Do you want to grow your online business and get flooded in a sea of buzzing words? There are abundant internet terms that are useful to know whether you are a search engine marketer or just need to appropriately explain something.
In order to help you understand some of the terminologies used in the world of internet marketing, we have put together this comprehensive internet marketing glossary defining many of commonly used terms in this sector.
Now, let's take a glance on a list of some of terms from A to Z that definite online marketing and – more usually, the internet. You have to be aware of these terminologies to learn more about internet marketing and stay at the top of the game.
This is the evaluation method of testing two variables of a landing page, email, advertise or other piece of online content are plotted against each other to decide which one produces the highest conversion rate. A/B testing is a means to improve your marketing efforts.
Above the Fold is the area of webpage that can be seen without scrolling down. It is one of the most valuable parts of the webpage.
An approach to set the product or service price that is higher than what your competitors offer.
Adwords is an advertising effort from Google; which basically targets the use of keywords. Using Adwords, you can produce an ad and show up when the internet users search for a particular keyword which is relevant to your business.
Adsens is what website publishers and bloggers use to publish targeted Google ads on their website pages and earn money when visitors view or click the ads.
An online business model that put advertisers together to one source, who are looking for hosting advertisements in an efficient manner. Advertising network works like intermediary between publishers and advertisers.
It is a revenue generating model wherein website owners place adverts on website to draw the visitors to an affiliated company’s website, typically in the form of sales, clicks or registrations. Affiliate marketing will expand your sales network. Revenue is normally generated when a visitor either visits or buys from the website.
In general terms, analytics means the analysis of data to get insight information. Essentially, it is discovery of the measurement, collection and reporting of Internet data for making better informed marketing decisions.
This is a chain of computer programming rules, allocating an application to mine information from a service and use it in own application or in data analyses. APIs make it easy to get necessary data for offering solutions to customer problems.
This marketing term used to distribute software-based services and solutions over the network to individual users - or an entire enterprise. ASP allows businesses to outsource all aspects of their information technology needs.
The process of media market researching to plan deep tacking and provide a 360-degree view of how consumers engage and use multiple media platforms.
Stands for Business to Business marketing, where one business sells its products or provides services to another business rather than to the public. For example, a business deal between a manufacturer and a wholesaler or between a wholesaler and a retailer.
B2C (Business-to-Consumer) is used to explain a transaction that happens between a business and consumers. In such kind of marketing, consumers are the future end-users of the business’ products or services.
A pricing process in which a prospective buyer eager to pay for the certain product almost found under government and business markets.
Formerly, it was used as a kind of online diary by individuals, but now blogs are generally used by both individuals and companies as an online journaling platform for publishing relevant and search-optimized contents including news, tutorials, opinions, tips, images and other stuff of interest. By posting blog regularly, you can enhance website traffic growth as well as conversion rates and industry expertise.
A slang term, represents the world of online blogs and all things related to them. Blogosphere keeps bloggers interlink with one another and post on any topic that catches their personal interest.
Usually, during this phase where the new buying process leads reach to become new customers. Your leads will ask for a demo, a free consultation or price quotation - depend on what kind of business is going to close the lead.
In web analytics, the bounce rate is the percentage of people who leave the website after just visiting one page. They don’t click on anything or navigate any other pages. While in email marketing, the bounce rate refers to show the percentage of undeliverable emails. A high bounce rate is evidence of poor conversion rates.
A browser is a software or application that translate HTML, allocating to view webpage. Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer and Safari are top browsers to access the business websites.
It is a conference technique for market research that gives you the right solution at the right time. It stimulates creative thinking, generates new ideas, etc., through spontaneous involvement in discussion.
This marketing method establishes a unique identity of your business and its product through unique names, symbols, color and other distinctive measures. A good branding sets you apart from your competitors.
A technique that track your business cash flow. It helps you in identifying your startup costs - both fixed and variable - and determines your breakeven point to understand the economic impact of various price and sales volume scenarios on your business’s profitability.
An excitement and interest generated word or phrase that is used mostly to appear classy.
An important internet marketing technique that often emerges on webpage in the form of text link, button, image, or some type of web link to direct the website visitors on landing pages to eventually become a lead.
Stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart, are usually appeared on online registration forms to avoid fake sign-ups. This challenge-response testing system is appeared in the form of image comprising some ambiguities to confirm that your task is not performed by a computer.
It evaluates the number of the customers that you retain. The Churn rate is primarily for recurring revenue companies. To find out the churn rate, the number of customers that you lost during a certain time frame is divided by the total number that you had at the starting of that time frame. No matter what your monthly revenue is, if your average customer doesn't stay around long enough to at least break even on your customer acquisition costs, then you are sure in trouble.
CTR is used to evaluate the percentage of your audience that proceed from one fraction of your website to the next step of your internet marketing campaign. You can calculate the clickthrough rate by dividing the total number of clicks by the number of opportunities that people had to click
Content Management System allows users to add, edit and manage content, data or information of a website project without having HTML knowledge. With it, you can get multiple options and features to index and search documents and even signify keywords and metadata for search engine crawlers.
This ethical benchmark helps you to states the principles and expectations leading the behavior of members of the organization. The code of ethics maintains and develops your professional competence.
The most common method in which salesperson visit or call to the prospects for the first time without an appointment for a future meeting or offering a sales presentation.
Conversion rate measures the percentage of website visitors who completed an intended action on your web page, it is either completing a contact details form or purchasing your product.
CPA is an online advertising payment technique that allows advertisers to pay for qualifying action from a prospective customer. That means you will get paid whenever a consumer click on your affiliate link or visit your ads.
CRM is the methods and software allowing businesses to manage everything they do with their current and potential customers. It also keeps track on email, phone calls, faxes, and deals; schedule appointment and log in for every instance of customer service and support.
Stands for Cascading Style Sheets, CSS is a data system that used to gives your entire website its style and layout and separate them from the structure. It also lets your websites to acquire different screen sizes and device types.
Data entry means to obtain, record and maintain data, then retrieve and enter them into the computer or data-recording system by typing on a keyboard or scanning a document such that others can use it for evaluative purposes. The data may be in alphabetic, numeric, or symbolic format.
At this stage, you should be concerned on consulting a team of manufacturers or product development experts to establish the quality level of your product and services.
Domain name is an address of business website, which is formed as per the rules and regulations of the Domain Name System (DNS). In simple words, the name that you would enter in the search bar is called a domain name.
It is one type of the promotional price adjustments. Such adjustments happen at the point-of-sale for customers to meet certain criteria determined by the seller.
The term defines the consumer group which always eager to explore something new before others. They are passionate for product innovation that most consumers cannot concern. Even they also accept underdeveloped or pricey products for the opportunity to test new things. Early adopters are well known for providing word-of-mouth advertising.
This rate is charged by the media operators on basis of higher volume or frequency of placing advertisements on that particular media channel.
It is a well-known social media metric to depict the amount of interaction such as likes, shares, comments or else a piece of content receives. Your received interactions show you how much your messages are resounding with your fans and followers.
Ethics relates to the standards and ethical principles or values that generally govern the behavior of marketing profession.
Evergreen content means a piece of content that always be relevant and valuable for readers for a long period of time. In general, evergreen contents are high quality, everlasting, precious or definitive. These kind of contents are the best friend of marketer owing to the great SEO value they provide.
It is an online discussion group where visitors can participate in and comment on a specific topic.
The right or license that franchisee acquires to use a franchisor’s business methods and other business aspects such as proprietary knowledge, trademarks in order to sell a product and services under the business name.
Any variable, website quality and consumer behavior trend that declines the progress of your business sales cycle. The friction-causing elements consists of over flooded data on your website, dissonant colors, inappropriate website navigation menus, etc.
Geo-targeting is the practice of detecting a website visitor’s location to serve location-based content or advertisements. It can be used to target local customers through paid or organic search.
Also called No-Name branding, the Generic Branding is an ordinary brand type that essentially creates a brandless product offering product usually associated with food and other packaged goods. Such products are generally available at a much lower price than any brand name product.
This product life cycle phase takes place when sales revenue grows rapidly, the prices remain high and profit margins are at highest level. At this stage, more efforts are conducted for brand preference and loyalty.
It is a promise usually in writing, offered by a seller for its quality or durability of product or services. Guarantee is one of the most powerful commitments that you can make, especially for new companies. In other words, guarantees give you the rights that you expect and offer repair, or give you a refund or a replacement.
Guest Blogging means writing and publishing a blog post on someone else’s website as a temporary featured author. It helps to promote your personal and corporate brand image. Using such effective technique, you can easily generate awareness, but you have to be aware about Google penalty.
A hashtag is a way for you and your readers to join together on social media and have conversations about a particular topic, trend, theme or event. Frequently used on Twitter and other social media, hashtags let users to easily tag tweets, comments and even content with the hash symbol (#). Nowadays, businesses has kept their interest to use hashtag in marketing to participate in relevant conversations, draw attention of customers or spark new ones with their own hashtag campaigns.
It is a literal way for online marketers to show the percentage of people interacted with different parts of a webpage. Heatmap specify the on-page data analytics, using colored cells. This is quick way to improve your website by deciding which design elements are presenting best and which do not make an impact.
HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is a programming language used to create web pages. It defines the layout and basic structure of the website with a variety of tags and attributes. It has always been the fundamental language used to develop webpages.
A clickable link on webpage that you can click on to go to another document, page, or place within the same website.
Impulse buying means unintended purchasing. It involves an emotional reaction to the incentive objects like product, packing, point-of-purchase display, or whatever in addition to the acquisition act.
When you are promoting a business through online content like blogs, articles, videos, whitepapers infographics, etc to get prospects' attention, it is called inbound marketing. It becomes easier to find the company online, grab the attention of the audience, convert them into leads, then customers and analyze the process as well. If you align the content with your customer's interests, you can draw inbound traffic naturally that you can then convert over time.
A link coming from external website to your own website. It is generally used by search engines to help determine a website’s importance. A website that gets more inbound links can be highly ranked in search engines.
In simple terms, it is a simple way of displaying complex content visually in easy to understand manner.
It is a comprehensive planning process, used to brand and coordinate all marketing communication aspects like advertising, social media, customer relations, direct marketing. With Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC), business can create integrated experience for consumers to achieve the overall marketing objectives.
It is a first phase of the product life cycle when the product is launched in the market for initial distribution. At introduction stage, the organizations are mainly focus on creating product awareness, not on profits.
IP (internet protocol) defines a number to exclusively identify computers as a part of a network.
Jumble means a mix together and the jumble display means display a jumble of different brands' products on a single place, just like a clearance table. Such kind of practice at retail turns many businesses to create and offer their own store displays and arrange the product training in order to reduce the risk of inappropriately brand presentation.
It is a measurement used by businesses to track your business progress toward internet marketing goals, and evaluate your performance against business standard metrics. KPIs consist of daily sales, conversion rate and site traffic, competitive price trends, webpage visits, service call satisfaction, social shares, bounce rates, etc.
A word or phrase used in search engines to find relevant content. Using appropriate keywords, you can optimize the web pages using both on-page and off-page tactics.
This defines the amount of indexable keywords in a body of blog. It is usually expressed in percentage. Generally the keyword density for a keyword should be between 2 – 4%. Too high density can be penalized or Google can declare you spammed.
It is a comprehensive procedure to find new high-value search terms for your website and analysis for specific terms to target for the highest return on investment (ROI).
A public library of knowledge or data, used for information searching, collecting, managing, sharing and utilizing. Knowledge Base makes the communication simpler between both the customer and the organization. Users can also create their own knowledge bases using specific software applications.
This marketing term defines a group of consumers who avoid new updates and new product to accept. Laggards are mostly concerned with reliability, low cost and usually not paying attention on higher content.
Also known as the lead capture page, this page separates visitor from becoming a lead and acts like a gatekeeper of the conversion pathway of your business. It can be optimized to feature specific keywords or phrases for ranking in search engines and capture a visitor’s contact details. This page revolves around advertising campaigns, such as a webinar or an eBook and allows to capture visitor information in exchange for the valuable offer.
Lead means potential customers who are interested in a product or service in various ways, shapes, or forms. Generating leads is an important factor in the prospect's journey to becoming a customer. Lead generation tools includes landing pages, offers, forms and calls-to-action.
An aspect of SEO that generate inbound links for website from other websites and help a website rank more highly in search engine results. Blogging is a popular method of link building.
A long-tail keyword is a longer and targeted keyword phrases containing three or four words. It is simply a matter of developing effective communication between your company and the customers who are already looking for what you provide. Long-tail keywords help you get better search rankings, more qualified search traffic, and lower costs per click.
A procedure that divides the large market into different small market segments having more or less similar or related tastes, expectations and characteristics. The marketing segmentation always occurs before targeting, which helps you find customers that are interested in your business products and services.
Marketing Automation is a way to manage all marketing aspects and automate repetitive tasks using software tools. It is aimed to help marketers and organizations in improving marketing efficiency with multiple online channels, like websites, emails, social media platforms, etc. It works through automating certain time-consuming tasks and ensure that a usual content is being distributed to target audiences.
The term of marketing mix is related to the various marketing tactics and behaviors. It is a means to make important decisions about implementing a successful marketing strategy. Product, Price, Place and Promotion are important elements of marketing mix.
At this phase of the product life cycle, sales growth is going to slow down and the brand awareness continues to be strong in the market. Therefore, companies add more features and modify the product in order to give more shelf space to the product in competitive market.
Micro-blogging is a brief text updates that usually allows users to exchange short or small pieces of content in form of SMS, the Web, IM, email or Mp3. Twitter is the most common Micro-blogging site where users can microblog only 140 characters.
It defines the stage that keep your potential customers coming back for more information as they make the decision. Middle of the funnel typically provides in-depth white papers, case studies or e-books with specific purpose - essentially something that brings your business into the equation as a solution of assessed and qualified leads.
A mission statement defines a declaration of the overall ethics, purpose and basic needs of the company. Eventually, it helps to lead decision-making and clear the company's mission to customers, suppliers and the community.
Mobile marketing is a practice of optimizing marketing for mobile devices to allow businesses to communicate and engage with their targeted audience in an interactive and relevant manner. When marketing though mobile, you will not only drive business growth but also discover stronger consumer engagement.
A procedure to design and format a business website for wireless handheld devices such as smartphones. Having a website optimized allows the user to easily read and navigate from the small screens of their handheld which means that they can reach a decision faster. Most interestingly, now Google's algorithm also rewards mobile-friendly websites, so if your site is still not fully optimized for mobile devices, you have to make it first.
A term to be used for a person who is new in the world of internet and unaware about its convention.
A news feed means a list of continuous news updates. Users can get push updates for new update on a website by subscribing to particular website's news feed. Many social media networks, like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn are equipped with news feeds that show all latest updates from members.
It is also recognized as concentrated marketing. The term ''Niche Marketing'' refers to the combination of target market and specialized offerings. As targetable part of the market, it really helps to attract the right people at satisfying specific market needs with your marketing, positioning and branding.
No-follow link is an attribute which is added when a website does not want to pass search engine authority to other webpages. It can be allocated to the HTML element of a link. Such links are recognized by all major search engines, like Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. It helps to avoid any foul play and instruct search engines to ignore specific untrusted hyperlinks.
Aim to help marketers in lead generation. Offers are usually found behind a form on a landing page. You can create various types of offers, including demos, templates, eBooks, checklists, etc
On-Page Optimization is one type of SEO techniques that is applied to know how well your website’s content is offered to search engines. This helps you to get good search engine ranking and increase overall readability of your website. It contributes many factors including actual HTML code, meta tags, keyword placement and keyword density.
It defines your website’s position in the search engine results page. With Off-Page Optimization , you can effectively market your website, get ranked in search engines, get better branding for your business and survive in this competitive SEO world. Linking domains and social media are the most effective factors in off-page optimization.
A practice to locate certain job functions done outside a company rather than sending them to in-house employees. These days, outsourcing has become a common trend in IT sector. Businesses are often outsourcing when they require expertise or skills that they do not find in-house.
Outbound links are links that bring your site visitors to some other domain.
The number of times a single webpage has been visited by users or requested from a server. For example, if someone goes to your website and views 3 pages, then it means your website discover 3 page views. It will be helpful to marketers in analyzing their website.
An advertising technique, wherein an advertiser places an advertisement in some advertising venues like search engine, social media sites or websites, and pays when a visitor clicks on such ads. The PPC ads reveal an advertisement when a person searches for a keyword that is similar to the advertiser's keyword list. It is the most effective way to assess the cost effectiveness and success of your paid advertising campaigns.
This term refers to promotional method, in which an individual try to sell something to another in person.
Product Life Cycle (PLC) defines the life stages of the products, from introduction to growth or eventual decline. It can be used to forecast sales volume and profit margins for a new product at each stage of the product life cycle.
A set of all audio or video digital media files, that are published episodically on web to subscribers via RSS feed. Podcasts can be placed for playback on the user’s own schedule.
An entry point for browsing the World Wide Web sites, that delivers a wide range of resources and services, like search engines, e-mail, forums, online shopping malls and much more.
Press release is a dedicated content form intended to share information with journalists and the official position of company as an announcement or interested news story.
Refers the process approved by a business to decide what a customer will give up in exchange of getting value from a marketer’s product and services.
A practice to research and collect exploratory or specific data to answer specific issues or questions. It includes questionnaires, surveys or interviews.
This term is used to define marketing effort, which is planned to present products in the best possible light to others offering similar products and services in the marketplace and also in the mind of the consumer.
As an important component of the marketing campaign, promotion is used to draw consumer interest, or increase awareness to existing content or services. It generally represents strategies planned to communicate with a target audience.
The term defines a specific combination of four key promotional elements such as advertising, public relations, personal selling and sales promotion. Those are used as important tools to communicate with the target market and generate organizational sales goals and profits.
A storage space where distribution channel members control distribution needs on a temporary basis.
Acronym for Quick Response code. It is two-dimensional barcodes that can be only readable by dedicated QR barcode readers and smartphones. When you scan such code, you will be automatically directed to website. Its encoded information may be in text or other data. You can always discover it in black modules that set in a square pattern.
A contact information of a prospective customer who is interested in learning more about with the ability to purchase it. With qualified leads, a good conversion rate is assured and that rate required to generate a good ROI.
It is research approach that used to assess and evaluate information using statistical analysis that gives you an opportunity to dig deeper into the data and get insights you need to grow your business.
An innovative practice of designing a website, aimed to create websites that will provide users with the best possible viewing experience on a range of devices. This usually recognizes the device that your customer uses and automatically optimize the website that is responsive for screens of any dimension whether it is of smart phones and tablets.
The term research reliability is a research concept in which the data leads are collected for the test of repeatability and consistency. The research can be duplicated and can produce similar results, that's where such research concept can be effective.
This research concept defines the strength of the final results and establishes accuracy in question design.
ROI is used to evaluate the profit made on the initial investment. There are many ways to measure ROI, but dividing the net profit by the total assets is the most frequently used method. And the result is stated in form of a percentage or a ratio. With solid ROI calculations, businesses can concentrate on campaigns that deliver the highest return and improve them over time. It makes easy to set an ROI goal for your entire marketing budget and personal campaigns.
Also called a revenue funnel, sales funnel represents the sales process from initial contact to final sale. There are three stages: the top, middle and bottom. It allows a person to be aware of your company, learn more about it, and take a good buying decision which not only allocate you to track your ROI, but also develop better customer retention practices.
This term defines a prospective consumer who expresses an interest in your goods or services. The sales leads are normally generated through the referral of an existing customer, or a direct response to advertising or publicity.
The professional discipline of improving the volume of unpaid traffic to a website in search engines. An inbound marketer improves the website’s performance in search engines and makes the website easy to find by using on-page and off-page SEO factors.
Stand for search engine results page, SERP is the list of results (Web page title, linked page URL, a brief description and links to points of interest within the website) that a search engine display in response to a specific keyword or phrase query.
Short for “Small-to-Medium Business”, defines a business that have 10 to 500 employees
An integration of sales and marketing efforts that bring the BOOM to revenue growth plans and bottom line. To be ultimately successful, a good Smarketing should be done to make the most of new business opportunities.
Social media is an online platform used for social interactions. It is easier to publish and share content with individuals who may or may not be connected in real life. Popular social media networks include Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest that can be used for personal or business use.
A person or group who have an interest (a “stake”) or concern in actions, objectives and policies of the enterprise. Investors, suppliers, customers, employees are examples of primary stakeholders in an enterprise.
A well-designed plan that outlines how a product line or brand will reach its goals. In other words, strategy is a general guide on how to create, distribute and promote the product or service.
SaaS is an approach to deliver software over the web in the form of service. It runs on a provider’s servers. By Incorporating SaaS successfully, an IT department can contribute to the business success more directly than ever before.
It is nothing but just actionable steps or specific method that contributed in order to follow the established strategies.
The target audience is a process in which a marketing message or product are aimed to find out what type of people are interested in your business. It is a specific demographic of people. It helps to build brand awareness effectively and drive more conversions to your business website.
Also referred as the most important part of the sales funnel, top of the funnel is the first stage where you come into contact of your consumer. It usually involves a content offer to attract audience and convert them into leads.
A consideration that presented by seller to set your product or service apart from the competitors.
URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator. It identifies your webpages, images or documents on the world wide web. URL of business website should include business name to ensure that consumers easily find a business’ website when searching on web.
It defines experiences and behavior of users when they are interacting with a website or product. To improve the user experience, you have to think like a customer.
UI is a visible, graphical, face of a software program that control a various function of the software or hardware device. Designing user-friendly interfaces is a key component in web design and development. Menu bar, buttons, etc are embraced in user interface.
Also called Value prop, the value proposition is one kind of marketing statement that convince a potential consumer for particular product or service which will add more value or better solve a problem than other similar offerings.
To describe a piece of content that are positive uplifting, inspirational and goes viral across the web through sharing, the term of viral content is used. If you want to generate abundant traffic for your business, you have to better focus on practically useful content that turns on high awakening emotions.
This term defines a blog that includes video content.
VoIP is IP telephony term that defines a set of facilities utilized to manage the delivery of telephone calls over the Internet at low cost in a timely way.
A website is a location connected with a set of interconnected web pages on the World Wide Web. A website should be responsive to business developments, promising trends as well as meeting and exceeding customer expectations. A website is used to attract relevant website visitors, convert them into leads, and close leads into customers.
The number of people who visits a particular website. Initially, it was an all-important metric for measuring the success on the Web. Now, web traffic is the largest part of the equation traffic.
A whitepaper is a credible, highly researched, in-depth document intended on a specific topic that presents a problem and provides a solution. It also offers insights into the capabilities of a company and its products or services. In other words, these are the sales and marketing documents that attract or convince potential customers to learn more about or get their hands on product, service, technology or methodology.
A marketing method wherein the people share information about a product, service or promotion verbally. This is an inexpensive method but it leverages components of inbound marketing including content marketing, product marketing, and social media marketing.
A technique to explain a lead generating campaign. A workflow can also adjust contact properties on a lead record on the basis of certain conditions, or add a contact record to a certain list. No matter how you use it, workflows can be a very powerful method in an inbound marketing strategy.
XML (Extensible Markup Language) sitemap is a list of pages URLs available on your website structure. With sitemaps, the search engine webmasters can easily determine the structure of the site so they can crawl it smartly. It breaks down the website's information into increasingly particular subject areas.
A desirable element for an internet marketing campaign. Whenever you plan your campaigns with the x-factor, it becomes successful stirs that rise above their originally intended marketing reach.
Yield Management is a strategy of pricing that can be applied to examine and understand influencing consumer behavior to get the maximum profile from a consumable good.
It is nothing but simply a database element of the domain name system; which contains the complete details from IP addresses to domain names and mappings. Zone file can be easily modified by using text editors like EMACS, VIM, etc.