Marketing Glossary

Welcome to our list of commonly used digital marketing terms. This marketing glossary aims to define any confusing marketing jargon you encounter!

• A/B Test: Creating 2 versions of digital assets like a landing page, display ad, email marketing, social posts, etc., to see which one users respond to better. In an A/B test, half of your audience automatically receives a specific digital asset version, while the other half receives another version to see which one performs better.
• Abandoned Cart: When a user adds a product to the online shopping cart of an e-commerce site but doesn’t proceed to checkout and complete the purchase. Users may abandon because they aren’t ready to buy. Instead, they use their cart as a “wish list” as they shop around and compare prices.
• Ad Budget: The money a company invests in promoting its products and services to its target audience to generate ROI. An advertising budget typically spans the cost of paid media, photography, printing, mailing, and the support of advertising professionals.
• Ad Copy: The words in your advertising messages to customers. Ad copy can be the headline of a display ad, the subject line of a marketing email, a Facebook ad’s call to action (CTA), or the script of a video or TV spot.
• Affiliate Marketing: 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.
• Application Programming Interface or API: these are a series of rules in computer programming which allow an application to extract information from a service and use it in their application or data analyses.
• Analytics: There are so many pieces to the marketing puzzle, and analytics should always remain an integral part of any campaign strategy or analysis process because you never know what might pop up when looking at your data! Analytics is essentially the discovery and communication of meaningful patterns in data.

• B2B (Business-to-Business): An adjective used to describe companies that sell to other businesses. For example, Google and Oracle are primarily B2B companies.
• B2C (Business-to-Consumer): An adjective used to describe companies that sell directly to consumers. For example, Amazon, Apple, and Nike are primarily B2C companies.
• Branding: or brand marketing is establishing and growing a relationship between a brand and consumers. Rather than highlighting an individual product or service, brand marketing promotes the entirety of the brand, using the products and services as proof points that support the brand’s promise.
• Blogging: This is short for web log or weblog. An individual or group of people usually maintains a blog. A personal or business blog will traditionally include regular commentary entries, event descriptions, or other material, such as photos and videos.
• Bottom of the Funnel: refers to a stage of the buying process leads reach when they’re just about to close as new customers. They’ve identified a problem, shopped around for possible solutions, and are close to buying.
• Bounce Rate – Email -: The rate at which an email could not be delivered to a recipient’s inbox. A high bounce rate generally means your lists are out-of-date or purchased or include many invalid email addresses.
• Bounce Rate – Website -: The percentage of people who land on a page on your website and then leave without clicking on anything else or navigating to any other pages on your site.
• Buyer Persona: A customer who is likely to be interested in your product or service based on market research and data about your existing customers. While it helps marketers like you define their target audience, it can also help sales reps qualify leads.

• Call to Action or CTA: a text link, button, image, or some type of web link that encourages a website visitor to visit a landing page and become of lead. Some examples of CTAs are “Subscribe Now” or “Shop Now.”
• Clickthrough Rate (CTR): The percentage of your audience that advances (or clicks through) from one part of your website to the next step of your marketing campaign. As a mathematic equation, it’s the total number of clicks your page or CTA receives divided by the number of opportunities people have to click.
• Closed-Loop Marketing: able to execute, track and show how marketing efforts have impacted bottom-line business growth. An example would be tracking a website visitor as they become a lead to the very last touch point when they close as a customer.
• Conversion Path: a series of website-based events that facilitate lead capture. In its most basic form, a conversion path will consist of a call-to-action (typically a button that describes an offer) that leads to a landing page with a lead capture form, which redirects to a thank you page where a content offer resides.
• Content: a piece of information that exists to be digested, engaged with, and shared. Content typically comes in the form of a blog, video, social media post, photo, slideshow, or podcast, although there are plenty of over types.
• Content Management System (CMS): A web application designed to make it easy for non-technical users to create, edit, and manage a website. Helps users with content editing and more “behind-the-scenes” work like making content searchable and indexable, automatically generating navigation elements, keeping track of users and permissions, and more
• Content Optimization System (COS): is basically a CMS (Content Management System) but optimized to deliver customers the most personalized web experience possible.
• Conversion Rate: percentage of people who completed a desired action on a single web page, such as filling out a form. Pages with high conversion rates are performing well, while pages with low conversion rates are performing poorly.
• CSS: is used to control presentation, formatting, and layout.
• Corporate Communication: management and orchestration of all internal and external communications to create a favorable point of view and prompt desired behaviors among all stakeholders.
  • Corporate Communication or Communication Design: creating visuals that spread messages and meanings in new and relevant ways.

• Dynamic Content: A way to display different messaging on your website based on the information you already know about the visitor.

• Engagement Rate: A popular social media metric used to describe the amount of interaction — Likes, shares, comments — a piece of content receives. Interactions like these tell you that your messages resonate with your fans and followers.
• Evergreen Content: content that continues to provide value to readers no matter when they stumble upon it.

• Form: The place your page visitors will supply information in exchange for your offer. It’s also how those visitors can convert into precious sales leads.

• Google Guaranteed: a certification program created to increase customer confidence in local businesses. Customers vetting companies online can look for the Google Guaranteed Badge, which offers protection if something goes wrong. Many businesses are already using Google’s Local Services Ads to generate leads for their companies through paid search efforts. The Google Guarantee offers help for businesses who want to draw more organic traffic instead.

• Hashtags or HT: a way for you and your readers to interact with each other on social media and have conversations about a particular piece of content. They tie public conversations on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and/or TikTok together into a single stream, which users can find by searching for a hashtag, clicking on one, or using a third-party monitoring tool.
• HTML or HyperText Markup Language: is the most basic building block of the Web. It defines the meaning and structure of web content. Other technologies besides HTML generally describe a web page’s appearance/presentation (CSS) or functionality/behavior (JavaScript). It provides the basic structure of sites, which is enhanced and modified by other technologies like CSS and JavaScript.

• Identity Design: An identity is a brand’s set of visual and verbal elements. The tangible elements you can see when a company communicates with you make up its identity design: Logo, colors, fonts, taglines, photography style, illustration style, patterns, icons, and messaging.
• Inbound marketing: refers to marketing activities that draw visitors in, rather than marketers having to go out to get prospects’ attention. It’s all about earning the attention of customers, making the company easy to find online, and drawing customers to the website by producing interesting, helpful content.
• Information Design: presenting information in a way that makes it most accessible and easily understood by users. This is targeted to specific audiences in specific situations to meet defined objectives.
• Interactive Design: often abbreviated as IxD, is “the practice of designing interactive digital products, environments, systems, and services.” Beyond the digital aspect, interaction design is also useful when creating physical products and exploring how users might interact with them.

• JavaScript is a logic-based programming language that can modify website content and make it behave differently in response to a user’s actions. Common uses for JavaScript include confirmation boxes, calls-to-action, and adding new identities to existing information.

• Marketing: the action or business of promoting and selling products or services, including market research and advertising. What marketing is really about is connections. Connecting your brand, product, or service with the desires, wants, and needs of an audience.

• Package Design: the connection of form, structure, materials, color, imagery, typography, and regulatory information with ancillary design elements to make a product suitable for marketing.
• Promotional Design: graphics created to increase the exposure of your business by utilizing strong promotional designs that demand attention and help your business to stand out from the crowd.
• Publication Design: is the layout and graphic designs for printed materials such as newsletters, magazines, books, brochures, etc.

• The AD Leaf Marketing Firm:

  A marketing and advertising success team that focuses on achieving results for its clients. We are a team entrenched in the ever-changing landscape of all things digital marketing. The AD Leaf® was founded on a mutual need to provide transparent and results-driven services. For the last decade, we have provided digital marketing results in the local market! Ready to start your marketing success?

• Target Audience: the intended audience or readership of a publication, advertisement, or other message catered specifically to said intended audience.
• Traffic: is the data sent and received by visitors to a specific website.
• Typography: is the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable, and appealing when displayed. The arrangement of type involves selecting typefaces, point sizes, line lengths, line-spacing, and letter-spacing, as well as adjusting the space between pairs of letters