Digital Marketing 101: Glossary of Digital Marketing Terms

This post originally published on the General Assembly Digital Marketing Blog.
digital-marketing-glossary

1. Analytics – information resulting from the systematic analysis of data or statistics. In digital marketing, analytics is the information resulting from systematic analysis of data gathered from marketing activity such as email marketing, landing page A/B testing, or Google Adwords purchases.

2. Average order amount – the amount of all orders divided by the total number of orders; used in digital marketing to help calculate the necessary reach, along with CTR and conversion rate.

3. Banner ads – also known as “display ads”, these advertising units are images that advertisers place on known publishers’ websites in order to attract or re-attract their target audience.

4. Baseline – an established level of normalcy; in digital marketing, for example, the normal or regular number of unique visitors per day to a website.

5. Behavioral email – an email generated when a known user performs a certain action – such as completing a video – on a website, and the owner of the website then contacts the known user regarding that video as a follow up to the user’s behavior.

6. Blogging – from the term “web log”, in which a user actively updates a visible section of a website in order to inform or attract users and customer on a regular basis.

7. Brand – a business’s brand is the sum total of all its users’ and customers’ opinion of that business; a business can choose to intentionally shape its brand or allow the market forces to shape its brand.

8. Business model – an entity’s business model defines how the business creates its product or service, delivers the product or service to the intended audience, and then collects payment for the service or product from the intended audience.

9. Channels – a delivery mechanism; in digital marketing, a business’s message is delivered via one or more marketing channel such as email, social media, blogging, advertisements, etc.

10. Click Through Rate (CTR) – the percentage of the targeted audience that is exposed to the marketer’s message that click on the link provided in the message and land on the marketer’s web property.

11. Consistency – the importance of continuing with a course of action, such as blogging, in a regular frequency in order to repeatedly expose the intended audience to the marketer’s message.

12. Conversion rate – the percentage of unique visitors to a website that are “converted” into customers, users, or leads.

13. Delivery – when the good or service provided by a business is provided to and accepted by the user or customer; in digital marketing, also the receipt of a message from the marketer to a group or individual in the target audience.

14. Digital marketing calendar – a tool that provides for time-based structure and discipline for the digital marketer in planning, assigning, creating, and delivering content to the marketer’s target audience.

15. Digital marketing funnel – a visualization of the calculations that starts with the total universe of targeted audiences, then measures those who click on a link from marketing content, the click through rate (CTR), the conversion rate, total conversions, order amount, and revenue.

16. Distribution – the means by which a product or service is delivered to its end user or customer

17. Earned content – content not created by the marketer, but rather created and shared by fans of the marketer’s message to the fan’s social and other digital connections.

18. Engagement – in digital marketing, the term for user interaction with a particular piece of shared content: Likes, shares, comments on Facebook; RTs, replies, favorites on Twitter, and link clicks on all social media.

19. Facebook Ads – the program operated by Facebook that enables paying customers to use hyper-targeting via Facebook profile tags and traits to reach a certain specific audience via advertisements placed in the users’ timeline.

20. Frequency – in digital marketing, how often a task is performed; for example, the frequency of a blog post or twitter update.

21. Google Adwords – the program operated by Google that enables paying customers to use hyper-targeting via Google Search Engine Results Page (SERP) to reach a certain specific audience via advertisements placed at the top and right sides of the search results.

22. Google Keyword Planning Tool – a free tool provided by Google within the Google Adwords interface that helps users find and plan which keywords to target with their advertising campaigns

23. KPIs – Key Performance Indicators

24. Lifetime customer value – the total sum of all revenue estimated over the lifetime of a repeat customer; often used as a metric in evaluating the pricing and value of a SaaS business.

25. OODA loop – Observe. Orient. Decide. Act. A teaching tool originating from military training that promotes the use of a constant cycle of learning; in digital marketing, used to instill the use of hypothesizing, experimentation, data capture and measurement, and then re-stating a new revised hypothesis based on information gathered in previous experiments.

26. Owned content – content created or curated by the marketer in order to promote the marketer’s message to the target audience; owned content typically consists of blog posts and social media posts and images, but should also be applied to any message that proceeds out of the marketer’s company and into the target audience, such as email signatures.

27. Page views – the number of times a web page or set of web pages are viewed during a given time period.

28. Pages per visit – the average number of pages viewed by a single visitor during a given time period.

29. Paid content – content pushed out by the marketer via any paid means such as Facebook ads, Google Adwords, Twitter Ads, or banner (display) ads.

30. Persona – the ideal compilation of all the traits of the “perfect” user or customer for a marketer’s product or service.

31. Retargeting – the technology, driven by web browser cookies, that enables a marketer to continually put a digital message in front of a user who has visited that marketer’s web property.

32. Sales cycle – the time required for a sales conversion to be completed after the prospect initially becomes aware of the marketer’s brand or product.

33. Seasonality – a business cycle driven by calendar-based events during the year.

34. SEO – Search Engine Optimization – the practice of preparing a web property to be quickly, easily, and properly indexed by a search engine, usually Google.

35. SERP – Search Engine Results Page

36. Time on site – the average time that a website visitor remains active on a particular website.

37. Total reach – the total exposure (measured in web users or “eyeballs”) of an advertisement or piece of content.

38. Transactional email – automated email driven by a certain type of transaction on a web property; for example, an order or email subscription.

39. Twitter Ads – the program operated by Twitter that enables paying customers to use hyper-targeting via Twitter users’ profile data to reach a certain specific audience via advertisements placed in the users’ timeline.

40. Web copy – words that appear on a website that are aimed at the marketer’s target audience and represent the marketer’s brand.

Explore Digital Marketing At GA

Comments

Leave a comment

More from Kevin

  • Still using Google?!?

    Still using Google?!?

    Other than a specific “Image Search”, I no longer use Google to search for anything. I use Grok. If you’re not familiar with Grok, it’s the artificial intelligence engine produced by xAI, one of Elon Musk’s businesses. Grok is fed real time data via the “firehose” that comes out of X. Why Grok? Why not…

  • Simplify Your A/V

    Simplify Your A/V

    Your conference rooms’ A/V does not have to be complicated. You should not have to “Call IT!!” to come fix your conference room’s A/V system. Ever. So why do we hear over and over and over the following mantra: “Yeah, can y’all come have a look at our conference rooms? Nothing ever works. Completely unreliable.”?…

  • Learning to Rappel

    Learning to Rappel

    More Search & Rescue (aka “SAR”) training this past weekend. This time, it was all about rappelling. For some of you, rappelling might be your weekend go-to hobby. This was my 2nd time. We spend the weekend in north Georgia learning all the basics of rappelling. We learned all the knots: bowline, square knot, figure…

  • Where’s Your 3rd Office?

    Where’s Your 3rd Office?

    Where do you work when you’re on the road? Sometimes we work at home. Sometimes we work in the office. But some other times, we get to work from our “third office”! Sounds exciting, doesn’t it? OK, maybe not “exciting”, but it could be, depending on where you go. So, your home office has a…

  • IRL vs. Virtual

    IRL vs. Virtual

    Got 47 seconds? Please watch this Gary Vaynerchuk video on Instagram:https://lnkd.in/e7mMuk5S What matters most in the processes deep inside your organization? Speed, efficiency, and effectiveness matter in business. Gary Vaynerchuk suggests that those things occur best in person, in the office, and tells a very familiar story to back it up. The common story, at…

  • ATL CRE 2025

    ATL CRE 2025

    Earlier this week, CBRE announced the complete (CBRE already owned 40%) purchase of Industrious, bringing to light the new business segment within CRE known as “Building Operations & Experience (BOE)”. See Patrick Braswell‘s analysis here:https://lnkd.in/evCBPMBM At the end of 2024, just a couple of weeks ago, the following stats were published by Commercial Edge (link:…

  • “Full RTO!”

    “Full RTO!”

    So, now that we’re 2 weeks in to 2025, who has returned to the office full time? Amazon? Anyone? Beuller? We (TRANSCEND LV) visited a very cool space today, in which the IT staff is preparing for “full RTO”. They’re updating conference rooms from old tech to new, updating WiFi access points, and otherwise preparing…

  • What’s Your Home Office Setup?

    OK, now that Atlanta has recovered from our (first?) snow of the 2025 Winter, let’s talk home office setup. Full disclosure: my home office setup consists of the following items. * Windows laptop* Bluetooth mouse* Levenger Stanley Journal* Sharpie S-Gel pen* WiFi via Amazon Eero / AT&T internet I do my very best to print…

  • No Snow Days

    It’s gonna snow in Atlanta on Friday. Currently, my weather app says 5-6″ of snow from Friday at noon through Saturday morning at about 6AM. We’ll see. I always keep my expectations low, so I don’t get disappointed by just a few flurries. I. Want. Snow! Which brings me to the real point: WFH is…