max 60 characters) description of a blog post, including the keyword, an intro, or a summary of the whole post.
Website visits from an application on a mobile or handheld phone such as a smartphone or watch.
Internet searches from a mobile or handheld device.
Meta tag of the semantic keywords of a website in the HTML page of the website.
N
Browsing from one page of a website to the next by visitors with ease.
Writing and posting blog posts about a specific section of a bigger industry.
Promoting and selling a product or service to a niche/segment of a larger market.
An amount of money that remains after accounting for all expenses that went in to make the sales.
A specific section of a big industry that blogs are base on.
O
An act of making your website become and perform in the best state.
Any website visitors that are not from paid search ads, that found and got to your website from a search engine.
Searching, and, the search results returned strictly on search engine algorithm without any promotions or boost of the displayed results. Purely organic.
The optimization of the inner pages and posts of a website to boost its organic search ranking. Such as optimizing images and content.
Off-site SEO optimization practices to boost ranking. Such as increasing backlinks.
A link from your website to another external website.
Any marketing that is done online (digital marketing).
Promise or agreement a product owner makes with an affiliate for his performance.
The measure of the rate at which an email was opened compared to how many subscribers it was sent to, in percentage.
A reach out seeking to generate leads, boost revenue, and brand awareness.
P
This is a digital marketing method where you optimize your website for a specific keyword (that you will want to rank for) and boost its reach by paying to show your website on the top pages of a Search Engine Result Page (SERP).
Advertising that’s done on a search engine, that is paid based on either impressions, clicks, or sales generated.
A way of promotion where advertisers are charged for every time their ads are clicked.
Publicizing a product, service, or brand to increase awareness and sales. Most times, by paying advertisers.
The sudden appearing small boxes from the top of a website (used for growing an email list), that often ask for visitors’ email in exchange for something valuable.
How fast a webpage loads despite the size and data centers’ locations.
A network of several unrelated blog sites that point to one domain or website to boost its search engine ranking.
An audio recording that is made available on the internet for public consumption.
Sometimes called revenue per thousand impressions is an advertisement cost calculation metric for billing advertisers per thousand page views or impressions.
Any tangible or digital piece of monetary value that is meant to be sold.
A metric developed by Moz that scores how high or low a particular page of a website can rank on a search engine result page.
Sales are made before a product is launched.
Performance-based marketing model where an advertiser pays a publisher for the number of calls it got from the publisher’s platform.
A link that reports whenever a conversion or sale takes place from an affiliate link, before automatically releasing earnings to the affiliate.
Q
Google’s rating of the relevance and quality of a keyword for calculating Cost Per Click (CPC) and ad rank.
Piece of write-up or other content types that humans and search engines could find valuable.
R
The act of buying a finished product or a bigger quantity of another company’s services, and then reselling it to others. For instance, Webhosting reselling.
These are the external websites or linking domains that point visitors from another website to your website.
A lightweight text file that tells a search engine crawler which URL can be accessed and ones not.
This is a type of advertising that aims for visitors or prospects who have at a point shown interest, but for any reason did not complete an action on a website or sales page.
Website visitors from one or more of your backlinks.
An archive on a blog or collection of relevant content on specific topics on a website.
Really Simple Syndication is a popular web feed format that provides webpage content and updates once original content is edited in real-time.
A net return of an investment after evaluating the invested capital versus the returns of the investment.
A list of recommended next-read based on the currently finished blog post.
Visitors are from people who have come back for the second or more time. In other words, they’ve been to your website before this time.
Custom names or numbers that affiliate marketers utilize to advertise with word-of-mouth marketing.
An incentive to motivate already-made customers to invite their friends for some monetary rewards.
Estimated number of people from a specific or global audience an ad can reach for the running period.
Determinants (directly or indirectly) of the possibility of a website ranking high or low on search engines. This includes any metric that search engines may evaluate for ranking.
A unique link that enables affiliates to refer buyers that could be tracked.
Sending a visitor to a different page of the same or external website.
The total income earned from sales of a product or service.
The position of a website on search engines, after a deep analysis.
A search result that stands out by displaying additional information such as reviews.
S
A special practice of optimizing a website to improve its presence (visibility, position) on search engines, mostly to boost organic website traffic.
An act of using paid search ads to drive more website visitors from search engines.
The website visitors you get to your website or blog from social media.
The combination of smart algorithm bots and a massively large database of almost all the websites in the world, helps searchers find the best solution to their queries fast!
The number of estimated organic searches for a keyword in a specified duration.
Structured microdata that adds Google Rich Snippets markup to a webpage according to Schema.org guidelines to structure your site for SEO.
The reason for a search query; is what the searcher could have in mind.
An already-made e-commerce platform that allows anyone to set up, grow and make money from their own eCommerce website, without manufacturing their own product.
A score of how trustworthy a website is. The higher the spam score, the lower the TF trust flow.
A well-planned customer journey step by step from visitor to paying customer.
A record of everything you search for on Google that is stored in your cookies or Google Account (for logged-in users).
Comparing several versions of a webpage (landing pages, sales page, etc) to identify the one with a higher conversion rate.
Outlook of a website’s social media shares counts, votes, comments, and overall engagement.
Social media posts that are boosted by paid promotion.
In blogging, these are blog posts published on another website with a large number of visitors from a target reader audience.
These are the words or phrases (keywords) that a user searches on a search engine.
Promoting a brand via one or more social media platforms.
Secure Sockets Layer certificate is a digital certificate that provides an encrypted connection for secure communication on a website.
The pages that return the results of a search query.
The collective name for all the micro-blogging websites and mobile applications that have made it easier to create and share content with a wider reach. E.g: Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, etc.
Web hosting service where a single server powers multiple websites.
The map of a website supplied to search engines, that contains the direction to all parts of a website.
Exchange of products or services for money.
T
A concise summary or image representation (or both) of a blog post.
A measure of the soundness of your overall website quality, content quality, and spam score. The quality of website visitors and where those visitors found your site can also boost or harm the trust flow of a website.
The title or headline of a webpage or blog post.
The term is used for referring to the visitors that come to a website.
The sudden popularity of a topic or event over a while (usually a short period).
The highest placed set of domains in the hierarchy of the Domain Name System (DN) of the internet.
An identified select group of audience to deliver ads to.
U
Refers to the number of separate individual visitors to a website.
So this has to do with visits, not page views.
One person can view a page 10 times, but the unique visitors’ count metric is concerned with how many distinct individuals visited a website or blog.
Content that is created and shared by users (like in forums) rather than a single author (like in blogs).
The overall feel and experience a user has after using a product or service.
Additional products (add-ons) that customers are persuaded to buy.
The total number of first-time clicks on a campaign or link.
Data from users about their experience with a product such as disliked features, suggestions for feature inclusions or removals, etc.
V
Utilizing video ads to market a product or service.
The specific search for video content on internal or external sources (Google, YouTube).
Marketing model that tries to make an event, product, service, or brand trend on different platforms by a combination of different marketing techniques.
W
Mobile or desktop users who visit your website.
The act of licensing the full legal right to rebrand and sell a product made by one company to another company (on purchase).
Digital marketing tactics and practices that are believed to be in line with the legal best practices.
E.g.: Whitehat SEO.
One or more related web-hosted pages owned and maintained by an individual, group of people, or company.
A page on a website.
The number of words a page or content is made up of, including or excluding prepositions.
X
Y
Z
An HTTP status code for permanently redirected pages of a website.
HTTP error status code display for non-existent of moved web pages.
HTTP error code indicating a server error.
Drawing The Curtain
Digital marketing is an almost one trillion-dollar industry and is still rapidly growing.
It encompasses a wide variety of terminologies, tactics, and strategies.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Affiliate Marketing, Social Media Marketing (SMM), Email Marketing, and Content Marketing are just a few of the digital marketing strategies that businesses can use to increase their reach and grow their customer base.
By understanding the glossary of digital marketing, and various digital marketing tools and techniques available, businesses can create effective strategies to reach their target audience and maximize their profits.
