The Digital Marketing A-Z

If you want to improve your marketing efforts, A/B testing may come in handy. This is the process of comparing two variations of the same variable to find out which one performs best The variations can be change in copy, call-to-actions, landing pages, etc.

This is the advert as it appears on a Google or Bing search.

This is a subset of your Google Ads campaign that targets a specific set of keywords and products.

This involves setting your campaign to display ads on specific days and times, so you invest your budget at times when you’re on hand to service potential customers.

Account Manager, the one in charge or previously working on the campaign or account.

This is a tool used to collect, measure and analyse web data so you can see how many visitors you have and what they are doing when they’re on your website.

The average position from the top of the page where your ad appears on Google. Remember though, it doesn’t necessarily pay the best returns to be number one!

Average cost-per-click (Avg. CPC) is the amount that you’ve paid for your ad divided by its total clicks.

Business Development Managers. The sales staff are often referred to as BDM’s.

The maximum price you, the advertiser are willing to pay for someone clicking on an advert for any given keyword

This is Bing’s pay-per-click advertising platform, which allows you to run adverts across the web.

You can set up your keywords to match in three different categories; ‘Broad match’ will show your ad for a wide variety of search terms related to the original term.

This is a series of related Ad Groups (consisting of adverts and associated keywords) with a shared budget.

This is the percentage of people who see your ad (impressions) and then go on to click through to your website or landing page. So, your brand-new Google ads are live. But how many people have seen them and been interested enough to “click-through” to your website? That’s the click-through rate.

This is the number of times your advert has been clicked on in any given time period.

A conversion happens when your visitor completes an action you deem to be valuable; namely, completing a purchase or filling in an enquiry form.

The percentage of people that click on your ad and then go on to complete the action you want them to once they have reached your website or landing page, e.g. make a purchase, filling in an enquiry form.

CRO is the process of combining quality design with insightful data to make small tweaks to your website to improve how it performs, who sees it, and what they do when they get there. It is done by making your website easy to navigate, quick to load and appealing to look at (amongst many other things).

By setting up some code on your website, your conversions can be recorded and counted, providing a very effective ad performance metric and a means for improving your campaign ROI.

The average amount you pay for each conversion, such as an enquiry form completed or purchase made on your website.

How much it costs every time someone clicks on your Google Ads.

Each time that your ad appears on Google or the Google Display Network, it’s counted as one “impression”. CPM measures the cost for a thousand of these “impressions”. Why a thousand? You might ask. Well, your ad will show A LOT more than people will necessarily see it, notice it, click it. CPM is just one way of measuring ad performance, many advertisers hope viewers will *click* their ad, but CPM is mostly used when you just want lots of people to see your ad a lot of times to get maximum exposure for your brand, product, or service.

A button or signal to a user on a website to take an action. It could be “Buy”, “Contact Us”, “Call Us”, “Subscribe to our newsletter”, “Book Now”

When a website is built not using WordPress, Wix, or Squarespace, it can be referred to as a custom build, or something that a web developer will likely need to add codes to.

The daily maximum allowance we set for your PPC campaign.

Direct Debit, when the first and recurring fee will be taken from the client.

The web page address (URL) shown to people when they see your ad on a search engine; note, this doesn’t have to be the same web page address you send them to.

You can set up your keywords to match in three different categories; ‘Exact match’ is the most targeted match type, and will only show your ad to people who search the exact keyword phrase.

Target who sees your ads based on their location. This could be by country, postcode or a set distance from your business location.

Geo-Targeting is a clever way to increase the quality of your digital marketing when ads or website content are shown to customers based on their location. 

It shares some similarities with Dynamic Content, whereby it could be displaying the copy on your website to people in the correct language (i.e. translating it to German for people in Germany).

But for these purposes we’re talking about it more in terms of targeting your online adverts to people based in certain locations: say you’re holding an event in Enfield and you want to advertise to people in Enfield to get them to come, or you provide garden services in Edinburgh and you want to advertise only in that area. That would be good use of Geo-Targeting.

This is Google’s pay-per-click advertising platform, which allows you to run adverts across the web.

A network developed by Google, meaning you can place ads on a variety of news sites, blogs and other niche sites across the Internet to reach more potential customers. For instance, YouTube and Gmail.

Relevant to e-commerce websites only. This is a Google service which allows users to search for products on online shopping websites and compare prices between different vendors.

Google Tag Manager is a tag management system, We use this application to set up tracking for clients

This is the number of times your ad has appeared on a search via a search engine compared to the total number of searches made on those keyword phrases.

This is the number of times your advert has been seen on a search engine within a given time period.

Words or phrases commonly used by people to search for information via a search engine. When talking about keywords for pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, we’re thinking of the words and phrases that you would use to advertise your product or service so that potential customers can find you on Google. For example, if you are a landscape gardener, your popular words, terms or phrases would include things like “landscaping”, “gardening services” or “gardener near me”

When talking about keywords for organic search (SEO) we’re talking about popular words, terms or phrases that help to increase a website’s search ranking position. So if someone searches “landscape gardener” Google would know that your website is relevant to that person, and is more likely to show it higher up the search results page (SERP).

A tactic that enables the dynamic insertion of the actual keyword searched for into either the headline or description of your ad text.

Conducting research to find out which words or phrases relevant to your business that people are searching for, and set a maximum amount we’ll bid based on the volume of searches and how competitive it is to be seen there. Often using an online tool such as Google’s Keyword Tool or Moz’s Keyword Explorer.

In digital marketing landing pages are a standalone web page, created for a specific marketing or advertising campaign. It’s where your visitor “lands” after they click on a link in your Google Ads, or other marketing activities like Facebook, YouTube, or emails.

Unlike web pages, which typically have many goals and encourage exploration and education, landing pages are designed with a single focus to get the person to perform an action. This is called a call-to-action (CTA) and will include goals like email signup, contact form, or purchase.

Because of this focus, landing pages are a great option for increasing the conversion rate of your ad campaigns and lowering the cost of getting a lead or sale. If they’re built well!

Someone who’s shown, or may show, interest in your service or product.

In marketing, lead generation simply means attracting nee potential customers or “leads” in order to drive future sales.

Essentially, building up a relationship with “leads” to try and encourage them to trust you with their sale or future purchase. This could be through sales calls, emails, social media, blog posts etc.

The customer lifecycle means every step a customer takes before, during, and after they buy from you. It is similar to the marketing “funnel”. 

There are five stages in the customer lifecycle: 

Discovery, education, and purchase. These steps happen up to, and including, the point when the person buys your product or service. Things like showing your brand off on social media, in newspaper or radio ads, or doing Google Ads to attract your leads. And also educating them with clever blog posts and social media, reviews and testimonials on your websites, or well-timed offers.

Post-purchase engagement, and advocacy. These are steps that happen after the person buys your product or service: now you’ve got them, how can you keep them coming back? Good customer support, informative email campaigns, interesting social media posts, and attractive offers.

The number of times your ad has not appeared on a search via a search engine, expressed as a percentage of the total number of searches made. This stat provides a clue as to how much more you could invest in your campaign without using new keywords.

Websites are traditionally not optimized for mobile so when a website loads fast and has an easy design on mobile it is considered mobile responsive.

Negative keywords added to a campaign – used for excluding certain search terms from your campaigns to help you focus on only the keywords that matter to your customers. i.e. if you sell only beach balls, you don’t want your ads to show when people search “tennis balls”.

Your optimisation score (opti score) is an estimate from Google Ads of how well your Google Ads account is set to perform.

The standard (non-paid for) search results compiled by a search engine which appears in the centre of the search results. Google and other search engines use complex algorithms based on a variety of ranking factors to rank sites in this way.

You can set up your keywords to match in three different categories; ‘Phrase match’ is more targeted than ‘broad match’ but more forgiving than exact match. This option requires specific words to be included in the same order within a search term for your advert to show.

Relevant to e-commerce websites only. These are ads that show the customer a picture of the item, its price and your shop name. Customers who click on your ad will be directed to your website where they can buy your product.

This is the position (from the top of the page reading down) that your advert appears in the list of adverts shown to someone performing a search.

Where advertisers only pay when someone actually clicks on an advert that is found by using a search engine.

This is a numerical score out of ten assigned by Google Ads or Microsoft Ads. It measures how relevant a keyword is to your ad and the web page that you direct your clicks. This score is based on a variety of factors, but the biggest contributory factor is your click-through rate. The benefit of a high-quality score is being able to bid less because you are (in Google and Bing’s eyes) providing a quality, relevant experience to the end-user.

The total number of people exposed to an ad.

Referral marketing is the process of promoting products or services to new customers through referrals or recommendations. Compared to traditional online advertising, it’s usually done through word of mouth.

“Referral” traffic is any visitor to your website that doesn’t come directly from a search engine like Google or Yahoo. It will tend to be people finding you from things like news articles or blogs written about your business by someone else, online directories – like Yelp, review sites – like Trustpilot, etc.

Referrals are website traffic that’s driven from outside of your Paid Search Ads, you can improve it yourself by getting listed on directories, review sites, and doing some simple PR such as articles in your local newspaper or trade publications.

A performance measure used to evaluate the efficiency of your pay-per-click marketing investment

Websites such as Google, Bing and Yahoo! that enable users to search for information on the web.

The percentage of searches we are displaying for in the campaign.

Are you longing for that top result in most search engines? You can improve your SEO by paying for it. SEA means that you are buying the top spots in a search engine’s result page. However, your link will have the little “Ad” button or other indication that it is a paid link.

The process of dividing an audience of potential customers into groups based on different characteristics or criteria.

Have you noticed the little yellow boxes that say “ad” next to the top links in a search query? That’s search engine marketing! Because most users select the first options that are shown in search results, businesses pay to get their website linked at the top hoping that people will click their link. This is done through Ads for Google search results. Other search engines (Bing, Yahoo, etc.) have similar tools.

Do you want to increase organic growth and visibility on the internet? Then you have to polish your SEO game. Through technical (e.g., a correctly structured website that a search engine understands) and creative (using the right keywords, optimized headlines etc.) aspects, well-made SEO improves your chances of appearing among the first results in a search query on Google or other search engines.

A campaign traditionally set up by the client with very limited tracking and keyword planning, most clients that come onboard usually have this type of campaign that is not working.

Small and medium-sized enterprises (also known as Small Businesses).

The definition of SMEs varies globally, but in the UK it is defined as independent firms which employ fewer than 250 employees.

It is broken down further into micro-businesses, with fewer than 10 employees and an annual turnover of under €2m, small-businesses, with fewer than 50 employees turning over less than €10 million, and medium-sized businesses that have less than 250 staff and a turnover below €50 million.

Search Query Report (or Search Terms Report) shows what terms or phrases people are typing into search engines that allow for ads to show.

Google Tag Manager, the software used alongside analytics to set up goals in google ads.

Crawler/Spider/Bot: An automated program that visits or “crawls” websites to collect information about them in order to understand their function and relevance. Search engines like Google then use this information to judge the relevancy and authority of a website

An oversimplified example would be if your website was UKGolfTrips.co.uk – the “crawler” would use the information on your webpages, i.e. mentions of golfing terms, golf course names etc and so on, to determine that you are relevant when someone searches around “Golf” terms on Google.