Marketing Terms

150+ Marketing Terms and Definitions You Should Know

Below is a list of over 150 marketing terms every marketer should know.

Marketing is a fast-paced industry that is constantly changing. It can be challenging to stay up to speed on the most recent marketing terms and lingo. Have no fear — we’ve got you covered.

I’ve created a complete list of marketing terms and I will continue to add new marketing terms to this list as they crop up.

Scroll through the list in alphabetical order…

Marketing Terms List

Marketing Terms and Definitions

Marketing Terms A

A/B testing

A/B testing is comparing two or more versions of a web page, email campaign, etc. and weighing outcomes to determine which performed better. To conduct an effective A/B test, it’s important to only test one thing at a time to get accurate results. Testing multiple variables at a single time can lead to incorrect assumptions. A few things you may consider testing include, but are not limited to:

  • Subject line
  • CTA
  • Email layout
  • Field insertion
  • Content personalization
  • Body text
  • Images
  • Specific offer
  • Message type (i.e. informational or promotional)
  • Time of send

Ad Completion

An Ad Completion is an event which indicates that video ad was played through to the end.

Ad Fraud

Ad Fraud is a process when a company knowingly serves ads that no one will actually see as a way to drive formal KPI indicators.
Example: A website use bots to automatically refresh its pages in order to register a high number of page views and appear more attractive as ad platform.

Ad Network

A grouping of websites or digital properties (like apps) where ads can appear. For example, Google has 2 ad networks: the search network (text ads that appear in search results) and the display network (image ads that appear on millions of websites that have partnered with Google).

Average Position

A metric in Google Adwords that helps advertisers understand where, on average, their ads are showing in Google search results pages. There are usually 4 available ad slots at the top of a search result page (where 1 is the first ad, 2 is the second ad, etc), so for the best results, advertisers typically want an average position between 1-4.

Ad group

An ad group contains one or more ads which target a shared set of keywords.

  • Each campaign is made up of one or more ad groups.
  • Ad groups can be used to organize your ads by a common theme, product or service type.

Adset

An ad set is a group of ads that share the same daily or lifetime budget, schedule, bid type, bid info, and targeting data. Ad sets allow a user to group ads according to criteria needed, and retrieve the ad-related statistics that apply to a whole set.

AdWords

Google AdWords is called Google Ads now.

Agency Trading Desk

Agency Trading Desk is a centralized, service-based organization that serves as a managed service layer, typically on top of a demand-side platform (DSP) and other audience buying technologies. Works as an agency’s internal “center of excellence,” supporting agency teams wishing to tap into this new buying model on behalf of agency clients.

Aggregation

Aggregation is a method of summarizing a group of values in order to return a single value.

API

Application Programming Interface

An API is a protocol created to allow separate software solutions to communicate over a relatively simple interface. Developers will often use APIs to connect or integrate systems and services. Our integrations use data source’s API to call data sources (like Facebook) and get information for improved integration. This is more of a IT/progamming term, rather than marketing terms.

Attribution

Attribution is the identification of a set of user actions (“events” or “touchpoints”) that contribute in some manner to the desired outcome, and then the assignment of a value to each of these events

Attribution window

Conversion window
An attribution window is a defined period of time in which a publisher can claim that an event led to the desired outcome (app install, purchase, etc.).
ExampleSeven days window is agreed between an advertiser and publisher. If a user installs the app not later than in seven days after interacting with an adv from a publisher, that publisher is credited with the install and would receive payment.

Audience Extension

Audience Extension is a process used in advertising technology that attempts to expand the target audience size while ensuring relevancy and maximizing engagement.

Average order value

AOV

Average order value or AOV is calculated by dividing sales revenue by the number of orders. This is an essential KPI for eCommerce websites that are used to measure merchandising results, cross-sell and upsell performance and acquisition channel values.

AOV = Revenue/Orders

MARKETING TERMS B

Behavioural Targeting

Behavioural targeting is a technique used by advertisers and publishers to utilize a web user’s previous web browsing behaviour to customize the types of ads they receive.

Bounce Rate

Website bounce rate: The percentage of people who land on a website page but leave it without doing or clicking anything. A high bounce rate generally leads to poor conversion rates because no one is staying on the site long enough to read it’s content.
Email bounce rate: The rate at which an email was unable to be delivered to a recipient’s inbox. In an email, not all bounces are bad, so it’s important to distinguish between hard and soft bounces before taking an email address off the list. This is one of many marketing terms that relate to website performance.

Brand Lift

The increase in effectiveness measurements (e.g., message recall) between respondents who did not view the ad and those who did.

Business Intelligence tools

BI tools

BI tools – software systems which provide historical, current, and predictive views of business operations, most often using data that has been gathered into a data warehouse or a data mart and occasionally working from operational data. Improvado can prepare data for different BI tools.

Business Manager

A Facebook platform that allows marketers to manage multiple pages and ad accounts in one central location.

Business-to-Business

B2B

B2B companies sell goods or provide services to other businesses. Our Improvado is a B2B company.

Business-to-Consumer

B2C

B2C companies sell directly to consumers. Amazon, Apple, and Nike are primarily B2C companies.

Business Model

A business model is an essential part of how you understand customer channels, customer relationships and your customer segments.

Buyer Persona

Buyer Persona is a representation of the ideal customer based on market research and your existing customer’s profiles. It is helpful for defining the target audience, but it can also help sales reps qualify leads.

MARKETING TERMS C

Campaign

An ad group or set of ad groups (ads, keywords, and bids) that share a budget, locat ion, targeting, and other settings. Campaigns are often used to organize categories of products or services offered. Campaign settings typically include budget, language, location, and etc.

Call-to-Action

CTA

A call-to-action is a text, button, image, or a web link that encourages a website visitor to visit a landing page and become of lead.
Example“Subscribe Now” or “Download Today.”

Churn Rate

A metric that measures how many customers company retains and at what value. The simplest formula for churn rate, take the number of customers lost during a certain time frame and divide that by the total number of customers at the very beginning of that time frame.
Example: A company had 300 customers at the beginning of the year and 240 customers at the end, so their customer churn rate would be: (300-240)/300 = 60/300 = 0.20 or 20%.

Click

Clicks metric is showing how many times the ad has been clicked on. When someone clicks the ad it is counted as one click.

Click to open rate

CTOR

Click to open rate or CTOR reveals the effectiveness of email content through a percentage by dividing unique clicks by unique opens. This metric expresses the ratio of users who opened and then clicked through email.

CTOR = (Clicks/Opens)*100

Click-through Rate

A metric showing how often people click on an ad or search result after they see it.

CTR

The percentage of an audience that advances (or clicks through) from one part of the website to the next step of the marketing campaign. It’s the total number of clicks that your page or CTA receives divided by the number of opportunities that people had to click (Impressions).

CTR = (Clicks/Impressions)*100

Conversion

A conversion is carried out when a customer or user completes an action that has been designated as a conversion on your site.
ExampleCustomer completes an order, clicks a link, submits their information in a lead generation form, visits a specific page of a website, etc.

Conversion Path

A conversion path is a series of website-based events that facilitate lead capture.
Example: Call-to-Action leads to a landing page with a lead capture form, which redirects to a content offer. In exchange for a website visitor contact information, he or she obtains a content offer to better help them through the buying process.

Content

Content (in marketing) is a piece of information that exists for the purpose of being viewed, engaged with, and shared. It can be a blog, video, social media post, photo, podcast, etc. Content plays an indispensable role in traffic to lead conversion. This has become one of the most popular marketing terms and fits to the overall topic of content marketing.

Content Management System

CMS

A web application designed to allow non-technical users to create, edit, and manage a website without concerning about “behind-the-scenes” work like making content searchable and indexable, generating navigation elements, tracking user actions, and more.

Content Optimization System

COS

A COS is a kind of CMS optimized to deliver customers more personalized web experience to enhance conversion rate and customer loyalty.

Conversion Rate

The number of conversions per ad click – the percentage of people who completed a desired action on a single web page, such as filling out a form. Pages with high conversion rates are performing well, while pages with low conversion rates are performing poorly.

CR = (Conversions/Clicks)*100

Conversion Rate Optimization

CRO

The process of improving site conversion using design techniques, key optimization principles, and testing. It involves creating an experience for website visitors that will convert them into customers. CRO is most often applied to landing page optimization, but it can also be applied to social media and etc.

Conversions

An action that’s counted when someone interacts with your ad (for example, clicks a text ad or views a video ad) and then takes an action that you’ve defined as valuable to your business, such as an online purchase or a call to your business from a mobile phone.

Cost per Action

Cost per Acquisition

CPA

CPA is an online advertising pricing model where the advertiser pays for a specified acquisition – for example a sale, click, or form submit – in fact a kind of conversion.

CPA = Cost/ConversionsCPA = Cost/(Impressions*CTR*CR)

Cost per Click

CPC

CPC or Cost per Click is the price paid by an advertiser to a publisher for a single click on the ad.

CPC = Cost/Clicks

Cost per Completed View

CPCV

The price paid by an advertiser to the publisher once a video has been viewed through completion.

Cost-per-Lead

CPL

Cost per lead (pricing model) is an online advertising pricing model, where the advertiser pays for an explicit sign-up from a consumer interested in the advertiser’s offer. It is also commonly called online lead generation. Contrary to cost per mille (CPM) and cost per click (CPC) pricing models, in a CPL pricing model advertisers pay only for a qualified sign-up regardless of how many impressions or clicks their advertisement receives.
Cost per lead (metric)

CPL = Cost/Leads_number

Cost per View

CPV

Cost per View means the price that gets paid when a video ad is played. In general the video doesn’t have to be watched the whole way through to cause a pay out – just started. In some video advertising models, this price is also paid when someone clicks on a video ad.
ExampleBooking 1,000 views on a site with $0.25 CPV would cost 25 cents for every time video was played, and $250 in total.

Cost Per Thousand

CPM

Cost per thousand is a marketing term used to denote the price of 1,000 advertisement impressions on one webpage. If a website publisher charges $2.00 CPM, that means an advertiser must pay $2.00 for every 1,000 impressions of its ad. The “M” in CPM represents the Roman numeral for 1,000.

CPM = (Cost/Impressions)*1000

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

Customer Acquisition Cost is company’s total Sales and Marketing cost. To calculate CAC, follow these steps for a given time period (month, quarter, or year):

  1. Add up program or advertising spend + salaries + commissions + bonuses + overhead.
  2. Divide by the number of new customers in that time period.

Example: Company spends $500,000 on Sales and Marketing in a given month and added 50 customers that same month. CAC is $10,000 for that month.

Customer Relationship Management

CRM

A set of software programs that let companies keep track of everything they do with their existing and potential customers: contact information, email, phone calls, faxes, and deals. CRM also can be used for sending personalized emails, scheduling appointments, and logging every instance of customer service and support.
Customer profile
A customer profile is an accurate information about your target customers which is used to help marketers market to potential customers and predict what products or services they’ll buy.

MARKETING TERMS D

Data Management Platform

DMP

Data Management Platform is a technology platform used for collecting and managing data, mainly for digital marketing purposes. It allows to generate audience segments for targeting specific users in online advertising campaigns.

Dashboard

A web page that contains and displays aggregate data about the performance of a website or digital marketing campaign. A dashboard pulls information from various data sources and displays the info in an easy-to-read format.

Deliverability

Deliverability measures the ability to deliver email messages effectively to a recipient’s inbox while avoiding being lost, blocked or driven to a spam folder.

Digital Marketing

A catchall term for online work that includes specialized marketing practices like SEO, PPC, CRO, web design, blogging, content, and any other form of advertising on a internet-connected device with a screen.

Demand Side Platform

DSP

A demand-side platform is a system that allows buyers of digital advertising inventory to manage multiple ad exchange and data exchange accounts through one interface. Much like Paid Search, using DSPs allows users to optimize based on a set of KPI such as effective Cost per Click, and effective Cost per Action.

Dynamic recommendations

Dynamic content, or product recommendations refers to portions of a website, ad, or email that change based on the interests or past behavior of the reader or customer. It allows there to be a customized experience specifically for the visitor or reader at that moment.
Example Amazon’s recommendation engine “If you bought A, you may also like B”

MARKETING TERMS E

Ebook

Ebooks are a common type of content that many marketers use, often to help generate leads. They are generally a more long-form content type than, say, blog posts, and go into in-depth detail on a subject.

Ecommerce

Buying and selling products over electronic networks, including the Internet or mobile applications. The term may apply specifically to electronic transactions or more generally to the online retailing and online business.

Editorial Calendar

It’s like a road map for content creation, showing you what kind of content to create, what topics to cover, which personas to target, and how often to publish to best support your strategy. Maintaining an editorial calendar will keep you more organized and show you any gaps you may have in your content library. It also helps ensure you’re doing the right things for your personas and not going way off-track with the topics you’re covering.

Effective Cost per Thousand

eCPM

Effective Cost Per Thousand (impressions) is a metric for measuring advertising revenue generated across various marketing channels, calculated by dividing total earnings by the total number of impressions in thousands.

CPM is the cost for every 1,000th impression when you are buying ad impressions (CPM buying method). eCPM is the cost for every 1,000th ad impression, regardless of what buying method are being used (fixed price, CPM, CPC, CPA or CPO). The main difference between CPM and eCPM is the data you use to calculate

Email Campaign

An email (marketing) campaign is a campaign comprised of several cadences of email messages meant to build familiarity and trust around a product or service. Generally, any email sent to a subscriber list of customers or prospects can be considered email marketing.

Engagement Rate

A popular social media metric used to describe the amount of interaction – Likes, shares, comments – a piece of content receives. Interactions like these tell you that your messages are resonating with your fans and followers.

Evergreen Content

Evergreen content is content that continues to provide value to readers no matter when they stumble upon it. In other words, it can be referenced long after it was originally published, and even then, it’s still valuable to the reader. This post on how to write blog posts serves as a prime example.
Typically, a piece of evergreen content is timeless, valuable, high quality, and canonical or definitive. These posts are typically a content marketer’s best friend because of the tremendous SEO value they provide. Unusually, this is one of those marketing terms that is often not known or forgotten.

MARKETING TERMS F

Fill Rate

The ratio of ad requests that are successfully filled in relation to the total number of ad requests made, expressed in percentage.

First-Party Data

Data directly collected by a brand – typically through e-commerce sites and company websites – about the actions their users take while on that site.

Form

The place your page visitors will supply information in exchange for your offer. It’s also how those visitors can convert into precious sales leads. As a best practice, only ask for information you need from your leads in order to effectively follow up with and/or qualify them.

Frequency

The number of times an ad is delivered to the same browser in a single session or time period.

Friction

Any element of your website that is confusing, distracting, or causes stress for visitors, causing them to leave your page. Examples of friction-causing elements include dissonant colours, too much text, distracting website navigation menus, or landing page forms with too many fields.

MARKETING TERMS G

Geotargeting

Showing ads to people based on their mobile device’s location, ZIP code information they submit when registering a site/service or GPS coordinates collected by site/serviceю

Google Ads

Google Ads (previously AdWords) is an online advertising platform developed by Google, where advertisers pay to display brief advertisements, service offerings, product listings, video content and generate mobile application installs within the Google ad network to web users.

Google AdSense

AdSense

Google AdSense is a program run by Google that allows publishers in the Google Network to serve automatic text, image, video, or interactive media advertisements, that are targeted to site content and audience. These advertisements are administered, sorted, and maintained by Google.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a freemium web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic, currently as a platform inside the Google Marketing Platform brand. It allows you to measure your advertising ROI as well as track your Flash, video, and social networking sites and applications.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a no-charge web service by Google for webmasters. It allows webmasters to check indexing status and optimize visibility of their websites. “Search Console tools and reports help you measure your site’s Search traffic and performance, fix issues, and make your site shine in Google Search results.” Google says.

MARKETING TERMS H

Hard bounce

A hard bounce is an email that had been returned to the sender because the recipient’s email address is invalid, e.g. domain name doesn’t exist or the recipient is unknown.

Hashtag

Hashtags are a way for you and your readers to interact with each other on social media and have conversations about a particular piece of content. They tie public conversations on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram together into a single stream, which users can find by searching for a hashtag, clicking on one, or using a third-party monitoring tool like HubSpot’s Social Inbox.
The hashtags themselves are simply a keyword phrase, spelled out without spaces, with a pound sign (#) in front of it – like #InboundChat and #ChocolateLovers. You can put these hashtags anywhere in your social media posts. Hashtags often relate to a marketing terms for marketers.

MARKETING TERMS I

Iframe

An HTML document that is inside of another HTML document on a website. Iframes are used commonly to embed content from one source onto another web page.

Impressions

Impressions metric describes how often your ad is shown. For example, on Google platform, an impression is counted each time your ad is shown on a search result page or other sites on the Google Network.

Impression Share

Used in Pay per click advertising, this metric refers to the percentage of times viewers have seen an advertiser’s ad, in relation to the total possible amounts that ad could have been seen. If an ad campaign’s impression share is 70%, then the ads showed 7 out of 10 possible times.

Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing refers to marketing activities that draw visitors in, rather than marketers having to go out to get prospects’ attention. It’s all about earning the attention of customers, making the company easy to find online, and drawing customers to the website by producing interesting, helpful content. By aligning the content you publish with your customer’s interests, you naturally attract inbound traffic that you can then convert, close, and delight over time.

Inbound Link

An inbound link is a link coming from another site to your own website. “Inbound” is generally used by the person receiving the link. For example, here’s an inbound link to our co-founder Dharmesh’s blog. Dharmesh could say, “I received an inbound link from HubSpot.”
Websites that receive many inbound links can be more likely to rank higher in search engines. They also help folks receive referral traffic from other websites.

Infographic

A highly visual piece of content that is very popular among digital marketers as a way of relaying complex concepts in a simple and visual way. Infographic is one of many marketing terms that relates to content marketing.

MARKETING TERMS J

MARKETING TERMS K

Key Performance Indicator

KPI

A type of performance measurement companies use to evaluate an employee’s or an activity’s success. Marketers look at KPIs to track progress toward marketing goals, and successful marketers constantly evaluate their performance against industry-standard metrics. Examples of KPIs include CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost), blog traffic sources, and homepage views. Choose KPIs that represent how your marketing and business are performing. Some sample KPI’s commonly used in B2C marketing are:

  • Customer acquisition
  • Customer lifetime value
  • Unsubscribe Rate
  • Open Rate
  • Click-through Rate
  • Conversion Rate
  • Average Order Value
  • Buy Rate
  • Average Time Before Purchase

Keywords

Words or phrases describing your product or service that you choose to help determine when and where your ad can appear. The keywords you choose are used to show your ads to people. Select high-quality, relevant keywords for your ad campaign to help you reach only the most interested people, who are more likely to become your customers.

MARKETING TERMS L

Landing Page

A landing page is a website page containing a form that is used for lead generation. This page revolves around a marketing offer, such as an ebook or a webinar, and serves to capture visitor information in exchange for the valuable offer. Landing pages are the gatekeepers of the conversion path and are what separates a website visitor from becoming a lead.
A smart inbound marketer will create landing pages that appeal to different personae at various stages of the buying process. A hefty endeavour no doubt, but one that pays off in spades.

Lead

A person or company who’s shown interest in a product or service in some way, shape, or form. Perhaps they filled out a form, subscribed to a blog, or shared their contact information in exchange for a coupon.
Generating leads is a critical part of a prospect’s journey to becoming a customer, and it falls in between the second and third stages of the larger inbound marketing methodology, which you can see below.

Lead Nurturing

Sometimes referred to as “drip marketing,” lead nurturing is the practice of developing a series of communications (emails, social media messages, etc.) that seek to qualify a lead, keep it engaged, and gradually push it down the sales funnel. Inbound marketing is all about delivering valuable content to the right audience – and lead nurturing helps foster this by providing contextually relevant information to a lead during different stages of the buying lifecycle. This also relates to many marketing terms that fit to the topic of funnel marketing.

Lifecycle Stages

These divisions serve as a way to describe the relationship you have with your audience, and can generally be broken down into three stages: awareness, evaluation, and purchase.
What’s important to understand about each of these stages is that not every piece of content you create is appropriate, depending on what stage your audience might fall in at that moment. That’s why dynamic content is so great – you can serve up content that’s appropriate for whatever stage that particular visitor is in.

Lifetime Value (LTV)

A prediction of the net profit attributed to the entire future relationship with a customer.
For example, if a customer pays you $100,000 per year where your gross margin on the revenue is 70%, and that customer type is predicted to cancel at 16% per year, then the customer’s LTV is $437,500.

Long-Tail Keyword

A long-tail keyword is a very targeted search phrase that contains three or more words. It often contains a head term, which is a more generic search term, plus one or two additional words that refine the search term.

LTV:CAC

The ratio of lifetime value (LTV) to customer acquisition cost (CAC). Once you have the LTV and the CAC, compute the ratio of the two. If it costs you $100,000 to acquire a customer with an LTV of $437,500, then your LTV:CAC is 4.4 to 1.

MARKETING TERMS M

Marketing Automation

While there’s some overlap with the term “lead nurturing,” marketing automation is a bit different. Think of marketing automation as the platform with associated tools and analytics to develop a lead nurturing strategy. If you’ll let me run with an “art” analogy, marketing automation is the paintbrush, watercolours, and blank canvas. Lead nurturing is the artist that makes it all come together. Like Bob Ross! You can’t paint a happy little nurturing campaign without both.

Mobile Marketing

With mobile search queries officially surpassing desktop queries, now is probably the time to explore mobile marketing. What is it? Well, mobile marketing refers to the practice of optimizing marketing for mobile devices to provide visitors with time- and location- sensitive, personalized information for promoting goods, services, and ideas.

Mobile Optimization

Mobile optimization means designing and formatting your website so that it’s easy to read and navigate from a mobile device. This can be done by either creating a separate mobile website or incorporating responsive design in initial site layout. Google’s algorithm now rewards mobile-friendly websites, so if your site isn’t fully optimized for mobile devices, you will likely see a hit to your ranking on mobile searches.

Monthly Recurring Revenue

MRR

The amount of revenue a subscription-based business receives per month. Includes MRR gained by new accounts (net new), MRR gained from upsells (net positive), MRR lost from downsells (net negative), and MRR lost from cancellations (net loss).

MARKETING TERMS N

Native Advertising

A type of online advertising that takes on the form and function of the platform it appears on. Its purpose is to make ads feel less like ads, and more like part of the conversation. That means it’s usually a piece of sponsored content that’s relative to the consumer experience, isn’t interruptive, and looks and feels similar to its editorial environment.

Net Promoter Score

NPS

A customer satisfaction metric that measures, on a scale of 0-10 (or -100 – 100), the degree to which people would recommend your company to others. The NPS is derived from a simple survey designed to help you determine how loyal your customers are to your business.
To calculate NPS, subtract the percentage of customers who would not recommend you (detractors, or 0-6) from the percent of customers who would (promoters, or 9-10). There are many marketing terms that fit broader business use, such as brand performance.

News Feed

A news feed is an online feed full of news sources. On Facebook, the News Feed is the homepage of users’ accounts where they can see all the latest updates from their friends. The news feed on Twitter is called Timeline.

No-Follow Link

A no-follow link is used when a website does not want to pass search engine authority to another webpage. It tells search engine crawlers not to follow or pass credit to linked websites as a way to avoid association with spammy content or inadvertently violating webmaster guidelines. To varying degrees, the no-follow attribute is recognized by all major search engines, like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Not all links (and linking domains) are created equal, and a no-follow attribute helps avoid any foul play.

MARKETING TERMS O

Offer

Offers are content assets that live behind a form on a landing page. Their primary purpose is to help marketers generate leads for your business. There are many different types of offers you could create, including ebooks, checklists, cheat sheets, webinars, demos, templates, and tools.

Off-Page Optimization

This is the free-spirited cousin of on-page optimization. Off-page SEO refers to incoming links and other outside factors that impact how a webpage is indexed in search results. Factors like linking domains and even social media play a role in off-page optimization. The good news is that it’s powerful; the not so good news is that it’s mostly out of an inbound marketer’s control. The solution? Create useful, remarkable content and chances are people will share and link to it.

On-Page Optimization

This type of SEO is based solely on a webpage and the various elements within the HTML (see “H” if you skipped here directly). Ensuring that key pieces of the specific page (content, title tag, URL, and image tags) include the desired keyword will help a page rank for that particular phrase.

Open rate

Open rate is a measure of how many people on an email list open or view a particular email campaign. Open rates are normally expressed as a percentage and calculated as such: If your campaign receives a 20% open rate, that would mean of every 10 emails delivered to the inbox, 2 were actually opened.

Open Exchange

An open digital advertising marketplace for aggregated inventory from multiple partners where buyers can bid either manually or programmatically to purchase impressions.

Opt Outs Per Sale

OOPS

OOPS is a metric that is used to balance quality and quantity of an email as it helps weigh tradeoffs between conversions and fatigue.

Opt In

Refers to an individual giving a company permission to use data collected from or about the individual for a particular reason, such as to market the company’s products and services.

Organic

In the context of search engine optimization and search engine marketing, organic results are those listings search engines show because of their relevance to a query, not because a site owner paid for an ad or paid to be featured.

Organic search

Organic search is a method for entering one or several search terms as a single string of text into a search engine. Organic search results, appear as paginated lists, are based on relevance to the search terms; and exclude advertisements. Whereas, non-organic search results do not filter out pay per click advertising.

Over-the-Top

OTT

Over-the-Top refers to content accessed via the internet without the involvement of a television service provider. OTT includes Subscription Video-on-Demand services like Netflix, as well as free ad-supported services like Hulu.

MARKETING TERMS P

Page Request

The opportunity for an HTML document to appear on a browser window as a direct result of a user’s interaction with a Web site.

Page View

A request to load a single web page on the internet. Marketers use them to analyze their website and to see if any change on the webpage results in more or fewer page views.

Pay per Click (PPC)

The amount of money spent to get a digital advertisement clicked. Also an internet advertising model where advertisers pay a publisher (usually a search engine, social media site, or website owner) a certain amount of money every time their ad is clicked. For search engines, PPC ads display an advertisement when someone searches for a keyword that matches the advertiser’s keyword list, which they submit to the search engine ahead of time. This is another one of those marketing terms that relates to paid advertising.

PPC ads are used to direct traffic to the advertiser’s website, and PPC is used to assess the cost-effectiveness and profitability of your paid advertising campaigns. There are two ways to pay for PPC ads:

Flat rate: agreement on a fixed amount that will be paid for each click.
Bid-based: where the advertiser competes against other advertisers in an advertising network.

Pinterest

Pinterest is a visual social network typically used by ecommerce marketers, but not without its fair share of top-notch B2B and B2C content marketers. Businesses and consumers alike use the website to post images and photos they like so fellow users can repin (share) that content.

Post Click

PC

A post click conversion is a conversion that occurs after a user has clicked on an ad.

Post View

PV

A post view conversion (or view through in AdWords terminology) is a conversion where the user has previously been delivered an impression but not clicked on it.

MARKETING TERMS Q

Qualified Lead

A contact that opted in to receive communication from your company, became educated about your product or service, and is interested in learning more. Marketing and Sales often have two different versions of qualified leads, so be sure to have conversations with your sales team to set expectations for the types of leads you plan to hand over.

QR Code

A QR code or Quick Response code is a specific matrix barcode that is readable by dedicated QR barcode readers and camera telephones. The information encoded may be text, URL, or other data. It also starts with “Q,” which is a rarity with marketing-related terms.

MARKETING TERMS R

Referral

A medium denoted in Google Analytics that represents a website visit that came from another website (as opposed to coming from a Google search, for example). When users click on a link to another, external webpage, they are said to have been “referred” there.

Responsive Design

This is the practice of developing a website that adapts accordingly to how someone is viewing it. Instead of building a separate, distinct website for each specific device it could be viewed on, the site recognizes the device that your visitor is using and automatically generates a page that is responsive to the device the content is being viewed on – making websites always appear optimized for screens of any dimension.

ROAS

Stands for Return On Ad Spend. A PPC marketing metric that demonstrates the profit made as compared to the amount of money spent on the ads. Similar to ROI.

Return on investment

ROI

Return on investment or ROI is a performance measure used to evaluate the efficiency of an investment. ROI measures the amount of profits returned on an investment relative to the investment’s cost.

ROI = (Revenue - Cost)/Cost

ExampleLet’s say you have a product that costs $100 to produce, and sells for $200. You sell 6 of these products as a result of advertising them on Google Ads. Your total sales are $1200, and your Google Ads costs are $200. Your ROI is ($1200-($600+$200))/($600+$200), or 50%.

RPM

RPM stands for Revenue per thousand impressions. Both the terms usually mean the same but they are used in different contexts.

RPM = Total_Revenue/Total_Impressions*1000

Impressions can be defined in different ways. For email, the metric determines how much revenue was generated per 1,000 emails delivered. It can be extended for page views, and other key user interaction points depending on the brand.

MARKETING TERMS S

Search Engine Marketing

SEM

Search engine marketing SEM is a form of Internet marketing that involves the promotion of websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages primarily through paid advertising.SEM may incorporate SEO to achieve a higher ranking in search engine results pages to enhance pay per click (PPC) listings.

Search Engine

A program that searches an index of information and returns results to the user based on corresponding keywords. The most well-known search engines are Google, Youtube, Bing, and Yahoo.

Search Engine Optimization

SEO

The practice of enhancing where a webpage appears in search results. By adjusting a webpage’s on-page SEO elements and influencing off-page SEO factors, an inbound marketer can improve where a webpage appears in search engine results. There are a ton of components to improving the SEO of your site pages. Search engines look for elements including title tags, keywords, image tags, internal link structure, and inbound links – and that’s just to name a few. Search engines also look at site structure and design, visitor behavior, and other external, off-site factors to determine how highly ranked your site should be in the search engine results pages.

Second-Party Data

Second-Party Data is other company’s first-party data made directly available to another company, which then uses it to sell ads.

Segmentation

Segmentation is a marketing technique where you segment your target audience based on various conditions like gender, age, geographic location, purchase history, email engagement. This strategy is used by marketers and businesses in an effort to send relevant communications to specific people on a marketing list. There are several marketing terms that relate to the customer.

Sell-Through Rate

The percentage of ad inventory sold as opposed to traded or bartered.

Sender Score

An email marketing term that refers to a reputation rating from 0-100 for every outgoing mail server IP address. Mail servers will check your Sender Score before deciding what to do with your emails. A score of over 90 is good.

Service Level Agreement

SLA

For marketers, an SLA is an agreement between a company’s sales and marketing teams that defines the expectations Sales has for Marketing and vice versa. The Marketing SLA defines expectations Sales has for Marketing with regards to lead quantity and lead quality, while the Sales SLA defines the expectations Marketing has for Sales on how deeply and frequently Sales will pursue each qualified lead. SLAs exist to align sales and marketing. If the two departments are managed as separate silos, the system fails. For companies to achieve growth and become leaders in their industries, it is critical that these two groups be properly integrated.

Small-to-Medium Business

SMB

Usually defined as companies that have between 10 and 500 employees.

Social Media

Social media is media designed to be disseminated through social interaction, created using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and Google+ are examples of social media networks that one can join for personal or business use. Social Media is a core component of Inbound, as it provides marketers with additional channels to spread reach, increase growth, and reach business goals.

Social Proof

Social proof refers to a psychological phenomenon in which people seek direction from those around them to determine how they are supposed to act or think in a given situation. It’s like when you see a really long line outside a nightclub and assume that club is really good because it’s in such high demand. In social media, social proof can be identified by the number of interactions a piece of content receives or the number of followers you have. The idea is that if others are sharing something or following someone, it must be good. Marketing influence is a big subject that has several key marketing terms. Others include reciprocation, commitment and consistency, liking, authority an scarcity.

Soft bounce

A soft bounce is an email that couldn’t be delivered because of temporary reasons that may include an inbox being full or the email file being too large. Most email providers will continue to try to deliver the email over the period of a few days if they receive a soft bounce on an email send.

Software-as-a-Service

SaaS

Any software that is hosted by another company, which stores your information in the cloud. Examples: HubSpot, Salesforce, IM clients, and project management applications.

Spend

Total amount of money spent on the ad campaign.

Spreadsheet

A spreadsheet is part of a software program that simulates a worksheet displaying data values in a grid of rows and columns. Excel sheets is a brilliant example.

MARKETING TERMS T

Target Audience

The intended audience for an ad, usually defined in terms of specific demographics (age, gender) and psychographics (interests, behaviors).

Third-Party Ad Server

Independent outsourced companies that specialize in managing, maintaining, serving, tracking, and analyzing the results of online ad campaigns.

Third-Party Data

Information that an established data company collects indirectly or aggregates from others and then sells to ad buyers.

Top of the Funnel

TOFU

Top of the funnel is a term for the first stage of the buying process. Leads at this stage are just identifying a problem and are looking for more information about goods and services they may need.

Transactional email

A transactional email is an automated message that is triggered based on a specific behavior or action taken, e.g.

  • Email address confirmation
  • Password resets
  • Purchase receipts
  • Support requests

Trend

Trend is the general movement or flow of an event or phenomenon over time, measured as the general direction (up or down) and the rate of change.

Trend Analysis

Trend Analysis is aimed at projecting both current and future movement of events through use of time series data analysis which involves comparison of data over a sequential period of time to spot a pattern or trend.

MARKETING TERMS U

Unique Reach

Unique Reach is a critical measure of scale, it allows you to know how many unique users you are reaching with your campaigns.
ExampleSteven sees your ad on his mobile, his desktop, and his tablet. Unique Reach can tell that each of those impressions comes from a single user, so it counts it as one rather than three.

Unique Visitor

A person who visits a website more than once within a period of time. Marketers use this term in contrast with overall site visits to track the amount of traffic on their website. If only one person visits a webpage 30 times, then that web page has one UV and 30 total site visits.

User Experience

UX

The overall experience a customer has with a particular business, from their discovery and awareness of the brand all the way through their interaction, purchase, use, and even advocacy of that brand. To deliver an excellent customer experience, you have to think like a customer, or better, think about being the customer.

User Interface

UI

A type of interface that allows users to control a software application or hardware device. A good user interface provides a user-friendly experience by allowing the user to interact with the software or hardware in an intuitive way. It includes a menu bar, toolbar, windows, buttons, and so on.

Urchin Tracking Module parameters

UTM parameters

UTM

UTM parameters are five variants of URL parameters used by marketers to track the effectiveness of online marketing campaigns across traffic sources and publishing media. They were introduced by Google Analytics’ predecessor Urchin and, consequently, are supported out-of-the-box by Google Analytics.

<b>Parameter</b><b>Purpose</b><b>Examples</b>

utm_source

Identifies which site sent the traffic, and is a required parameter

Google

utm_medium

Identifies what type of link was used, such as cost per click or email

cpc

utm_campaign

Identifies a specific product promotion or strategic campaign

spring_sale

utm_term

Identifies search terms

running+shoes

utm_content

Identifies what specifically was clicked to bring the user to the site

textlink

MARKETING TERMS V

View rate

A ratio showing the number of paid views of a video ad to the number of impressions.

VR=(Views/Impressions)*100%

Example: if you had 5 views and 1000 impressions, then your view rate would be 0.5%.

  • View rate is similar to Click-through Rate (CTR), but instead of measuring clicks, it counts people who viewed your video ad after seeing it on YouTube or the Display Network.
  • You can use View rate to track the value of your video campaigns on YouTube and the Display Network.

Video Ad Serving Template

VAST

Video Ad Serving Template is a universal XML schema for serving ads to digital video players.

Viewable CPM

vCPM

Viewable CPM is cost per thousand viewable ads served.

vCPM = CPM/Viewability_rate

Viewability

Viewability is a metric that addresses an ad’s opportunity to be seen by a viewer.

Viewable Completion

When a video is viewable at the end of ad play.

Viewable Impression

According to the Media Ratings Council, a viewable video impression is an impression where at least 50% of a video player’s pixels are in view in an active browser tab for any two consecutive seconds.

Video Player Ad-Serving Interface Definition

VPAID

Video Player Ad-Serving Interface Definition a universal specification developed for interaction between ad units and video players focused on “enabling a rich interactive in-stream ad experience”.

View-Through Rate

VTR

View-Through Rate is a measurement of how many people saw an ad and eventually visited the advertiser’s site, similar to the Click-through Rate.

Viral Content

This term is used to describe a piece of content that has become wildly popular across the web through sharing. Oftentimes, folks don’t know a piece they’re creating will be viral until it actually does, which is usually unfortunate if it’s particularly embarrassing. This is one of many marketing terms that fit to the topic of viral marketing

MARKETING TERMS W

Word-of-Mouth

WOM

The passing of information from person to person, e.g. rumors, viral videos, etc. WOM marketing is inexpensive, but it takes work and involves leveraging many components of inbound marketing like product marketing, content marketing, and social media marketing.

MARKETING TERMS X

MARKETING TERMS Y

Yield

The percentage of clicks vs. impressions on an ad within a specific page. Pretty similar to Click-through Rate for one specific ad.

Yield Management

Yield and Revenue Management is the process of understanding, anticipating and influencing advertiser and consumer behavior in order to maximize profits through better selling, pricing, packaging and inventory management while delivering value to advertisers and site users.

MARKETING TERMS Z

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