Ever feel like the world of digital marketing is full of confusing jargon? Well, you probably use industry-specific acronyms in your business and digital marketing is no different. But if you’re not in the thick of it every day, marketing lingo can seem like an entirely foreign language.
That being said, the more terminology you know, the better equipped you’ll be to explore digital marketing opportunities for your business, as well as knowing how to ask the right questions if you need to talk to the experts.
That’s why we’ve put together a handy glossary of the most common digital marketing acronyms for you to easily reference below.
B2B: Business to business.
B2B businesses are organisations that provide products or services to other businesses. Yellow Pages is a great example!
B2C: Business to consumer.
B2C businesses provide products or services directly to consumers rather than businesses: think hair and beauty salons, personal trainers, doctors and dentists.
CPC: Cost per click.
CPC is the amount of money spent to get one click on a digital ad, such as a Google Ad. Measuring CPC is a way to compare the cost effectiveness of different ad variations and assess the overall profitability of a digital marketing campaign.
RELATED: Marketing jargon buster: Cost per click.
CPL: Cost per lead.
CPL is the amount of money spent for a business to generate a new lead. A simple way to calculate CPL is to divide your total digital marketing spend by the total number of new leads (potential or actual customers) acquired during a campaign.
CR: Conversion rate.
Conversion rate is the percentage of people who took a desired action on a web page, such as filling out a form, making a purchase or downloading a piece of content. Pages with a high conversion rate are generally considered to be performing well.
CTA: Call-to-action.
A call-to-action is a prompt to encourage a website visitor or online user to do something specific, such as click on a link, make an inquiry, download a piece of content or make a purchase. Calls-to-action can be text links, buttons or images.
RELATED: 7 ingredients for creating a perfect call-to-action.
CTR: Clickthrough rate
Clickthrough rate is the percentage of an audience that clicks through to a link on an ad, email or search results. As an equation, it’s the total number of clicks received divided by the number of opportunities that people had to click (for example, the total number of ad impressions).
RELATED: Email marketing tips to improve your open and click through rates.
eDM: Electronic direct mail.
eDMs are emails sent by businesses to their subscriber database, typically as part of an email marketing campaign. eDMs can be used to promote deals, events and special offers, re-engage customers, share news and invite feedback.
RELATED: What is eDM marketing and how does it work for small businesses?
GA: Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a platform with detailed data about a website’s traffic and visitors, as well as information about conversions and sales. Digital marketers use GA to better understand a website’s audiences, trace customer journeys and measure the success of a website’s web pages and site content.
KPI: Key performance indicator.
KPIs are metrics a business uses to gauge the success of an activity. Although KPIs can be specific to many areas of a business, marketers look at KPIs such as campaign budgets, sales, traffic and customer numbers to track the progress and effectiveness of a marketing strategy.
PPC: Pay per click.
PPC is a digital advertising cost model where advertisers (businesses) pay a certain amount of money every time their ad is clicked.
RELATED: How to make Google Ads work for your small business.
SEM: Search engine marketing.
SEM, or search engine marketing, is the process of gaining traffic through purchasing ad spots on search engines. SEM is often referred to as paid advertising, pay-per-click or ‘paid search.’
RELATED: Why SEM is vital for small business.
SEO: Search engine optimisation.
SEO, or search engine optimisation, is the act of optimising your website’s content and structure to improve your ranking in search engines (i.e. how high up your website appears in search results whenever someone searches for something related to your business).
RELATED: What’s the best SEO strategy for small business?
SERP: Search engine results page.
A search engine results page (SERP) is the list of web pages and other content that a search engine, such as Google, shows in response to someone searching for a keyword or phrase. There are two main types of SERP results: organic (unpaid) web pages and paid ads.
RELATED: Does getting on the first page of Google really matter?
Need help making sense of it all?
Understanding key terminology is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to building a successful digital marketing strategy.
Whether it’s an online ad on Australia’s favourite business directory, SEM, or social ads, Yellow Pages is the digital marketing agency that helps thousands of small businesses grow online each year. Find out more about how we can help.
