Digital Marketing Terms Glossary

Whether you are a newbie at digital marketing or a veteran, marketing intelligence lingo may not always be at the tip of your tongue. The pace at which digital tools emerge and advance forces everyone to keep updating their vocabulary. We created this dictionary to help you keep track of all the terms every digital marketer needs to know.

Bookmark this page for reference and look up words when they pop up or you need to explain them to someone else. Find their definitions here, along with examples, informative resources, and actionable, pro tips.

Digital Marketing Glossary

Marketing Terms A- C

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301 Redirect
Some technical terms are critical for digital marketers to understand. This is one of them. When you move a page to a new URL, you need to instruct search engines such as Google and Bing on how to treat that move. A 301 redirect lets search engines know that you permanently moved your content to a new URL. Searchers will automatically be redirected. Search engines will add the new link to the index, and links pointing towards the old URL are automatically forwarded to the new URL, including ranking factors. You can see why this is critical for your search marketing.

302 Redirect
Very similar to the 301, and you need to know the difference. When using the 302 Redirect, search engines and browsers will treat the new URL as temporary. This has implications for SEO. Only use the 302 Redirect when you plan to go back to the original URL at some point. For example, when you are working on a redesign of the page, A/B-testing the page, or when you want your visitors to access a special offer page for a period.

404 Error
This error code indicates that the requested page could not be found by the server, even though the browser established communication with the relevant server. If one of your pages generates a 404 Error, you need to check what’s happening because there’s bound to be some technical error.

A

A/B Testing
An effective way to test and optimize your marketing content, also known as split testing. You compare the performances of two variations of the same web page, email, or any other content piece.

For A/B testing to be effective, only the element you’re testing should vary in version B from version A. This is the only way you can be sure which specific element caused your audience to respond differently.

Example:

Your landing page gets a lot of traffic, but the conversion rate is less than 1%. You suspect your CTA “SIGN-UP NOW” is weak. You create a second version, identical to the first, with the CTA “I want the early-bird discount.”

Send 50% of your traffic to the original version A and 50% of your traffic to the new version B and measure the conversion rate for, let’s say, the following two days.

If version B converts better, you send 100% traffic to version B. If not, your CTA is not the problem, and you need to keep checking and keep optimizing.

Example of A/B testing emails:

A/B Testing is extremely popular for testing emails. In this case, you would send your test emails to a small percentage of your mailing list first and analyze. For example, send version A to 10% and version B to 10%. The remaining 80% will later receive the version which performed better.

Again, only one element should vary. A/B-test your subject line, and then compare open rates. Or test your CTA copy by comparing the click-through rates and so on.

Above the fold
Everything visible on the screen the moment your page opens without scrolling is considered ‘above the fold.’ All content that becomes visible after the user scrolls down is not.

You knew that, but did you ever wonder why it’s called “above the fold”? The expression is rooted in newspaper printing. Printed newspapers are folded to leave only the top part of the front page visible. Only the headlines and stories “above the fold” are readable at first glance. The hottest news appears on the front page above the fold.

Ad Creative
For display ads and other visual advertising campaigns, you need to get creative. You design a banner, a video, an image, or audio. The files that hold the data to display these are your ad creatives. You add them to the display network when you set up your online ad. Another option is to store them in a creative library to be used in various campaigns.

In affiliate marketing, many companies prepare ad creatives and store them in a creative library of their affiliate network. When someone signs up to the affiliate program, they get access to the library.

Ad Exchange
An ad exchange is the centerpiece of programmatic advertising, which is an automated media buying method. You can imagine the ad exchange like a stock exchange, with display ad impressions being traded off instead of financial assets. Publishers are the owners of the ad space they put up for auction, and advertisers bid for impressions so their ads can be displayed there.

This happens through two additional platforms: the DSP, where the advertisers’ ads are uploaded, and the SSP, where the publishers’ inventories are listed. In the ad exchange, the advertisers’ ads and criteria for audience demographics get matched with the publisher’s audience. The highest bidder wins the impression. Find more definitions and in-depth explanations of programmatic advertising.

Ad Group
An ad group is a collection of ads that target the same keyword set. Each PPC campaign includes one or more ad groups. Ads within an ad group are somehow related.

Example:

You are running a campaign promoting a variety of protective face masks.

Your keyword is ‘face mask,’ and you create the following ad groups:

1. Coronavirus Face Masks
2. Protective Face Masks
3. Safety Masks

Each ad group targets the key terms’ variations, i.e., for the first ad group: corona face masks, face masks for corona, face masks against the virus, etc.

Ad Monetization
If you want to make money from your website or app without actually selling anything, this is one way to do it. Ad Monetization means publishing ads on your website, blog, or app to generate revenue. You basically provide space for others to place ads on your site, and whenever a visitor clicks on the ad, you collect your share.

Display networks, blogging platforms, and Social media platforms offer tools and features for ad monetization. It is specifically useful when you build and run an app because you can use in-app advertising methods to cover your costs.

Ad Network
Ad networks are the precursors to ad exchanges and were used for media buying in display advertising. A handful of ad networks, such as Google Display Network aka GDN, are still active. However, most have been replaced. One reason is that fraudulent ads were a common problem on ad networks due to the way they functioned.

Ad networks are basically resellers of inventory sold by publishers. On these platforms, publishers lost control over their inventory, and bad players had it easy. Ad exchanges emerged out of the need for greater control and fraud limitation.

Ad Relevance
A term formed in the paid search sphere. Both Google and Bing define ad relevance the same way: Ad relevance measures how closely related your keyword is to your ads. For your ad to rank well, it needs to be highly relevant to the targeted keyword. The same goes for the landing page.

Affiliate
An affiliate is “a person or organization that is in close connection or association” with another. This can mean many things. A marketer associates third-party marketing with the word. In digital marketing, affiliates promote someone else’s products or services and receive a commission in return.

Affiliate Marketing
A form of third-party marketing in which you let others promote your product or service in return for a commission. The commission is paid based on performance. In other words, if the efforts of the affiliate are successful, they receive payment.

Affiliates come in many variations, reaching from coupon sites to review sites, bloggers, and even email marketing. Not every type is suitable for your business. The right fit for your marketing is determined by your industry and business type and your specific marketing goals. Read our blog post on how to build a successful affiliate marketing strategy for more valuable information.

• Pro-Tip: With the Similarweb Marketing Intelligence tool, you easily monitor and evaluate your own affiliates’ performance. But that’s not all; you can also dig into your competitors’ stats, check how their affiliates perform and compare. This lets you spot opportunities and catch on to emerging trends. Use the insights to plan your next steps so you can stay ahead.

 

Affiliate Program
The method that determines how your affiliates market your brand and receive payment. Affiliate programs include rules about how to become an affiliate, advertise, and calculate the commission. Depending on the type of affiliate your company targets, you provide the creatives, the offers, or other instructions on how to present the brand.

The payment method is based on the type of advertising and its purpose. The most common payment schemes are pay-per-click (PPC), pay-per-lead (PPL), and pay-per-sale (PPS). There are other models to accommodate different affiliate programs. Find out more about how affiliate programs work and get examples of the best affiliate programs in our blog post about which affiliate programs are the best and why

Algorithm Update
Simply put, an algorithm is a sequence of instructions that a computer program follows to solve an issue. Search algorithms are the instructions a search engine follows to find results for a specific search query.

Google and other search engines try to improve their ranking procedure frequently, meaning they implement changes to their search algorithms. Large-scale changes are referred to as algorithm updates. They can significantly impact the way the search engine indexes your pages and can topple your entire SEO. So, make sure you’re on the ball with the latest updates.

https://x.com/searchliaison/status/1334521448074006530

Alt Text
Stands for “alternative text” and appears instead of an image that fails to load on the user’s screen. Each image on your website should have an Alt Text or Alt Description that accurately describes what’s on the image. An exact alt text that is related to the relevant keywords and content helps search engine crawlers do their work. This, of course, affects your SERP ranking. Alt Text is also used by screen readers to help the visually impaired understand an image.

Anchor Text
When you link your HTML document to another page, you do so by adding a hyperlink. The anchor text is the clickable text in the hyperlink. For SEO purposes and the readers’ convenience, the anchor text should include terms related to the page title or the keywords of the page that opens when the person clicks the link. In the blog post, you are reading right now, you see many hyperlinks, clearly distinguishable by the anchor text’s blue color.

ARPA
ARPA (Address and Routing Parameter Area) is a specific type of top-level domain in the Domain Name System (DNS) of the Internet, used only for Internet infrastructure purposes.

Originally ARPA was the acronym for the Advanced Research Projects Agency, an organization that developed a predecessor of the Internet called the ARPANET.

Attribution Models
A rule or set of rules according to which credit for sales and conversions are assigned to specific touchpoints in the conversion funnel. An attribution model could assign 100% credit to the last interaction right before the purchase, or the first interaction, or distribute credits across a number of touchpoints.

Audience
In the digital world, an audience can be described as part of the general public that gives attention to your content. Read a more detailed description in our Research Glossary.

B

B2B
Stands for Business to Business and refers to companies who sell or offer services and products to other businesses rather than individual end customers.

B2C
Short for Business to Customer and refers to companies who sell and market to individuals as end customers.

Backlink
When someone adds a link from their website to yours, it’s called a backlink, an inbound link, or an incoming link. When you link to an external site on your page, that site receives a backlink from you.

These links are significant for your SEO ranking. Sites with a large number of backlinks tend to rank higher for organic searches.

Banner Ad
An advertisement displayed on a webpage usually including an image and text. A banner ad is typically served by an ad network or display network and can be static or animated. It includes a hyperlink, and its purpose is to drive traffic to your website or landing page.

Bid
In paid search marketing, you place a bid on a keyword that you want your ad to rank for. Your bid is the highest amount you are willing to pay per click.

Bidding is also used in programmatic advertising. The advertiser uploads ad creatives to the Demand Side Platform (DSP) and books the display ad campaign. They then bid in the auction for impressions that take place on the ad exchange.

Bid Strategy
A bidding scheme in Google Ads designed for you to better target your goals. You can choose from 3 main bid types:

1. Pay per clicks
2. Pay per conversion
3. Pay per impressions

This helps you tailor your campaigns towards different marketing goals, such as increasing awareness, generating traffic or driving sales.

Blog
Everyone seems to have one these days. And for a good reason. Blog is short for “weblog”, a kind of journal in which people or companies share their thoughts, knowledge, experience, or activities in a chronological form. A professional company blog is a great way to demonstrate your expertise in a specific field, drive traffic, engage your audience, and improve SEO rankings.

Branded Keywords
A keyword or search term that includes a brand or product name. If a user types “Similarweb Analytics Tool” in the search field, this counts as a branded keyword. The searcher isn’t interested in any random analytics tool but intends to find a defined brand. That’s why brand searches are among the most important keywords in your marketing strategy.

If you are a well-known brand or have a unique popular product, using branded keywords can be highly effective in paid search.

You should also check your SEO ranking for key phrases that include your brand name. If someone else ranks higher than you for your brand name, you need to do some optimization.

Behavioral Marketing
Behavioral marketing is a marketing method that lets you target audiences based on their behavior and nurture leads using personalized campaigns. How does this work? We’ll try to put it in a nutshell.

The concept builds on audience segmentation and tracking of online behavior. You can segment your audience per demographics, level of engagement, purchase frequency, the average purchase amount, product category, or anything relevant for segmentation in your business. Once a lead is captured in your CRM, you keep tracking their online behavior.

Create content that matches each segment’s specific needs and interests. A defined action or series of actions by a lead functions as a trigger in your marketing automation and initiates your customized campaigns. You can also choose the form of engagement preferred by the leads per segment. This allows you to distribute highly personalized marketing messages to finely-tuned segments.

Sounds complicated? You’re right. This type of marketing involves a massive amount of data collection and continuous analysis. Even though the process is automated, setting up and maintaining it requires a lot of work and a high level of expertise. Behavioral marketing is only efficient when based on completely accurate data.

Bounce Rate
In Google Analytics terms, the bounce rate measures the percentage of single interaction visits to your site. The user ‘bounces’ back from the same page they entered without sending any additional trigger to the analytics server. In simpler terms, they did not move to another page, clicked a button, or watched a video. Find out more about the bounce rate in the Research Glossary.

Buyer Persona
An imaginary person representing your ideal buyer in terms of demographics, characteristics, and online behavior. Read more on buyer personas in the Digital Research Glossary.

C

Campaign
A sequence or collection of marketing activities aimed at achieving a definitive goal. In digital marketing, campaigns are usually created for a dedicated marketing channel, such as a social media campaign, an email campaign, or a paid search campaign. It’s even more effective to combine campaigns or create simultaneous campaigns with the same goal.

Common goals are to drive traffic to a specific page or site, promote sales of a particular product or product type, or increase brand awareness.

In PPC, a campaign consists of ad groups, each targeting different keywords, including various PPC ads and a landing page.

Churn
Also referred to as ‘customer churn’, is the percentage of customers that end a subscription, discontinue using your service or stop buying your products. Use analytics tools to measure your churn rate and keep an eye on it to prevent unpleasant surprises.

Here’s how you can calculate your churn rate: Divide the number of customers that dropped off during a defined period (i.e., a month or a quarter) by the number of customers you had at the beginning of that period.

For eCommerce, it may be valuable to add new customers to the calculation:

Contact Form
A contact form allows people to contact your company via a form. They enter their name, email address, and specific query or inquiry. Contact forms let you collect contact data and turn prospects into leads. There are two obvious benefits: one, you can track and analyze related data, two, you grow your mailing list for nurturing campaigns. Using contact forms also prevents spam emails or bot emails to your company’s mail server.

You can add fields to your contact form to collect additional information and also to help direct your prospect in the right direction (i.e., are they looking for customer service, do they want a price quotation, do they have a question about functionality).

A contact form can also be added to a marketing campaign to capture relevant leads.

Content
In digital marketing, content is anything that expresses an idea or a value, or transmits information to an audience of consumers. This can be done through written text and images or other media forms such as video or audio.

Content is the primary tool with which you reach your audience in digital marketing. The overall purpose is to drive engagement with your audience, educate your audience, achieve a good ranking on the SERP, and earn links to your site. For your content to work effectively, you should define a specific purpose for your various pieces. Choose the channels and content types to match that specific purpose.

Content Marketing
Content marketing is a digital marketing strategy based on creating and distributing content that is valuable and relevant to a specifically defined target audience. The idea is to provide a consistent flow of information to attract and retain your audience and drive profitable customer action rather than pitching a product or service. Read our blog post about content marketing and B2B content marketing to find out more.

Conversion
The dictionary defines it as “the process of changing or causing something to change from one form to another”. In digital marketing, it means transforming a prospect into a lead, a lead into a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL), or an SQL into a customer.

You define the specific touchpoint that performs the conversion. This lets you track and analyze success and Return on Investment (ROI).

Conversion rate is an essential metric to measure and is often used as a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) for digital marketing campaigns.

Cookie
We’re getting technical again. A cookie is a small text file storing and collecting specific data. In digital marketing, a cookie is placed with the user to collect information about their interaction with your site so you can track and generate further interaction. Cookies are essential for digital campaigns and analytics.

CPA (Cost Per Acquisition)
A standard payment model you can choose when you advertise on a display network or social media. Cost per Acquisition (CPA) is sometimes also called Cost per Action. In both models, a specific action, or a set of actions that lead to conversion are defined as the acquisition of a customer or a lead. In most cases, it will be a sale, a sign-up, an app download, or a form submission. You pay the network per each completed acquisition.

Cost per acquisition as a metric measures the aggregate cost of such an acquisition.

To calculate your CPA, use this formula: 

The model involves relatively less risk than the other models, is easier to calculate, and generally your best option for campaigns aimed at conversion.

CPC (Cost Per Click)
A term used in paid advertising. The amount you pay for each click on your PPC ad is referred to as Cost Per Click.

When you set up a paid search campaign on one of the ad platforms such as Google Ads, Bing Ads, or social media, you determine the maximum cost per click you are willing to pay. This is your bid on a specific keyword, which enters an auction each time someone types it in the search field. Together with your ad’s quality score and relevance to the keyword, the bid amount determines where your ad shows on the Search Engine Ranking Page (SERP).

The actual final CPC you will be charged may be lower than your bid, depending on your ad rank and the maximum bid.

CPL
An acronym for Cost-per-Lead. CPL is a digital marketing pricing model in which you pay for each lead generated by a campaign. You may choose this payment scheme for campaigns aimed at generating leads that you can then nurture through the funnel. Such a campaign includes a  sign-up form where prospects leave their name and email address. Each completed form counts as a lead you pay for.

CPM
Another pricing model in digital marketing. In this model, you pay for impressions. CPM stands for Cost-per-Mille, meaning you pay per thousand impressions. You probably figured it out; this model is used in awareness campaigns.

CPV
One more payment model you should be familiar with. CPV is an acronym for cost-per-view and is the default model for video ads. You pay every time someone watches 30 sec or more of your video or interacts with your ad.

CRO
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is the process or any activity to improve your conversion rate. Performance-based, digital marketing lives and thrives on tracking and analyzing data. Conversion rate is one of the essential metrics to measure. An improved conversion rate usually means you are closer to your marketing goals.

To calculate your conversion rate, take the number of conversions, and divide it by the number of total visitors during the same period. You can use this formula for your website:

For optimization, you will analyze the data related to the touchpoints leading to conversion and identify weak spots. CRO can include improving ad copy, adding elements to your site (pop-up, testimonials, video, chat function), removing distractions from a landing page or fields from a sign-up form, and more. Get tips on how to optimize conversion rate for ecommerce in our blog.

CTA (Call to action)
A Call to Action (CTA) is typically a clickable button. It receives its name from the text on the button, which calls the user to carry out a specific action, i.e., “Click Here” or “Subscribe Now”. The CTA links to a landing page, a sign-up form, or any other page. It can also initiate a download, activate a coupon code, and so on.

Sometimes, a section of text can also be a call to action when it tells the user precisely what to do. For example, a sentence such as “Sign up to get your free ebook on effective benchmarking strategies”, could be considered a call to action. It would either be followed by or hyperlinked to a sign-up form.

Clear, strong, well-paced CTAs are considered extremely powerful in digital marketing.

* CTR (Click-Through Rate)
This essential metric measures the ratio between impressions and clicks on your ad or CTA. It counts the total clicks, divides them by total impressions, and shows the percentage rate. As an example, if you had three clicks from 100 impressions, your CTR would be 3%.

Here’s the formula: 

Since your goal is to get as many clicks as possible, a high percentage indicates that your ad is performing well. CTR is also an important factor in PPC because it impacts your quality score and, in turn, how much you pay.

Marketing Terms D-F

D

Dashboard
A marketing dashboard displays data and KPIs to help you monitor the performance of your marketing activities and campaigns. You can view key metrics in real-time data at a glance. The dashboard lets you gauge the overall level of success and pinpoint areas you need to analyze by going deeper into the data provided by your analytics tool.

Demographics
The analysis of parameters defining visitors to your website. Demographics as a website metric include age, gender, location, and much more. Find additional details in the Digital Research Glossary.

Digital Marketing
A broad term that embraces all marketing that uses digital devices, utilizing digital channels such as search engines, display networks, social media, and email. Digital marketing also involves marketing analytics tools that monitor the activity and performance of the various channels.

• Pro-Tip: Most analytics tools provide data from your own website and channels. With the Similarweb Analytics tool, you can also monitor your competition, get valuable industry benchmarks, and identify emerging trends. This lets you better assess your marketing position and discover growth opportunities.

Direct Traffic
In Google Analytics, direct traffic includes:

• Traffic that reaches your site as a result of someone typing your URL into the browser.
• Traffic of which Google has no information about how it reached your site.
• Traffic of which Google cannot identify the channel or source.
• Traffic that comes from sources that have been configured to be ignored.

Display Advertising
A form of digital advertising that makes use of banners or other visual media and is distributed through a display network to third-parties.

Display advertising is a form of push advertising that targets specific users. Depending on what you aim to achieve, you can choose the parameters for targeting. One option is to place your display ad on a particular website and drive traffic to your site.

Another possibility is to have the display network choose the relevant sites your ad relates to (contextual advertising). This would be a good choice for raising brand awareness. You can also use retargeting and display your ad to people who have visited your site before. This method can lead to an increase in conversions and sales.

Display Network
A digital network that distributes and displays your ads. The largest is Google Display Network (GDN), with over two million websites on which your ad can be displayed. Additional networks include other search engines, such as Bing and Yahoo, social media platforms, and dedicated display networks.

Domain
“A territory over which dominion is exercised”. On the Internet, it refers to the section of the web, which is under your authority. One could say, it’s a piece of online real estate under your control. The moment you buy the rights to a domain name, you control all pages under that domain name – that’s your domain.

Domain Authority
A search engine ranking score that estimates the likelihood of your website ranking high on a SERP. There is a commonly used scoring system ranging from 1 – 100, the highest number represents the highest probability of ranking.

The scoring is based mainly on your linking data. That’s because Google and other search engines view sites with many backlinks as an authority on a certain subject. A large number of high-quality backlinks will generate a high domain authority score.

DSP – Demand Side Plarform
DSPs are critical in programmatic advertising. Advertisers use this platform to upload their ads and book their campaigns. The campaign settings include criteria for target audience demographics and publisher or ad space.

Duplicate Content
Here’s Google’s explanation: ”substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar.” To put this into simpler words: when the same or very similar content appears in more than one location on the internet, it’s considered duplicate content.

Why does Google mention this at all? Duplicate content makes it hard for search engines to determine which page is more relevant for a search query and how to rank them. Content on each of your web pages should always be unique.

E

Email Marketing
A marketing method that uses emails to promote a brand or product. The primary goal is to engage and help your prospects move through the conversion funnel. Email is one of the most effective tools in marketing.

Lead-nurturing campaigns typically include segmented and personalized emails distributed to various mailing lists. Your lists are based on audience demographics and lead lifecycle. The content and sending sequence are triggered by lead behavior.

Marketing automation software provides the tools to set up complex streams and schedules for effective email marketing strategy.

Engagement Rate
The metric shows the overall level of engagement with your social media account, website, or app. The calculation for social media is simple. Engagement rate counts the likes, shares, and comments and divides their total number by the number of your followers (See here how engagement rate is calculated in Similarweb platform). However, to determine your website or app’s engagement rate, you first need to define actions that count as engagement for each relevant source.

F

Featured/Rich Snippet
Featured Snippets are selected search results that Google displays at the top of the SERP. A short text excerpt is pulled from the page and displayed as a snippet in a text box below the ads and above other organic search results. It contains a highly relevant answer to the search query.

Rich Snippets are specific search results displayed in a visually more appealing way than regular organic results. They also include additional valuable information in addition to the page title, description, and URL.

Frequency
In digital marketing, frequency refers to the number of times your ad is displayed to a unique user in a set period. The reason to measure frequency is that users are more likely to click on an ad after they have seen it several times.

Marketing Terms G-K

G

Google Analytics
Google Analytics (GA) is a free web analytics service offered by Google. You can track and monitor website traffic and generate reports about traffic quantity and quality. GA provides the basic metrics needed to understand the performance of your website. For more in-depth data, add more advanced analytics tools. Similarweb provides the most accurate and comprehensive data set of website traffic analytics.

Google E-E-A-T
If you read all the definitions so far, you’re probably ready for a snack break. Sorry to disappoint you, but Google E-E-A-T has nothing to do with eating.

The letters stand for expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness and originate in Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines. This nearly 170-pages-long document was published in 2013 (and updated many times since) to explain how Google assesses pages. The document defines each of the terms in detail and explains how they are evaluated individually and in conjunction.

The E-E-A-T guidelines are particularly relevant for sites that include YMYL pages. YMYL stands for ‘Your Money, Your Life’ and refers to page types or topics that could potentially impact a person’s future happiness, health, financial stability, or safety.

Google Keyword Planner
Part of the services offered by Google. The Keyword planner helps you research keywords and find the right keywords to target in your search campaigns. The tool is basic, and there are many additional software options to get more keyword data and ideas. Try Similarweb’s keyword research tool, including a keyword generator.

Google Search Console
Another free service by Google. This was originally called Google Webmasters and includes tools that allow webmasters to check indexing status and optimize their websites’ visibility. Google Search Console lets you measure, monitor, and optimize your search results on Google and fix issues.

H

H Tags
Tags in HTML are snippets of code that determine how content is displayed in your web browser. H tags refer to headings. There are six levels of headings, with H1 being the highest and H6 is the lowest in the hierarchy.

H tags help search engine crawlers determine the topic and subtopics of your content. They should include your main keywords and closely relate to the content that follows. Make sure to use only one H1 in your web content to ensure search engines can identify the main topic and index your page correctly.

Hashtag
A way to label content and make it searchable in social media. The hashtag (pound sign) in Twitter and other social media platforms turn the adjacent word into a searchable link. This lets others easily find your content according to the keyword that follows the hashtag.

Hyperlink
A link from a webpage to another file, page, or location. The hyperlink is typically embedded in the text when you want to refer your reader to a source of information or suggest a related article. It can also be an image, a graphic, or an icon.

I

Impressions
Impressions are a significant metric in digital advertising. It reflects the level of exposure your ad receives. Each time your ad appears on a user’s screen, it counts as an ad impression. For awareness campaigns, this can be highly significant. The payment model CPM is based on the number of impressions.

You can also monitor impressions for your website. When the URL of your webpage shows on the search engine ranking page (SERP), it means your website had an impression.

Inbound Marketing
A marketing methodology aimed at drawing customers to your site, brand, and products, rather than reaching out to offer and sell.

Inbound marketing uses content marketing, SEO, branding, social media, and other techniques to draw attention and provide value to potential customers.

The method is based on the philosophy that education, teaching, and engaging your audience leads to more loyal customers than pitching products for sale.

Inbound marketing is a relatively new form of marketing leveraging digital tools and replacing (or supplementing) the traditional outbound marketing methodology.

Influencer Marketing
This might be the most fashionable item in our entire digital marketing dictionary. Influencer affiliate marketing is a popular form of referral-marketing, in which a person perceived as an authority promotes your product or service.

Influencers are individuals who have gained a reputation of being knowledgeable and reliable in a specific field, based on their experience, expertise, or status in the industry.

What makes them interesting for marketers are their large audiences. Influencers can be celebs, industry leaders, professional experts, or merely famous contributors on social media.

Getting an influencer to advertise for you allows you to reach their audience in addition to yours.

Internal Links
A hyperlink that connects to another page or object on your website. Links to locations outside of your domain are called ‘external links’.

Internal linking is vital for SEO because it helps the search engines identify related pages and better crawl your site.

IP Address
Short for Internet protocol address. The IP address is the address of your computer on the internet. It’s a numeric label assigned to each device that is connected to the network. Depending on where you login from, the IP address changes.

K

Keyword
Keywords are the words and phrases that link your content to a search query. For the search engine, a word or group of words that someone types into the search field are the keyword to finding the pages that are closest related to the query.

As a marketer, you need to make an effort to identify the terms your audience uses to find you. These will become the keywords you target in your SEO and paid search campaigns.

Keyword Comparison
During your keyword research and analysis, you often need to compare two or more terms side by side to evaluate their usefulness for your SEO strategy. Which exact term will generate the best ROI for your PPC campaign? Which specific keyphrase does your target audience use to find your brand or product?

The keyword comparison metric takes the manual workload away and displays the relevant keywords and the related key metrics in one view so you can set them against each other.

Note that Similarweb is the only keyword gap tool that can provide this level of data granularity. Google Trends and other keyword research tools do not differentiate between keyword variations or synonyms.

Keyword Difficulty
Also referred to as keyword competition, keyword difficulty is an essential metric to consider in your keyword strategy. Keywords with high competition are more difficult to rank for than keywords for which there’s little competition.

Determining the level of difficulty helps you select the best keywords for your SEO strategy. Examine additional metrics such as search volume, search visits, and zero-click searches to develop a paid search strategy with high ROI.

Keyword Gap
Keyword Gap is a significant metric for keyword analysis in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and is offered by all significant keyword research tools. It measures the keyword discrepancies between your and your competitors’ sites.

Popular tools compare the ranking and show you terms for which your competition ranks higher than you. Similarweb also shows you the traffic each site receives from the keyword. This allows you to assess the keyword’s value to a site more accurately because it doesn’t stop at the SERP (Search Engine Results Page). You can see if the high ranking also results in high traffic volume.

The keyword gap tool enables you to find new keyword opportunities based on the keywords that drive more traffic to your competition and optimize your content accordingly. You can use it to analyze how your audience searches and use it as inspiration for new content ideas.

Keyword Research
The process of finding the terms people type into the search engine to get a specific result.

Keyword research is critical to optimizing your content for search engines. The goal is to understand which terms searchers use to find your brand or products and then optimize your content for these keywords. Both your SEO and PPC strategies are built around keywords.

Keyword Stuffing/Density
Content that’s jam-packed with the same keywords can harm your search ranking and even lead to a penalty that will cause your page to be removed from the SERP. This is referred to as “keyword stuffing”. Search engine algorithms are smart enough to realize it’s unnatural and an attempt to manipulate search results.

The recommended keyword density on a page is 2%. You can use this formula to calculate keyword density in your content:

Knowledge Graph
The knowledge graph in Google is the database that serves Google’s knowledge panels.

Knowledge Panel
A box of information displayed on the right side of a SERP. Knowledge panels provide an overview of the information available on the topic a searcher is looking for. For example, if you search for a famous landmark, let’s say the Berlin Wall, the knowledge panel dishes out images and the most searched information, such as history, significance, date built, date destroyed, etc.

KPI
KPI stands for key performance indicators. These are used to evaluate progress towards specific business goals. As a digital marketer, you set goals related to awareness, conversion, engagement, etc. Set achievable, measurable goals, and choose the relevant representative metrics.

Example:

Holidays are coming up and you are starting dedicated campaigns aimed at conversion. One KPI could look like this:

• Increase overall conversion rate by 0.5% till Dec 26th

Or

• Reach a conversion rate of 3% for holiday campaigns by the end of Dec 2020

All you need is to monitor the conversion rate in your analytics tool.

There are far more complex KPI for digital marketers.
To reduce marketing spend, you would set several KPIs, one of them for customer acquisition cost. Something like:

• Reduce customer acquisition cost by 10% till the end of Q1 2021.

For this, you have to measure all costs related to customer acquisition and divide that by the number of acquisitions. Then keep monitoring.

Marketing Terms L-O

L

Landing Page
The page someone lands on after clicking on your PPC ad. Landing pages are also useful in email campaigns or other digital marketing campaigns. The sole purpose of this advertising asset is to persuade the visitor to click. A landing page includes marketing copy, a visual element such as image, video, infographic, animation, and a CTA.

Everything is geared towards conversion, which could be a purchase, a sign-up, a coupon code, a download, a demo request, and more. A landing page lets you collect contact information and capture leads. That’s why it’s also called a Lead Capture Page.

Last Touch Attribution
An attribution model in which the last touchpoint before conversion is credited with the purchase. Last touch attribution is the default attribution model in Google Ads.

You should evaluate whether this model is right for your type of advertising. If the buyer journey includes many significant touchpoints, it might be unfitting to ignore previous interactions.

For affiliates, this model can be problematic. You may be working hard to get prospects’ attention at an early funnel stage, but unless they convert immediately, someone else gets the credit.

Lead
In sales and marketing, a lead is basically a known potential customer. When you have some information on a prospect or established a way to connect, a prospect turns into a lead.

As a marketer, it’s your job to provide the lead with promotional material and develop a relationship. This is referred to as lead nurturing. Your marketing automation tool can help  nurture your leads and implement a lead scoring system that evaluates readiness to make a purchase. At this point, they will be sales qualified (SQL), and you hand them over to your sales team. This process is relevant mainly for B2B companies.

Lead Capture
Lead capture refers to the activity of turning an unknown potential customer, a random site visitor, or social media follower into a lead. It means collecting and recording the prospect’s details in the right place in your CRM and adding the newly captured lead to the appropriate campaigns and segments.

Lead Form
The part of the landing page where leads fill in their details. A lead form usually includes name, email, and maybe other contact information.

You can ask for additional data necessary to assign them to a segment and send customized marketing campaigns. However, be careful not to overwhelm your potential lead with questions. Also, privacy is a sensitive issue, and you don’t want to scare anyone away by being too nosey.

Lead Generation
We’re not done talking about leads. Lead generation is marketing’s number one job in digital marketing. It encompasses everything you do to stimulate interest and curiosity in your product or service with the goal to create and enhance your sales pipeline.

Lead generation also includes the measuring and tracking of the number of leads you produce. After all, you want to show success.

Take it a step further, check which campaigns generate more leads than others or which marketing channels yield higher lead quantities. Use the data to optimize your marketing activities.

Link Building
SEO professionals will either get excited or stressed when hearing about link building. It’s a crucial part of every SEO strategy as it functions as the infrastructure for search engine crawlers.

Internal links connect your website’s pages; external links lead to pages outside your website. Each link type plays a critical role in SEO.That’s why every individual link needs careful planning and evaluation.

And then there are backlinks—links from other locations to your site—over which you have no control. However, by establishing the right connections and partnerships, you can influence their quality and improve your ranking chances with Google.

Link Profile
Closely related to the previous term. Link profile refers to the characteristics of backlinks, also called inbound links. Google examines the sites they come from, the anchor texts, and the way links were acquired. An ideal link roots in a website with high authority and was established voluntarily. Such inbound links will generate a favorable link profile for your site and improve your ranking

Link Velocity
Keep that thought. We are still discussing link building. Link velocity refers to quantity and speed, while the link profile relates to quality.

As soon as your site is life, others can start linking to you. Link velocity is the rate at which the number of backlinks to your site increases. If too many other pages link to you too quickly, Google gets suspicious.

Local SEO
Optimizing your site to appear in relevant local searches is called local SEO. If you run a local store or provide a local service, you need to get found by people in your area. Local SEO calls for different considerations, such as mentioning your town’s name in your content, defining the geographical reach, and analyzing traffic according to location.

Long Tail Keyword
It would be more accurate to call them long-tail key terms because they consist of several words that specify or characterize the core keyword. The tail of words can either appear before or after the main keyword.

Long-tail keywords have a lower search volume but are very helpful when targeting specific audiences or search queries. Make sure to research which combinations of words and phrases people type into the search field, group them, and incorporate them into your keyword strategy. Identify how people use your primary keyword in voice search which is gaining popularity. Here’s where long-tail keywords are most often used.

In this blog post, you’ll learn everything you need to know about long-tail keywords. As a bonus, you can download our keyword research template that will help you group your keywords effectively.

• Pro-tip: Use Similarweb’s keyword research tool to find trending long-tail keywords in your industry and single out the most relevant for your business.  

LTV
An acronym for Lifetime Value. In digital marketing, customer lifetime value serves as a revenue metric. The idea is to estimate the overall revenue you can reasonably expect from a customer. To achieve this, first calculate the average value per purchase per customer, the number of purchases per average customer, and the average time period people remain your customers. Next, multiply these, and receive the average LTV.

For growing companies, customer LTV is among the must-have metrics. Measure both customer acquisition cost (CAC) and revenue per customer, then determine how long it takes to retrieve your investment in customer acquisition.

M

Marketing Automation
Refers to software that automates marketing processes. Marketing automation has proven to be incredibly effective in email marketing but can also manage social media marketing and ad campaigns.

Automated marketing processes don’t just make your life as a marketer easier; they also improve efficiency and results. Automation tools enable you to personalize the content on landing pages and emails per segment and customer. You can capture leads, and manage lists and lead scoring. The software also provides tracking and reporting to help you gauge the outcome of the different efforts.

Marketing Funnel
Also known as sales-, purchase- or conversion funnel. It visualizes the journey someone takes from being a prospect to becoming a paying customer. Read more in the Research Glossary.

Multi-Touch Attribution
This attribution model is gaining popularity, especially for SaaS and mobile apps, where the customer journey includes multiple touchpoints. In multi-touch attribution, the credit for a purchase is divided among several touchpoints, rather than being assigned to the first or the last interaction point.

Multichannel Marketing
A marketing channel is the medium used to reach your potential customers. In the digital world, they include your website, social media, email, affiliates, display ads, mobile, and any digital channel that can be leveraged for marketing purposes.

With so many options, why limit yourself to a single marketing channel? Multichannel marketing means sending the same offer or value proposition through several marketing channels. Using multiple channels allows you to reach a wider audience and get more exposure.

Research which channels are most effective in your market and for your business. Customize the campaign for each specific channel. Also, analyze what differentiates the audiences per channel in terms of demographics and online behavior.

For example, you could discover that a specific age group is more responsive to email marketing and that they take longer to reach a purchasing decision than others. Adapt your email content and the frequency of messages accordingly.

N

Non-Branded Keywords
Any keyword that doesn’t include a specific brand or product name or a variation of it. Optimizing your website for non-branded keywords that are related to your type of business, service, or product is critical for having an effective SEO strategy.

This is particularly important if your brand isn’t well known in your industry yet. People are not likely to type your brand name, and you need to beat the competition for non-branded keywords.

Generally, there’s significantly higher search volume and competition for non-branded keywords than for branded keywords.

SEO relies almost entirely on non-branded keywords and should be based on meticulous keyword research.

• Pro-tip: Use Similarweb’s advanced keyword research tool to find the keywords with the highest potential for you. Examine your and your competitors’ traffic. The tools lets you identify the keywords that generate the most traffic in real time and if they are on the up- or down trend. Differential between paid and organic search and much more. See what Similarweb’s keyword analytics tool can do for you.

O

OOH
It’s not an outcry, but an acronym for ‘out of home’. It pertains to any form of advertising that reaches consumers outside of their homes. Mobile devices count as part of a home, so digital online marketing isn’t part of it.

Why are we including OOH in a digital marketing dictionary if it relates to traditional billboard advertising and posters at bus stops or park benches? Glad you asked.

Here’s the thing, digital marketing is beginning to invade outdoor advertising spaces and turning OOH into DOOH (digital out of home). Sure, digital advertising screens are nothing new, but Ad-Tech companies are now developing ways of geofencing, tracking, retargeting, personalizing, attribution, and measurement for this type of advertising.

Now is the time to go: Ooh! Programmatic advertising isn’t going to be limited to online space. The future of advertising promises to get exciting.

Organic Keywords
A keyword that yields organic traffic. Any keyword that drives organic traffic to your site is referred to as an organic keyword.

For most websites, organic makes up the highest share of website traffic – and is a clear indicator of your product’s/service’s relevance to actual search intent. Therefore, organic search terms are a major traffic generator to your site, and your SEO strategy builds around it.

Keywords used in PPC are referred to as paid keywords.

Outbound Marketing
A form of marketing that reaches out to the audience and offers something with the goal to sell.

Basically, all traditional forms of marketing fall under outbound marketing: TV and radio commercials, printed ads, flyers, cold calling or emailing, telemarketing, or any form of marketing where the viewer or listener does not request anything but receives an offer anyway. Pop-ups, banners, and display ads also are a form of outbound marketing if they pitch a product or service.

Outbound marketing has taken backstage to inbound marketing in recent years. The argument is that consumers are fed up with being disturbed and distracted by ads and invasive marketing techniques.

Marketing Terms P-T

P

Page Views
According to Google, a pageview is an instance of a page being loaded (or reloaded) in a browser. In other words, each time someone opens a page in their browser. Read more in our Research Glossary.

Paid Keywords
A keyword you use in paid search such as your PPC campaigns.

The keywords you target in your paid search campaigns usually differ from those you target through SEO. This is because the keywords that generate paid traffic are not the same that drive organic traffic. These are called organic keywords.

It’s critical to differentiate and carry out dedicated keyword research so that you can build your paid search strategy on the right keywords.

Pay Per Click (PPC)
A popular online advertising model that uses keywords to drive results. As the name suggests, you pay each time someone clicks on your ad.

PPC advertising is highly competitive and extremely dynamic. Marketers use PPC marketing to generate traffic, increase brand awareness, and sales through search engines.

You can think of it as an online keyword auction. The highest bidder receives the highest rank on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page), provided their ad is relevant and of high quality. You pay only when a searcher clicks.

It’s popular because you control your ad and your ad spend. PPC brings quick results that are easy to track and measure. Read how to get started with PPC and be successful in our blog.

Programmatic Advertising
The next generation of display advertising. Programmatic advertising uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to buy ad space and place ads in front of the right people in real-time.

Here’s what happens in a fraction of a second when a user clicks on a website: the ad impression is put up for auction, advertisers place their bids, the highest bidder with the highest relevance and most cost-effective offer wins the space, and the ad is served.

Sounds like fiction? It’s already a reality, and as a marketer, you should start getting familiar with programmatic advertising. The method promises better ROI for advertisers and publishers alike. Read all the details in our blog on media buying and what it really means.

Publishers
In digital marketing, publishers are the people or companies who advertise your product with their resources in their digital space. We’re not talking about the publishing network, which only provides the infrastructure for the publisher.

The term publisher is mainly relevant in affiliate marketing. The affiliate publishes your ads or other promotional content and collects a commission when the campaign yields results.

Affiliates can be advertisers for their own product and simultaneously be publishers for someone else’s. They can be bloggers, review or comparison portals, news sites, and so on.

Q

Quality Score
This is Google’s way of rating the quality of your PPC ads and keywords and their relevance to the landing page. A high quality score can bring down your actual cost per click.

The quality score considers these components:

• Click-through rate
• Relevance of keywords to the ad group
• Landing page relevance and quality
• Relevance of ad text to keyword and landing page
• Historical performance of your account

Query
The actual phrase a searcher types into the search field. Researching which exact queries people use to find your product or brand is critical in matching the keywords you target and developing successful SEO and PPC strategies.

See which synonyms people use and if there are recurring misspellings. Keep in mind that people record entire sentences with voice search. Find out what they ask and target these long-tail keywords.

R

Reach/Reachability
Reach refers to the size of the audience that you are reaching with your advertising. Reachability refers to the size of the audience you can potentially reach. This includes your email subscribers, social media followers, and other direct customers.

Referral Marketing
In referral marketing, companies incentivize existing customers to invite their friends, family, or social connections to become new customers. The seller offers a reward to existing customers when they bring a friend who makes a purchase. Typically the reward is a sort of discount in the form of a coupon or another benefit.

Referral Traffic
The traffic that is referred to your site from an external source. Whenever someone reaches your site by clicking on a hyperlink on another website or social media, the search engine recognizes it as referral traffic.

Referral traffic can come from an affiliate, a blog, a forum, a directory, a social media network, or an email (if adequately tagged).

Partnering with other sites helps you increase the amount of referral traffic, rather than relying on search and direct traffic.

Retargeting
A type of campaign in which you target website visitors that didn’t convert. Display ad networks offer this option to recapture potential leads or customers and increase conversion rate. It lets you place customized ads in front of people who visited your site, clicked an ad, or abandoned a shopping cart and vanished.

Retention Marketing
Retention marketing targets existing customers. Its purpose is to turn them into loyal, returning customers who keep coming back for more.

Successful retention is usually a joint effort of marketing, sales, and customer service teams. This includes campaigns that aim at up-selling and cross-selling. Simple engagement campaigns are just as significant, though.

ROI
Stands for Return on Investment and measures the profit or loss generated from an investment. A high ROI indicates a high yield relative to the investment. In marketing, the metric serves as a performance indicator for your campaigns. In our Research Glossary you can find more information.

RTB – Real Time Bidding
Real-time bidding is the automated auctioning process that happens in an ad exchange during programmatic advertising. It also involves the DSP (Demand Side Platform), where advertisers upload the ads, and the SSP (Supply Side Platform), where publishers list their inventory.

S
Search Engine
Any software system that searches and identifies content on the web related to a specific search query. Examples are Google, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, Baidu, and more.

Search Intent
Every searcher has a definitive motivation for searching. Are they curious? Do they need an item? Are they lost?

Search intent or user intent refers to the motivation that drives the user to carry out a particular search on the web. Google aims to identify the motivation before displaying search results to ensure they are most relevant. The main types of keyword search intent are informational, transactional, commercial, and navigational.

When developing an SEO strategy, be sure to consider user intent to reach the right audience. Find out how to analyze and optimize for search intent and how Similarweb makes it easy for you.

SEM (Search Engine Marketing)
Search Engine Marketing is the hypernym for all paid advertising on the web. Any strategy aimed at gaining website traffic by purchasing ads falls under SEM.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Refers to the measures you take to ensure relevant searchers easily find your website and content.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) typically starts with keyword research to identify the terms your audience is using.

By properly incorporating these terms in your content and site structure, you enable search engines to determine your page’s relevance to these keywords. The page the search engine identifies as the page that allows the searcher to complete their tasks the fastest (i.e. most relevant and accurate content, best UX, and loading speeds) gets the highest position of the results page (SERP).

The tricky part of SEO is that search engines often change their algorithms, which means the weights of the ranking factors change as well sometimes. Always stay up to date with the latest developments.

SERP (Search Engine Ranking Page)
The page on which a search engine displays the results of a search query is called a Search Engine Ranking Page or Search Engine Results Page, in short SERP.

The page shows results according to their ranking, meaning the content that the search engine found most relevant for the search term shows first.

To rank high on a SERP you need to optimize your page for search engines (SEO).

Note that Google places paid ads above organic results.

Sessions
In web analytics, a session includes all the visitor’s activities from when they arrive at your site till they leave. Measuring session duration and the number of pages viewed per session are fundamental metrics to understand visitors’ engagement.

• Pro-tip: Similarweb’s analytics tool includes many advanced metrics related to the time visitors spend on your website and a separate set of metrics dedicated to app use. Get a more detailed picture and a deeper understanding of how engaged users are.

Share of Voice
In its traditional meaning, share of voice (SOV) revealed share of advertising in a specific market or industry. It measured how much a company advertised compared to its competitors.

Today advertising has taken on many (sometimes unconventional) forms, and customer engagement plays a significant role. So the term had to adapt. In digital marketing, SOV refers to your overall online visibility and includes organic search, paid search, and social media.

However, when measuring share of voice on social media, advertising isn’t separated from other mentions of your brand. It takes the total amount of online discussion about a product, category, or topic into consideration. SOV doesn’t only show your share of advertising; it also indicates how much buzz the advertising creates.

Social Media Influencers
Oh, they are so popular these days! An influencer is a person with the capability to influence large audiences. This can be a celebrity, an expert in a specific field, or a leading personality in their industry.

In many cases, social media influencers are simply extremely active people on social media who have gained a reputation for being credible. Social Media Influencers must earn the audience’s respect and accumulate a large number of followers. They then use their reputation and reach on social media to promote relevant products or brands.

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To leverage influencer marketing on social media for your product, you need to find one with a name in your industry. Also, look into their audiences’ characteristics to ensure they are streamlined with your target audience. Check what other products they promote, which general values they stand for, and how they advertise. A social media influencer can affect your brand image.

SSP – Supply Side Platform
SSPs play a significant role in programmatic advertising. On this platform, publishers list their inventory of ad space they put up for auction on the ad exchange. The DSP (Demand Side Platform) stores the relevant information for the ad exchange to pull the data and offer the space for auction when demand comes in.

T

Tag
Tags are a set of characters in HTML, the standard coding language for the web. They instruct the web browser how to display your content and ensure its consistency across all browsers.

For example, the relevant HTML tags define whether a piece of text is a title or a paragraph, which size or color the letters are, and where a line ends.

Some HTML tags are significant for SEO. For example, a search engine crawler regards a headline differently than normal text and identifies topics, images, hyperlinks, and so on.

Tracking Cookie
Tracking cookies are tiny text files that websites place on a visitor’s browser to track browsing behavior. They are used in marketing and advertising to help target the right audience. Tracking cookies collect information about the sites a user visits and the information they request, such as keywords and geographic locations.

Trigger
An interaction of someone with your software that initiates a sequence of marketing messages. Triggers are used in marketing automation to set off automated campaigns. This lets you target visitors at specific touchpoints in your funnel and provide personalized messages.

For example, when someone downloaded a whitepaper about one of your solutions, the trigger sets off a series of follow-up mails related to the same solution.

Marketing Terms U-Z

U

URL
URL is an acronym for Uniform Resource Locator. In everyday language, people call it the address of a web page. Technically the URL specifies a location on a computer network and a mechanism to retrieve it.

Each webpage has a unique URL. They are another crucial element of SEO. Build your website with a logical structure and name the pages accordingly so that search engines can swiftly index them correctly. Include primary keywords in the URL and create categories. Make it easy for crawlers to recognize related pages and navigate smoothly through your site.

UTM
A snippet of code used to identify traffic sources and monitor campaign performance. UTM tags can be attached to a URL and track information such as which campaign the visitor came from and what they clicked to reach you.

UTM is short for Urchin Tracking Module and dates back to when Google Analytics was owned by Urchin on Demand, before they were acquired by the internet giant in 2005.

V

Value Proposition
You promise to deliver a distinct value inherent in your product or service when purchased. That’s a value proposition.

A value proposition states to your potential customers what they gain when they buy your product and, at the same time, gives them a reason to do so. It’s more than a marketing slogan, but describes the solution and its benefit to the user.

Your value proposition should be unique to your product so that customers will associate your product with its value proposition.

Video SEO
Video SEO refers to the process of optimizing your video content for specific keywords so they can compete in the SERPs ranking. Besides being a platform for video content, YouTube is also a search engine. You need to optimize your content to get found by your target audience.

YouTube SEO includes:

• Adding your top keyword in the video title and description.
• Adding Tags with secondary keywords.
• Using other written text elements to help the search algorithms understand the video content and who you intend to reach with it.
• And more.

Video Marketing
Video marketing refers to the use of video content as a vehicle for marketing campaigns and activities. The idea is to create content in the form of video and distribute it through various channels.

Companies develop ongoing video marketing strategies and may use their website to publish product and explainer videos. Video platforms such as YouTube or Vimeo are more common because videos can be shared easily. You can launch individual video marketing campaigns or distribute content through social media. Also, YouTube functions as a search engine which helps with exposure and SEO.

Example:

Depending on the purpose of the campaign, you can use a variety of different types of marketing videos. Here’s an example of video advertising.

Viral Marketing
A form of marketing in which your audience spreads the message. You place a super-catchy ad or video on social media and rely on your followers to make it go viral.

It’s a bit of a gamble. Why? Because there’s no telling if the video clip you thought was funny will make the hit list of your audience and beyond. It won’t cost you much to create the clip—-or another type of ad, but you have no way of estimating the result. Once it’s out there, you give up control, and that can be risky.

Content doesn’t just go viral for no reason, and you’d have to come up with something exceptional. Often viral marketing ads are unconventional or controversial. If the audience doesn’t understand your humor, for example, it could turn into an embarrassment or harm your brand reputation.

If it succeeds, though, you’ve hit the jackpot.

W

Webinar
A combination of the words “Web” and “Seminar”. The term describes an educational presentation delivered virtually over the web to a designated audience.

Webinars have grown increasingly popular in B2B marketing. They offer an opportunity to share information and updates about your company or educate about relevant topics. Customers and prospects get the chance to raise questions.

Webinars are a great way to demonstrate professionalism and establish a relationship with your audience. Participants experience you live as a human being and that makes you more accessible to potential clients.

This is an advantage when presenting to prospects in a phase of the buyer journey where they collect information and aren’t willing to engage directly. Webinars can be icebreakers. They are also highly useful in retaining and strengthening the bond with existing clients.

WordPress
If you ask WordPress, you’ll find this answer: “WordPress is a full-featured content management system that just happens to be the world’s most popular tool for creating websites.”

It started out as a blog-building site in 2003. Since then, it is continually being improved and extended with additional features and functions. Today over 60% of website owners use WordPress.

Z

Zero-Click Searches
They are the end of your search campaigns. When searchers find the answer to their query on the SERP, they don’t need to click through to your page. It’s a zero-click search. Keywords that result in zero clicks don’t always offer value for your SEO or PPC activity.

Google is working hard to provide quick, easy answers to searchers. That’s why they introduced the knowledge panel and featured snippets. Visitors may be satisfied with what they find there and not move on to additional pages.

• Pro-tip: Similarweb recently introduced the zero-click metric to enhance your keyword research. Enter the platform to find out which keywords end on the SERP and analyze the impact of zero-click searches on your site.
  

Takeaways

These terms are just some to help optimize your digital marketing lingo, no matter where you are in your professional journey. Stay tuned for future editions, covering the most up-to-date trends. If you’re not in the digital marketing space, be sure to check out our other solution glossaries including sales terms, investor terms, eCommerce terms, and digital research terms.

To boost digital marketing strategy, companies (large and small) can use Digital Marketing Intelligence to understand how to win more market share in their industry. Similarweb’s Digital Intelligence will give you an overview of traffic, bounce rates, leading keywords, top-converting pages, search strategy, and more.

• Digital research terms
• Ecommerce terms
• Stock market terms
• AI Marketing Glossary
• Sales Terms Glossary