Do you know your CPMs from your CTRs? Here at Disruptor Media, we’re here to make your journey into digital marketing easier with our round up of digital marketing definitions. Here’s 20 digital marketing definitions you may not have known.

Metrics Used To Measure Performance

A click-through rate (CTR) measures the number of people who saw an ad, and then clicked anywhere on it, including to look at the pictures and/or comments. This is slightly different to a link click-through rate, which measures the percentage of people who clicked on a specific link.

A CPM rate stands for cost per mille and shows the cost of serving an advert 1,000 times. Mille is Latin for thousand.

Search Engine Marketing Definitions

A crawler/web spider is software that collects information about websites. Some use this information to help show relevant search results, while universities use crawlers/spiders to check for plagiarism.

Search engines use website indexes to make sure their search results are relevant and high quality. An index makes sure Apple iPhones and Macs appears in search results when you search for ‘latest apple release date’ rather than apple fruit chunks!

Organic listings are results you’ll see on the Google/Bing/DuckDuckGo search engine results page that aren’t paid advertisements.

A ranking online is the same as it is on the racetrack – the goal is pole position! When you rank in position #1 on Google for the search term ‘digital marketing definitions’, your website will appear at the top of organic results.

A search engine results page (SERP)​ is the page you see when you search something on a search engine. This includes everything from website links and paid ads to product posts and question boxes.

Other Initialisms & Acronyms

HTML stands for ‘Hypertext Markup Language’ and is a coding language frequently used by web developers to build websites.

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are used in nearly all industries to evaluate the success of campaigns, and how these link to the overall business aims.

Pay Per Click (more commonly known by its initialism PPC) is a type of advertising payment where a company pays for every click they receive. If their ad doesn’t receive any clicks, they don’t pay a penny!

Search engine marketing (SEM) is a type of advertising where you pay search engines (Google/Bing etc) to appear for certain keywords. If we paid to promote this blog post on search engines, we might pay Google to appear for keywords such as ‘digital marketing key terms’ and ‘digital marketing definitions’.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the art of making changes to your website for the benefit of search engines in the hope you’ll appear higher in organic search results. This can be on page amends that will be seen by the end user (changes to text and website load time speed) or hidden in the back end of your website code.

Other Important Digital Marketing Definitions You May Not Have Known

A/B testing is where marketeers run two variants of something (captions; background colour; call to action etc) and compare their performance over a period to find which one performs best. It may be called A/B testing, but many businesses A/B/C/D/E/F/G test until they find the perfect formula that achieves their goals.

A banner advert is shown on websites and mobile apps. They’re found in a multitude of shapes and sizes and can include text, images and video.

A browser is a program used to view the internet. If you own a Windows computer, you’ll likely be familiar with the browser Internet Explorer. Mac and iPhone users will see Safari as their default browser. Other browsers include Chrome and Firefox.

Conversions and goals are actions that lead towards your ultimate end goal – usually a sale. In a bricks and mortar store, conversions could include physically entering; picking a product up; asking for assistance and (the big one) making a purchase.

Landing pages are the first page a user sees when they enter a website. This doesn’t necessarily have to be the homepage.

Lead nurturing is the art of interacting with users who have inputted information into your website. Once you receive a lead, you should keep them updated and engaged with your latest products. This will make your web visitors more likely to buy from you in the future! This is lead nurturing.

Multichannel marketing campaigns are delivered in various places (social media, television and print). A great example of this is Black Friday.

A responsive design or a responsive website will automatically fit to the size of the screen so users can still read all the content on your site.