marketing terms

A/B Testing is a stage of design and development that compares two or more versions of a web page or app in simultaneous use to assess which is the optimized version for achieving a specified design goal or performance metric.

Marketing based on a relationship between an online advertiser and website publishers where the advertiser pays for leads or revenue that comes from the publishers’ sites. It’s a form of value sharing or commission sharing. Partnering with affiliates extends your advertising reach and increases your relevance with target audiences for a limited investment. You only “pay for performance.” Bloggers can make great affiliates.

Algorithms are a list of mathematical calculations and if/then statements that decide what action a computer program should take. The Google algorithm is the rules-based system Google uses to sort through hundreds of billions of websites to deliver relevant results to users’ search queries. The results are ranked in order of usefulness on the search engine results page (SERP). The algorithm also uses personal context, such as your current location and past search history, to tailor the results.

Alt text shows in place of images or pops up when you hover your mouse over an image. Alt text, or alternative text, is written into the HTML code of a web page to describe an image in case the image doesn’t show. This can happen for a few different reasons. Some users may have images turned off so web pages load faster. Other users may have low vision or blindness, so they use special screen readers that translate web page text into an audio or a Braille-like touch format. Alt text also helps search engines "understand" images better.

A marketing strategy based on identifying subgroups within the target audience in order to deliver more tailored messaging for stronger connections. The subgroups can be based on demographics such as geographic location, gender identity, age, ethnicity, income, or level of formal education. Subgroups can also be based on behavior such as purchases made in the past. Psychographics come into play when you have access to insights about your audience’s values, attitudes, and beliefs.

Links on websites other than your own that go back to a page on your website. Backlinks are also called inbound links because they represent traffic coming to your website from somewhere else. The quality and quantity of your backlinks can help you rank higher in search engines such as Google and Bing. This is because your backlinks are considered an indicator of how popular your website is with users.

Best Practices refer to a procedure or set of procedures that is preferred or considered standard within an organization, industry, etc.

The percentage of visits to your website where only 1 page was viewed. When we say users "bounce," we mean they viewed a page of your site or a landing page but didn’t engage further. They didn’t click on links or view more pages. There are many methods for improving your pages so more users stick around. An offer, call to action (CTA), ad copy, and design can all be optimized through A/B testing.

Brand Identity is the experience a customer has with your product or service visually. A brand identity is made up of elements like the brand’s name, logo, color palette, and type style to convey a distinct brand image to customers. It also includes consistent standards for words, images, voice, and tone.

If you’re thinking "Hansel and Gretel," you’re right. This fairy tale duo left a trail of breadcrumbs as they ventured into the forest so they could find their way back home.

Digital breadcrumbs serve the same purpose. They’re a form of website navigation that shows users the sections they’ve visited in the order they visited them so they can retrace their steps easily.

The percentage of users who click on the link in your digital marketing message after seeing it. For example, if 10,000 users see your display ad, and 10 users click on it, your click-through rate (CTR) is 0.001 or 0.1%. The same math applies to links within marketing emails, landing pages, and social media. CTR is a key success metric for an advertising campaign.

Content marketing is a strategy businesses use to attract, engage, and retain customers by creating and sharing relevant articles, videos, podcasts, and other media. This approach establishes expertise, promotes brand awareness, and keeps your business top of mind when it’s time to buy what you sell.

A fee that a website publisher charges to serve your display ads on its site. Instead of paying for your ads to simply show up, you only pay when the audience interacts with them. Google is a major publisher of cost-per-click (CPC) ads, and it contracts with other publishers to distribute them to other sites, too.

The practice of customer relationship management (CRM). The goals of CRM are to retain current customers, increase their spending, and convert prospects into new customers. CRM technology is used to manage information such as a summary of each interaction, indicators of intent to purchase, and purchase history. Analytics are also used to provide real-time insight into cross-sell and upsell opportunities at the individual customer level.

Cascading style sheet (CSS), a language that dictates how a web page looks. It covers layout, colors, fonts, font sizes, and more. The advantage of using CSS is that its rules can apply—cascade—across all of your web pages, reducing the time to code each page from scratch. CSS also enables responsive web design, which aims to reuse code across desktop and mobile devices and keep the user experience (UX) consistent.

What you want your target audience to do after receiving your marketing message. The call to action (CTA) clearly articulates the next step: learn more, contact us, shop now, follow us, sign up. A/B testing offers a great opportunity to experiment with different calls to action and optimize your messages with the CTAs that get the best audience response.

Think of a customer journey as a detailed map that shows the full experience a customer has with your business. It lets you see every interaction they have with your company, even before and after they engage. By first understanding the customer journey, it will be easier to define your goals and use our automation tool to create the overall marketing experience you want to provide.

Digital marketing is the promotion of brands to connect with potential customers using the internet and other forms of digital communication. This includes not only email, social media, and web-based advertising, but also text and multimedia messages as a marketing channel.

A drip campaign is a series of automated emails sent to people who take a specific action. For any given action, you can choose how many emails to send and the rate at which to send them. These emails can be personalized with data like the contact’s name and specific references to the action they took.

You might send a drip campaign to someone who signs up for your online course, for example. Or you could send a drip campaign to people who add an item to their online cart without buying it.

A hash or pound sign (#) used after a word or phrase to label content and make it easier to find. Hashtags are common on social media and used to connect posts on related topics. For example, if you click #Mailchimp on Twitter, it will bring up a list of tweets that include that hashtag. Hashtags can combine multiple words and are often styled with internal capitalization so they’re #MuchEasierToRead.

Hypertext markup language (HTML) is the coding language used to create web pages. With the help of CSS and JavaScript, HTML tells a web browser how to format, style, and link together text and images on a page. For example, the tag is used to separate a block of text into paragraphs. HTML tags can also include attributes and values that tell the web browser what to do with the content.

An iframe is a section of a web page that contains content that comes from another page. It’s a page within a page. Iframes are typically used to pull in content from third parties. For example, you can set up iframes on your website to display banner ads from Google Ads or another ad network. Iframes are different from framesets (also called just “frames”), which were used in the early days of the internet to make page layouts easier and navigation consistent.

A word or phrase in the content of your web pages that matches the words and phrases users are entering into search engines as closely as possible. The idea is to speak the same language as users when they make their search queries so you rank higher in their organic search results based on relevance. Mailchimp.com keywords include: marketing platform, email marketing, landing pages, and automation tools. The keyword is the cornerstone of search engine optimization (SEO).

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are quantifiable measures that help businesses evaluate their progress toward achieving important objectives. Although different businesses use different metrics, KPIs are always central to understanding how your company is performing and how you can improve that performance.

A standalone web page that potential customers can “land” on when they click through from an email, ad, or other digital location. A landing page aims to capture information from contacts in exchange for something of value, such as a retail offer code or business-to-business (B2B) insights in the form of a white paper. Landing pages are different from other web pages in that they don’t live in the evergreen navigation of a website. They serve a specific purpose in a specific moment of an advertising campaign to a target audience.

A brief summary of what a web page is about in the HTML code of the page. Character counts may vary by search engine, but 160 characters with spaces is a good guideline. Search engines consider meta descriptions when ranking your page for relevance to user searches, but it’s not one of the most important factors.

Words and phrases in the HTML meta keywords tag of a web page. Meta keywords help search engines identify what the page is about and rank its relevance to user searches accordingly. The keywords in your tag should reflect the content of your page. Otherwise, search engines will disregard the meta. In other words, you can’t add keywords to the meta tag to make up for a lack of relevant keywords in the content itself.

HTML code that helps search engines understand, evaluate, and rank web pages. Meta tags include meta description (a summary of the page), meta keywords (words and phrases used in the content of the page), and a canonical URL (the master version of a page).

The natural and unpaid results users receive after making search queries. Search engines, which crawl your web pages and rank your content for relevance to the most common queries, determine these results. You can improve your ranking through search engine optimization (SEO) activities, such as including keywords in headlines.

Online advertising that is triggered when users perform searches using keywords that a company has purchased. Ads look like organic search results, but they appear more prominently on a search engine results page (SERP) than they would have organically. They are also labeled as “ad” or with another word indicating “paid.” You’ll often see paid search in crowded categories such as airline flights, hotels, and laptops. The pricing model is usually pay-per-click (PPC).

An online advertising campaign that a company pays for only when users interact with the ads. Instead of paying for your ads to simply show up on a publisher’s website, you pay for user clicks. Pay-per-click (PPC) refers to a type of campaign. Cost per click (CPC) refers to the actual cost: the campaign fee / number of clicks = cost per click. For example, if you pay $1,000 for a campaign that receives 50,000 clicks, your CPC is $0.02.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the method used to boost the ranking or frequency of a website in results returned by a search engine, in an effort to maximize user traffic to the site.

The page that a search engine returns after a user submits a search query. In addition to organic search results, search engine results pages (SERPs) usually include paid search and pay-per-click (PPC) ads. Thanks to search engine optimization (SEO), ranking position on a SERP can be highly competitive since users are more likely to click on results at the top of the page. With the launch of schema markup, SERPs are becoming much more complex to try to anticipate user needs.

Sponsored Content is advertising that a brand pays an online publisher to create and seamlessly integrate, conforming to the design, format, and content of the website or social media feed where it is published.

How a person feels about using a product or service. The discipline of user experience (UX) makes digital experiences efficient, effective, and sometimes entertaining. In the world of digital marketing, UX is often equated with optimizing the user interface (UI) on the website. For example, e-commerce companies want to know about the browsing and checkout experience on their websites.

A blueprint for a website’s user interface (UI). Wireframes are simplified sketches—often drawn by hand—of how content and functionality come together in a layout. They focus on how elements are ordered and placed on a page but rarely include specifics about the final visual design. For example, photographs are represented by a box with an X through them. Wireframes are an essential step in responsive web design, since the same elements need to be reordered for different screen sizes.