Essential Glossary of Digital Marketing Terms

Business has only two functions – marketing and innovation.

    Milan Kundera, Novelist

Native advertising is a powerful branch of digital marketing. Regardless of your niche or industry, if you want your business to thrive in the long term, understanding the core concepts of digital marketing is no longer compulsory⁠—it’s essential.

One of the best ways to get a firm grasp of digital marketing principles, the kind that you can apply to your business, is knowing the lingo.

As an ever-evolving discipline, digital marketing is a field with a vast number of terms and acronyms and terms used to describe various concepts and activities.

As a busy creative, marketer or business owner, we know you don’t have the time to wade through every single digital marketing term in existence. So, to lend you a helping hand here’s an essential glossary of essential digital marketing terms for your reference.

Know your lingo: the essential list of digital marketing terms

A/B Testing

A/B Testing: Also known as split testing, this is the process in which marketers compare two versions of a single element or variable to decide which performs better, and optimizing their marketing efforts accordingly.

Ad (creative)

Ad: In a creative context, an ad, or advertisement, is a targeted digital asset that uses a mix of text and visuals to address specific customer pain points, boost brand awareness, and prompt conversions (see below for ‘Conversion Rate’).

BR

Bounce Rate: This is a marketing performance metric based on the percentage of users that leave your site as soon as they've landed on it. A number of factors can affect bounce rate but irrelevant content, as well as poor user experience (UX), are the two most common.

Buyer Persona

Buyer persona: A profile based on your ideal or model consumer based on a number of demographic factors, attributes, and motivations. Buyer personas give shape, direction, and meaning to your marketing efforts⁠—native ads included.

CAC

Customer Acquisition Cost: This particular marketing metric focuses on the cost of acquiring a new customer. For example, if your average customer spends €200 and €100 is the net profit after the cost of goods sold, an acceptable CAC might be €100.

CPA

Cost per action: CPA is an online ad marketing metric that empowers a marketer to pay for a specific action from a prospective customer. Typically, CPA is only charged if a customer completes the desired action.

Conversion Rate

Conversion rate: your conversion rate is important as it offers a clear indication of the number of visitors that have completed a desired goal or action. This could be signing up to your newsletter, sharing a piece of content or making a purchase.

CPC

Cost per click: This digital advertising metric refers to the literal cost incurred for every individual click on your ad or advertising campaign.

CPM

Cost per thousand: Similar to CPI (see below), CPM refers to the cost per thousand clicks, impressions or interactions relating to your advertisement.

CPI

Cost per impression: The CPI is the cost or expense incurred for each prospective customer that views or clicks through to your advertisement.

CTR

Click-Through Rate: CTR is important as it indicates the percentage of users that actually click on your nantive ad, social media content, search engine listing, or any other related asset.

Engagement rate

Engagement rate: This is a metric that offers a direct, quantifiable measurement of how engaging an advert of a piece of marketing content is based on how your audience interacts with it - an essential piece of content-centric performance data.

KPI

Key Performance Indicators: KPIs are essential to digital marketing as they provide insights, data, and benchmarks that will empower you to improve your processes, campaigns, methods, and internal communications. For example, in social media, a useful KPI could be the number of likes, comments, and shares a particular post generates. Or in SEO, a KPI could become in the form of clicks, click-through rates or bounce rates.

Lead Generation

Lead generation: In a marketing context, lead generation, or lead gen, are the strategies, activities, and initiatives designed to inspire consumer interest in your services or products and potentially increase your sales. Typical lead generation activities include native ads, email newsletters, landing pages, and targeted social media content.

ROI

Return on Investment. This is the profit or growth generated for your various digital activities and investments.

ROMI

Return on Marketing Investment: The same concept as ROI but in reference to your marketing investments and activities in particular.

SEO

Search Engine Optimization: SEO is the process of boosting the visibility of a website, landing page or domain, using organic or paid approaches to ensure higher rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs).

SERPs

Search Engine Results Pages: SERPs is the abbreviated term to the page of results that appears after searching for any particular keyword or term on the likes of Bing, Google, and other popular search engines.

Thank you page:

Thank you page: An effective lead nurturing tactic, a thank you page is a dedicated communicative page that thanks a custom for their purchase, prompting loyalty and repeat custom as a result.

User Experience (UX)

User experience: UX refers to a user's emotions and attitudes toward interacting with a particular product, page or service. User experience encompasses the practical, experiential, affective, and value-based aspects of human to computer interaction in addition to product ownership.

We hope our definitive list of digital marketing terms helps to accelerate your promotional success. Bookmark our this glossary and use it as a quick-glance practical reference and before long, all of these terms will become second nature.

For more practical promotional insights, check out our essential guide to creating a successful native advertising strategy.