As marketers, designers, and developers, we’re always striving to speak to our clients in plain language, but industry jargon is a natural and (sometimes) useful feature of our work. For instance, knowing the terms of a trade often helps you to understand the tools of the trade. With that in mind, here’s the list of 66 marketing technology and digital marketing terms we at Launch Brigade wish all of our clients knew.
Advertising Network: A company that connects people who want to advertise online with websites that are willing to host advertisers.
Analytics: The discovery, interpretation, and communication of meaningful patterns in data.
Behavioral Data: Information gathered by a business that shows a specific customer’s interactions with the business. For example, website clicks, purchases, mobile app use, and help desk interactions.
Bounce Rate: The percentage of people that visit a website and leave after only viewing one page.
Business Blog: A standalone website or section of a website that provides information about a company’s products or their industry in general.
Call-to-action (CTA):: Something offered to gain an immediate response or action. On a website, a CTA could be a prompt to sign up for an email newsletter or click on a link.
Click-Through Rate (CTR): The number of people who click on a hyperlink or advertisement and arrive at a destination website.
Conversion: The moment that the receiver of a marketing message acts on that message, like buying a product or signing up for a newsletter.
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO):: Using data about a visitor’s past behavior on a website to modify the site in various ways with the intention of increasing the number of visitors who perform a desired action, like making a purchase.
Content: A piece of writing, image, or video composed for a specific target audience, and published online with the intention of generating new customers.
Content Management System (CMS): A tool that helps to design, manage, and publish a website.
Content Network: One or more websites that allow advertisers to display content on their websites.
Cost Per Action (CPA): Online advertising payment model where the advertiser only pays when a specific action like a click, submit, or sale occurs.
Cost Per Sale (CPS): An online payment system where the owner of a website is paid per sale generated by the advertisements on their site.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM): All the strategies and tech tools a business uses to collect, analyze, and track customer relationships in order to improve its products and services.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software: Software that organizes your company’s relationship history with a customer or potential customer into one cohesive profile.
Data Management Platform (DMP): A tool that allows a business to collect and analyse data about people who visit their website or group of websites.
Dimension: One of the aspects that make up a customer like gender or income.
Drip Campaign: A process to gain new customers by delivering a series of emails over an extended period of time.
Dynamic Ad Creation: Advertisements built to change slightly based on the information known about the person who clicked on it.
Dynamic Content: Also known as smart or adaptive content. Dynamic content is information or images on a website that change based on the viewer’s previous interactions with the site.
Engagement Rate: A metric that analyses how effective a piece of content is by looking at how many clicks, likes, shares and other types of interactions it receives.
Gated Offer: A special deal offered to a website visitor, but they have to do something first, like provide an email address.
Geotargeting: When a website uses location data to customize a website based on the location of the viewer.
Google AdWords: A service provided by Google where businesses bid on keywords in order to increase their prominence on Google searches.
Google Analytics: Google’s free service that aggregates and interprets data about visitors to a website.
Impressions: The number of views a website receives.
Inbound Marketing: A strategy to attract new customers using content published on the internet like social media, white papers, or blog posts.
Indexing: The way search engines organize information in order to give a user meaningful results.
Key Performance Indicator (KPI): A piece of data that shows how well a business is doing in regards to its goals.
Keyword: A word or phrase that a potential customer uses when searching for a specific product or service.
Keyword Insertion: The strategy of replacing code in an website’s advertisement with keywords that trigger a web search.
Landing Page: The first website a visitor sees after clicking on a link, which is designed to pair with a certain marketing campaign.
Lead: An individual that has interacted with a company and left some of their information for the company to utilize, like email address or phone number.
Lead Generation: Identifying people who would potentially buy your product or service and getting them to the point where they actually do.
Lead Nurturing: The process of giving potential customers information that may sway them to make a purchase.
Lead Scoring: Ranking potential customers on a scale using a range of data like demographics, or the number of times they’ve clicked on a website.
Lead Source: The way a potential customer found your website, whether by word-of-mouth, social media, or a print advertisement.
Marketing Automation: Software that helps businesses automate processes like email campaigns, social media posts, and other marketing activities.
Metric: A measurable value used to assess the success or failure of a business campaign.
Multitouch Attribution: Determining the value of every touch point a business has with a lead or customer, whether it be email or social media.
Native Advertising: Promotional content disguised to be purely informational, which can come in the form of social media posts, and articles like advertorials.
Net Promoter Score (NPS): An index ranging from -100 to 100 that shows how willing a customer is to promote your product to someone else.
Off-Page Optimization: Factors outside of a website that increase its ranking on a search engine, like influencer mentions or backlinks from other websites.
Omnichannel: An approach to marketing that seeks to provide a seamless interaction with customers, whether on a laptop, smartphone, or in a brick and mortar store.
On-Page Optimization: The placement of strategic words in the code and content of a website that help to give the site a higher ranking on search engines.
Open Rate: The number of emails opened by potential customers in comparison to the number that were sent by a business.
Organic Search: List of search results on a search engine page not including those promoted by payment.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC): A model of internet marketing in which a business pays search engines each time one of their advertisements are clicked on by a potential customer.
Persona: An imaginary person who symbolizes your ideal customer.
Progressive Profiling:: Learning about a person, but doing it a little bit at a time, so you don’t scare them off with too many questions.
Quality Score: The metric Google uses to determine a website’s relevance and organic placement on search result pages.
Read Length: The length of time between someone opening and closing an email.
Remarketing: The act of delivering targeted ads to those who have already visited a website and taken an action or made a purchase.
Responsive Design: A website design that scales itself in response to the type of computing device from which it is being viewed.
SaaS: Software offered as a subscription service.
Sales Dashboard: Software that aggregates and displays sales information about your customers.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Strategies and tactics employed by marketers to attain a higher ranking on search engine result pages like Google.
Search Engine Result Pages (SERP): The list of webpages displayed by a search engine like Google after someone enters a query.
Segmentation:: Thinking of your customers as particular sets of people who have something in common.
Sender Score: A number between 0 and 100 that communicates the quality of the emails a company sends. The lower the score, the spammier the message.
Smart List:: A customer list made by an algorithm, or a list that automatically updates itself using filters.
Static List:: A lead or customer list you make that stays the same unless you update it yourself.
User: The ultimate consumer of a service or product, who may not always be the purchaser.
User Experience (UX): All of the emotions and attitudes an individual has while using a certain product or service.
User Interface (UI): The way a user interacts with a software application or website.