Definitions and Terminology in Digital Marketing

Understanding important pieces of online marketing will help us understand Digital Marketing easier.

Let's review these terms and definitions together.

One of the most important pieces of online marketing, is CTC or Call to Action.

Call to Action button

This is an instruction provided to your audience as a way to provoke a response. Calls to action typically use a verb, such as "Save Now" or "Buy Today". You'll find them in banner ads, on website landing pages and in social media posts, to name a few.

Bounce Rate.

This is when a visitor arrives to your website but leaves after visiting only one page. They're said to have bounced and your bounce rate is the percentage of those visitors. A bounce rate can apply to an entire website or a single page.

Now the traffic that bounced had to come from somewhere, whether it was an advertisement or an email, you'll want to be measuring your Click-Through Rate. As marketers, we'll often measure performance by how many clicks an ad receives. Every time an advertisement is shown, it counts as an impression and the click-through rate is how many clicks were received in relation to the amount of impressions.

Abandonment.

This is when a user does not complete the goal you intended for them. A user is following a particular path, say to check out, from an eCommerce store or to complete an online form for more information and then they leave in that process. In marketing, we aim to reduce that and that's what we call abandonment.

Paid advertising terms

Ad Impression. Each time your advertisement is displayed to a user, it counts as an impression. Impressions are often tied to Frequency

Frequency

The amount of time a single user will see your advertisement. If you had 10 impressions of an ad, with a frequency of two, then five people would have seen that advertisement. When a user completes your goal, whether its buying a product or downloading an application, they're said to have converted

Conversion Rate

is the percentage of visitors who entered into this experience and actually completed the goal.

Tracking Pixel.

These are tiny one by one pixel images that are installed on your website to track conversions, website visits and ad views. Now, advertising only make sense if it brings you a positive return on investment.

Cost per Acquisition.

You may also hear this referred to as CPAor in some cases Costs per Action. This is how much it costs you per goal completion. So if you ran an advertisement with a goal of getting an application download and that ad costs you $100 and if one person downloaded the app, despite the hundreds that clicked on it, the cost per acquisition for that single user would be $100.

Lifetime Value or LTV.

Every customer has a value. Some will buy once and never return, others will become repeat buyers. Your lifetime value is a prediction of the net profit attributed to the lifetime of that customer's relationship with you.

Typically, with paid advertisements, you want your cost per acquisition to be lower than your lifetime value.

Banner Advertisements and Display Ads.

Refers to visual images, either static or animated that are used to generate brand awareness or entice a user to click. Most banner or display advertisements will contain a call to action.

Landing Page.

the first page that the visitor first arrives on a page, a specific page to your promotion and converts.

Organic Result.

When you conduct a search, on say Google, you have two types of results.Paid results, which are typically the first couple of links and then organic results, which are not paid and instead achieve their rank through search engine optimization.

Search Engine Optimization

a collection of tools and best practices that help your website rank higher in search engine results, thereby driving more traffic to your site and potentially more business

As we progress through learning Digital Marketing, Feel free to return to this blog to brush up on these definitions anytime.