As technology expands, language expands with it, and just like any other profession, there’s a whole host of marketing jargon that is used every day in our industry. However, that’s not always helpful if you’re comparing agencies, or looking to get into it yourself. To help you, we’ve picked out 50 of the most commonly used pieces of marketing jargon and explained what they mean in simple terms. They’re ordered by what they are – for example, if you need to know an acronym, these are explained in the first section, and if you’re learning about social media, that’s the second section, and so on. Our list is set out as follows
- Acronyms
- Social Media
- SEO
- PPC
- General Marketing
Acronyms Marketing Jargon
B2B – Business to Business – If you sell your products to other businesses, then you are marketing your products from one business to another; B2B
B2C – Business to Consumer – Selling your products straight to consumers, rather than other businesses
CPC – Cost-Per-Click – The average amount that you were charged for each click on your adverts. It’s calculated by dividing the total amount spent by the total number of clicks
CPM – Cost-Per-Mille – Sometimes, you might want to pay for your adverts based on how many people see them, rather than click on them. Cost-Per-Mille tells you how much it costs you for 1,000 users to see your adverts.
CRM – Customer Relationship Marketing – Marketing strategies that build intangibles like customer loyalty and brand value
CTA – Call To Action – This is anything that encourages the user to take the next step in the customer journey; whether that’s making a purchase, contacting the business or signing up for a newsletter
E-A-T – Expertise-Authority-Trustworthiness – Closely linked to YMYL, but this is a rating that your whole site gets. Who is your main contributor? What’s the quality of conversation on your forums? Do you have a Secure Socket Layer on your website?
KPI – Key Performance Indicator – You can measure marketing success in thousands of ways – your Key Performance Indicators are the metrics that you choose to measure in any campaign.
PPC – Pay-Per-Click – Methods of advertising which charge you only when someone actually clicks on your advert.
ROI – Return on Investment – Revenue taken/Costs = Return on Investment
SEO – Search Engine Optimisation – This is the practice of setting up a page on your site to get it as high in search engine rankings as possible – don’t worry, we’ve got a whole section on SEO marketing jargon later on.
SERP – Search Engine Results Page – The page that appears after you make a search in a search engine, which lists entries from many different websites.
YMYL – Your Money, Your Life – With certain posts, it’s more important to be right. If your content could genuinely affect a user’s happiness, Google imposes stricter checks on who the author of the post is, and posts without an authoritative author will not be shown highly in Google’s results. Examples of this kind of post are any advice relating to medicine, finance, the law, and parenting – and there are others.
Social Media Marketing Jargon
Engagements – The number of times that people interacted with your post or advert; there are a number of different types of engagements, such as saving a post, liking it, sharing it, or commenting on it, as well as some others which are platform-specific.
Impressions – The number of times that your posts or adverts were seen – one user seeing your post multiple times counts as multiple impressions.
Influencer – This word seems to be everywhere nowadays, but it doesn’t just mean Love Island contestants; it can apply to any individual who has the power and means to influence an audience’s purchase decisions.
Pixel – This is a bit more for your developers, but Pixel is code that Facebook gives you to put on your website so that you can accurately track the actions of users that come to your site via Facebook.
Reach – The number of individual people who saw your posts or adverts.
SEO Marketing Jargon
Alt text – Is an HTML attribute applied to image tags to provide a text alternative for the image. This brief image description breaks it down for crawlers and also provides information about the images if they don’t display on a users computer. You should set alternative text for all the images on your website.
Anchor text – Is the visible clickable text in a hyperlink, often blue and underlined.
Backlinks – If other websites link to your website, that’s a good thing, especially if those websites are reputable. The links between websites are called ‘backlinks’
Crawl – To work out what content there is on your site, and how authoritative your site is, search engines send bots which read the information – this process is called crawling.
Cornerstone content – The most important content on your website. Other blogs should link to it, and it should be longer than the rest of your content. If you’re an authority search engines want to promote the content that you think is most important – this is one way of showing them.
Domain Authority – How reputable your website is. A high Domain Authority means that your posts will rank higher in SERPs
Keyword – a keyword is a word or phrase that best describes the content on your page or post best. When writing content, you should always have a keyword. This is the word that the content is geared toward explaining or promoting. For example, if you run a clothing store, you may have a blog on “sweatshirts”.
Meta Description – The listings in SERPs contain information which you should specifically set – and it’s crucial to include your keywords and, if you can, a call to action
Meta Tags – Snippets of text that describe a page’s content which exist in the source code of a page and are not visible to users. Meta tags are essentially little content descriptors that help tell search engines what a web page contains.
No-index – If you have content on your website that you don’t want to appear in SERPs, you can use a no-index tag. This tag tells crawlers not to publish the page on search engines. This might be the case if you have your Privacy notice on your website, or Terms & Conditions.
On-page optimisation – Elements of SEO can be broadly split into technical – the background function of the website – and what is actually on the page viewable to the users. Ensuring these latter elements are correct is called on-page optimisation.
Organic Search – At the top of most SERPs, adverts appear. Rankings which appear without users paying for the clicks are said to be appearing organically. This is the distinction between Organic Search and Paid Search.
Ranking – The position which your content occupies on the SERP.
Sitemap – Your site’s skeleton, comes in the form of a simple text document which lays out the content on your site, designed to make it easier for search engine crawlers to navigate around your website. Not designed to be followed by people.
PPC Marketing Jargon
Acquisition – The gaining of a new customer for your business.
Broad match – You have to set keywords to trigger your adverts, but AI in the platforms means that your adverts might show for similar keywords, that you didn’t necessarily set. For example, if you have an advert set for “sports trainers”, your advert might appear for some searches like “tennis shoes”
Click-through rate – The number of times that your adverts were shown divided by the number of clicks you got.
Conversion – When a user who has clicked through an ad takes an action that you have defined, often with a monetary value. Usually, this is buying something, but it could mean contacting your business to enquire further, for example.
Landing Page – The page that a user is taken to immediately after clicking on a PPC advert or a search engine result.
Phrase match – Similar to broad match, but this gives the AI less scope for variety. For example, an advert for “tennis shoes” might be triggered by “men’s tennis shoes”, but not by “sports trainers”
Quality score – is a rating given by Google which measures how relevant your ads, keywords, and landing pages are to a person who sees your ad. Google gives all your keywords a ranking out of 10. The higher your quality score, the less you might have to pay for a click.
General Marketing Jargon
A/B testing – Testing two versions of the same advert to see which is more effective.
Automation – Software that is designed so that marketing departments do not have to repeat the same tasks, such as the ability to post messages on all your channels from one place.
Branding – Creating a name, design or value set that differentiates your products from your competitors’
Bounce Rate – If a user bounces on your website, it means that they came onto the landing page and left without looking at any more pages or taking any action on that page. The bounce rate is the number of users that bounced, divided by the total number of users, multiplied by 100.
Channel – A method of communication between your business and your targets
Content marketing – A style of marketing where you create and share content that increases interest in your products and services.
Copy – Any piece of writing, which could be as short as a tweet or as long as a thesis.
Gated content – You might choose that some of your content is good enough that your users need to give something up to read it – whether this be an email address, or complete a short survey, or maybe even pay for a subscription.
Offer – NOT “2-for-1 this Christmas”, a marketing offer is a product or service of value you give to users who complete a call to action that is of no cost to them.
Persona – When building a campaign, you should have an idea of the profile of the target individual. This individual is the persona.
Remarketing – Sending marketing messages to users who have already interacted with your brand. This method of marketing is shown to yield better results for lower spend – but you need to do the work to establish your brand before this is effective.
Session – The time that someone spends on your website is their session, from the page they enter on, throughout their journey to the page they exit from.
We’re not in the business of duping or bamboozling, and we always look to empower our clients with the digital skills that we use every day. If you’ve been left in the dark by an agency that uses too much marketing jargon, and you’re not seeing the results you expected, talk to AsOne today on 0161 368 9100.
