Glossary of Digital Marketing Terms and Definitions
Digital Marketing is a field which is filled with abbreviations, acronyms and jargons. This page contains a comprehensive glossary of digital marketing terms and its respective definitions used in the digital marketing and digital advertising industry today.
This page will be frequently updated as new terms become common. You can also suggest me new terms to include here. Send me an email through the contact me page. – Digital Deepak.
This Glossary of Digital Marketing Terms and Definitions will be available PDF Format soon.
Digital Marketing Terms
Click on a term to go to its definition on the same page. Click the ^ on the bottom right corner of this page to get back to the top.
Call to Action
CTR – Click Through Ratio
Conversion Ratio
Conversion Rate Optimization
CPM – Cost Per Thousand Impressions
Funnel (Sales & Marketing Funnels)
Retargeting
Split Testing
View Through Conversions
Call to Action
Call to Action is a button or a link on a page which leads to an action. For example, the button with the text ‘Register’ or ‘Sign up for a Trial’ is a call to action. Call to action is not only common in digital marketing but also in traditional marketing. For example, if a newspaper ad has a phone number along with the words ‘Call us to order your copy today’ then it is a call to action. Call to action is very important in marketing for tracking ROI. If you have no call to action, you wouldn’t be able to know if your marketing efforts are working or not.
CTR – Click Through Ratio
When you run an online advertising campaign, the ad is displayed X number of time and it is clicked on only Y number of time where Y < X. If your ad is displayed 1000 times and if 10 people click on it, then the CTR or Click Through Ratio is 1%. This term is used for display ads and also text ads. It can also be used where ads are not involved at all. For example, the call to action button on your landing page can have a CTR.
Conversion Ratio
Conversion ratio is the number of people who convert from one step to another as defined by the conversion. A conversion may be from click to registration. From a registered user to a paying customer or from a paying customer to a premium customer. For example, if 100 people visit a Landing page and 10 of them convert into subscribers, then the conversion ratio from visits to subscription is 10%.
CRO – Conversion Rate Optimization
CRO or conversion rate optimization is the practice of doing split testing and consumer research to increase the conversion ratio of a landing page, an ad or some other measurable metric along the conversion funnel. There are many companies that specialize only on CRO and helps brands increase their conversions on various levels.
CPM – Cost Per Thousand Impressions
Usually in display advertising the price of a banner ad is fixed in cost per thousand impressions. It can range from $1 – $10 or even more depending on the market. CPM originally originated from Cost Per Mille (in Latin mille means thousand). When advertisers want to advertise with a publisher, they look at the cost per thousand impressions (CPM). The same metric can also be used by the publisher to calculate their earnings but something RPM is used which stands for Revenue per thousand impressions.
Funnel (Sales & Marketing Funnels)
Funnel in Digital marketing is the set of steps in which people go through before making a purchase of a product or service. The usual steps that are there in most digital marketing funnels are visitors, subscribers, buyers of front-end products, buyers of back-end / premium products. A funnel is a visualization of how people go through different stages before making end purchases. For example, a simple funnel looks like this: 1000 people visit a landing page, 100 people subscribe to the newsletter, 10 people buy an ebook and 1 person buys the training program. The job of the marketing team is to put more people into the top of the funnel and take them through a few more stages. The job of the sales team is to take the customer from the middle to the bottom of the funnel.
Landing Pages
Most of the web pages on the internet are designed for communicating information. But the sole purpose of a Landing page is to make an internet user take an action. For example, there could be a page which is solely designed to collect Leads (Usually Name, Email ID and/or Phone Number). Or there could be a page which sells something like an ebook or a software. The effectiveness of a landing page is measure by its Conversion Ratio. If a landing page converts 20% of its visitors into subscribers, then that landing page is more effective than a landing page which converts only 10% of visitors into subscribers. Landing pages are usually Split Tested to find out which is more effective. There are softwares and plugins specifically created to ease the process of landing page creation.
Lead
A Lead, also known as Sales Lead or Prospect is a person who has the intention and qualification to buy a product or service. For low ticket items such as items in an ecommerce store, lead generation is usually not done before a sale is made. As we move on to high ticket items, a prospect or a lead needs more information to become a customer. For example if you are buying a virtual phone system for your company, you would do a lot of research before buying it. More often than not, you would need someone to talk to before making a buying decision. Lead generation is a important part of digital marketing when it comes to mid-high ticket items. Leads are generated through digital marketing and then sales team closes the deal through phone or in-person meetings. Leads are usually collected through landing pages.
Retargeting
If a visitor comes to your web page and leaves without converting into a lead or customer, then you can run display advertising campaigns targeting only these visitors. These visitors are more likely to convert because they have been to your website already and know your brand. You can also customize retargeting in a way that only qualified visitors are retargeted. For example, you can run ads only for the people who have visited your home page, features page and pricing page.
Split Testing or A/B Testing
Split testing is the science of finding out which Landing Page is more effective in achieving its goals by splitting the traffic randomly but equally between these landing pages. If one gets 2,000 visitors through a specific traffic source, 1000 visitors can be sent to Landing page A and another 1000 can be sent to Landing page B. If landing page converts 100 visitors into subscribers and Landing page B converts only 50 then Landing page A is said to have won the test. Now, the split test can be run again with a different variation and it can be checked if it outperforms the original landing page. There are several tools and softwares in the market which enables A/B Testing or Split testing.
View Through Conversions (VTC)
Consider you are advertising your product or service through online display banners. If someone has viewed the banner, not clicked on it and later came to your website and converted, then this is called a VTC or a View Through Conversion. This is somewhat similar to advertising on a newspaper where someone saw the ad and visited directly. This helps you measure the effectiveness of your ad campaign. Unfortunately there is no way to track who came via this channel and in your Analytics, they would show as direct visitors. VTC is commonly used in Retargeting, Facebook ads and display ad networks. This is not common with text ads like Google Adwords.
