Digital Marketing is a vast and varied field. We know that there are multiple nuances to the Digital Marketing sphere, from Social Media Marketing to Pay Per Click, Content Marketing to Search Engine Optimisation and everything in between. If you are taking the first dip into the world of Digital Marketing or have been in the industry for years, there are some key marketing terms you should know. We’ve rounded up some of the most important in our A-Z of Digital Marketing glossary.
A: Alt Text
What is Alt-text? Alt-text or alternative text is the information given for an image on a website that tells viewers the contents of that image. This is inserted into the HTML of a page and helps screen reading tools for the visually impaired describe what is in the image.
Why is alt-text important? Alternative text also helps viewers to know what the image should be if your page fails to load for any reason. This is important for SEO as it helps to improve user experience and accessibility as well as providing more accurate relevance for your content to search engines, thus helping to drive more traffic to your website.
B: Bounce Rate
One of the most important key terms for Digital Marketers is bounce rate. Bounce rate means the percentage of people who land on your website page and leave without clicking anything or visiting any other pages on your site. A high website bounce rate may cause poor conversion rates as visitors to your website will not be on your site long enough to engage with the content or convert by purchasing a product or service.
Alternatively, email bounce rate is the rate that emails are unable to be delivered to a recipient. This could be because the email entered is incorrect or out of date. There are also two types of email bounces. Hard and soft bounces which means that the email has bounced for either permanent reasons (a hard bounce) or temporary reasons (a soft bounce).
C: CPC
One of the most common terms in digital marketing is CPC. But what does CPC mean? CPC stands for cost per click. This term is most commonly used when discussing paid digital advertising such as display ads or Facebook retargeting. This is the cost you pay for every click through to your website using PPC advertising. Whilst the CPC for each industry will vary based on how competitive your industry is, a good CPC ensures that you are not overspending on your campaigns. It will also ensure that the return you receive on your campaign outweighs the money you have put into it(see ROI below).
D: Duplicate Content
Duplicate content is any content that appears in multiple places across the internet. This could be content that exactly matches or is an extremely similar version of the content. Duplicate content can harm your digital marketing efforts resulting in both poor user experience as well as (if it appears maliciously or deceptively done) could result in action from Google against your site. You should review your website carefully for any duplicate content as it can cause your pages to compete against each other and harm rankings for both of the pages. Google details some key guidelines here. or you can read our guide to what is duplicate content here.
E: Email Marketing
Email marketing is, simply put, marketing that your business or organisation sends out to prospective customers through email. The aim of this could be more visitors to your website, or it could be to encourage more purchases on products you would like to push.
Email marketing is an incredibly useful tool for Digital Marketers as you have an audience who have already shown interest in your brand by signing up and are more likely to interact because of this.
F: Facebook Advertising
Millions of people use Facebook every day. It is one of the main social media platforms and a great way to build a brand image, with important interactions with your consumer base. Facebook advertising can tap into this key audience using your target demographics to achieve your digital marketing goals.
G: Google Analytics
Google Analytics is Google’s own platform for measuring website traffic and conversions. It is an extremely useful tool for Digital Marketers as it can track how users interact with your site, where they came from and where they leave your website. Google Analytics contains a number of stats that are important KPIs for your site.
H: Hashtag
No digital marketing glossary would be complete without a mention of hashtags. Hashtags are tags used on social media platforms to tie content, be that visual or written to a topic. Using hashtags on social media allows your communications to show up more easily in searches as well as being more easily found by individuals interested in that subject. Having a well-thought-out hashtag strategy can propel your content into the spotlight, boosting engagement and interactions with your brand.
I: Infographics
You may have seen an infographic before on the web and not known the name or heard the term but not matched it to the topic but what is an infographic? An infographic is a visual piece of content that can communicate larger ideas such as how-to guides or competition guidelines in a fun and accessible way.
J: JavaScript
Javascript is a programming language used to control dynamic website content. It is the information that goes into everything on your website and is key to users experience of your online brand. JavaScript can be used for everything from pop-ups to check forms and much more so is an important part of any digital marketing strategy.
K: KPIs
In our A-Z of digital marketing, one of the most used terms used by Digital Marketers is how to measure KPIs or key performance indicators. KPI stands for key performance indicators. These are the main ways of tracking your digital marketing campaigns. These could be things such as the number of quality leads you have in the sales funnel or the number of weekly sessions on your website.
L: Landing Page
Landing pages are the dedicated website pages a person lands on after clicking a marketing call to action or link. This might be through PPC or email marketing among other digital marketing methods. A well-optimised landing page can boost conversions dramatically and is a powerful digital marketing tool.
M: Metadata
Metadata is data on your website that explains all of the other data for the page. Your page metadata includes the page title and meta description, a short description of what your page contains. Search engines such as Google use this information to figure out what your page is about so that it can display the correct results on a search engine results page.
N: No-follow
What are no-follow links? No-follow links are links that have a rel=”nofollow” HTML tag attached to them. This tells crawlers from search engines not to follow them. These can be useful for things such as comment threads on blogs to prevent spam.
O: Organic Traffic
Organic traffic is any search traffic to your website that is not the result of paid advertising. Organic traffic is important because it can continue bringing traffic into your site long after you have created the content, without a continuous cost to you. As a key part of your digital marketing strategy, organic traffic helps to build up domain authority and consumer’s trust in your brand.
P: PPC
PPC or Pay Per Click advertising is a type of advertising most commonly used through search engine marketing in which you would pay per click on your online advert. PPC advertising can target specific keywords to make it easier to reach customers looking for your product or service.
Q: Quality Score
Your quality score is a metric used by search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo that measures the quality and relevance of your ads and keywords. This can influence the cost of your CPC advertising which in turn can affect your ROI for your digital marketing efforts.
R: ROI
The digital marketing term ROI stands for Return on Investment and is an extremely important term for Digital Marketers. ROI aims to measure the returns of particular marketing efforts in terms of how much revenue they have brought in compared to their cost.
S: SEO
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. The process of optimising your website and content in order to rank in search engine results pages and increase organic traffic to websites. This excludes traffic gained by paid advertisements.
T: Tracking Code
A tracking code is something that is appended to your URL in order to track user activity through that link. It can track things such as where the person came from or whether they met conversion goals.
U: Unique Visitors
A unique visitor is a way of defining how many different people have visited your website as a separate measurement to the total number of visitors to your website. This is because the total number may contain people who have visited your website multiple times, bumping up the total numbers. This can give you a sense of the total size of your audience.
V: Viral Content
Viral content is content that rapidly spreads across the internet. This could be through shares on social media channels or multiple links to a piece of content. A common form of this is a meme as this is a very ‘shareable’ piece of content.
W: Web Crawler
A web crawler, also known as a spider, is an online bot that ‘crawls’ your website through links in order to index it on search engines such as Google.
X: XML Sitemap
What is an XML sitemap? An XML (or Extensible Markup Language) Sitemap is a text file that details all of the URLs on your website. This acts as a sort of map of navigation for how your website works and ensures that Google is able to crawl and index them easily.
Y: YouTube Advertising
If ‘content is king’ then video is the popular prince when it comes to digital marketing. The most popular YouTube channels to date have more than 28.4 million subscribers which makes for a huge market for those advertising on the platform. In combination with Google Ads, Youtube Advertising allows you to target the people you want to reach through various criteria and allows for a range of ad types depending on your needs. In some cases, you will only be charged when someone shows interest in your ad, for example by watching it for more than 30 seconds or clicking a call to action.
Z: Don’t be a Digital Marketing Zombie.
The key thing you should take away from our A-Z of digital marketing is that there are a number of different ways to engage with your audiences and a number of tools to help you do it. If your digital marketing efforts get switched to auto-pilot your audience will notice, so make sure you engage your digital audience with campaigns that will engage and inform them. The stats will then speak for themselves.
Have more questions on digital marketing or looking for a professional service to give your digital presence the recognition it deserves? Get in touch with our team on 0121 552 6500. We’d love to help.