Glossary of Marketing Terms

Thanks to Hubspot for the following acronyms and definitions in the world of online content marketing.

BR: Bounce Rate

Website bounce rate: 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. A high bounce rate generally leads to poor conversion rates because no one is staying on your site long enough to read your content or convert on a landing page (or for any other conversion event).

Email bounce rate: The rate at which an email was unable to be delivered to a recipient’s inbox. A high bounce rate generally means your lists are out-of-date or purchased, or they include many invalid email addresses. In email, not all bounces are bad, so it’s important to distinguish between hard and soft bounces before taking an email address off your list.

CMS: Content Management System

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.

CPC: Cost-per-Click

The amount of money spent to get a digital advertisement clicked when running a Pay Per Click (see below) advertising campaign. CPC is used to assess the cost effectiveness and profitability of your campaign.

CR: Conversion Rate

The percentage of people who completed a desired action on a single web page, such as filling out a form. In general, pages with high conversion rates are performing well, while pages with low conversion rates are performing poorly (though there can be exceptions to this rule).

CRM: Customer Relationship Management

A set of software programs that lets companies keep track of everything they do with their existing and potential customers. CRM systems can do things, like tracking email, phone calls, sending personalized emails and logging every instance of customer service and support.

CRO: Conversion Rate Optimization

The process of improving your site conversion using design techniques, key optimization principles, and testing. It involves creating an experience for your website visitors that will convert them into customers. CRO is most often applied to web page or landing page optimization, but it can also be applied to social media, CTAs, and other parts of your marketing

CTA: Call-to-Action

A text link, button, image, or some other type of web link that encourages a website visitor to take an action on that website, such as visiting a landing page to download a piece of content.

The action you want people to take could be anything: Download an ebook, sign up for a webinar, get a coupon, attend an event, and so on. A CTA can be placed anywhere in your marketing — on your website, in an ebook, in an email, or even at the end of a blog post.

CTR: Click-Through Rate

The percentage of your audience that advances (or clicks through) from one step of your marketing campaign to the next. As a mathematic equation, it’s the total number of clicks that your page or CTA receives divided by the number of opportunities that people had to click (ex: number of page views, emails sent, etc.).

GA: Google Analytics

A service by Google that generates detailed statistics about a website’s traffic and traffic sources, and measures conversions and sales. Marketers use it to get to know their audience, trace their customers’ paths, and make a visual assessment of how visitors interact with their pages.

KPI: Key Performance Indicator

A type of performance measurement companies use to evaluate an activity’s success. While KPIs are used throughout a business, marketers look at KPIs to track progress toward marketing goals.

Examples of KPIs include CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost), leads generated, and homepage views. Choose KPIs that represent how your marketing and business are performing. 

PPC: Pay-per-Click

An internet advertising model where advertisers pay a publisher (usually a search engine, social media site, or website owner) a certain amount of money every time their ad is clicked. For search engines, PPC ads display an advertisement when someone searches for a keyword that matches the advertiser’s keyword list, which they submit to the search engine ahead of time. 

There are two ways to pay for PPC ads:

1. Flat rate, where the advertiser and publisher agree on a fixed amount that will be paid for each click. Typically this happens when publishers have a fixed rate for PPC in different areas on their website.
2. Bid-based, where the advertiser competes against other advertisers in an advertising network. In this case, each advertiser sets a maximum spend to pay for a given ad spot, so the ad will stop appearing on a given website once that amount of money is spent. It also means that the more people click on your ad, the lower PPC you’ll pay and vice versa.

SaaS: Software-as-a-Service

Any software that is hosted by another company, which stores your information in the cloud. Examples: HubSpot, Dropbox, IM clients, and project management applications.

SEM: Search Engine Marketing

Aka, Paid Search or Pay Per Click (PPC), search engine marketing (SEM) is a digital marketing strategy used to increase the visibility of a website in search engine results pages (SERPs).

While the industry term once referred to both organic search activities such as search engine optimization (SEO) and paid, it now refers almost exclusively to paid search advertising.

SEO: Search Engine Optimization

Techniques that help your website rank higher in organic search results, making your website more visible to people who are looking for your brand, product, or service via search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

There are a ton of components to improving the SEO of your site pages. Search engines look for elements including title tags, keywords, image tags, internal link structure, and inbound links — and that’s just to name a few. Search engines also look at site structure and design, visitor behavior, and other external, off-site factors to determine how highly ranked your site should be in the search engine results pages.

SMM: Social Media Marketing 

When people use social media to market their business to customers, potential customers, journalists, bloggers, employees, potential employees, and anyone else in the social universe.

Solopreneur

A person who sets up and runs a business on their own (aka, yours truly, Usher Ink).

UI: User Interface

A type of interface that allows users to control a software application or hardware device. A good user interface provides a user-friendly experience by allowing the user to interact with the software or hardware in an intuitive way. It might include a menu bar, toolbar, windows, buttons, and so on.

UX: User Experience

The overall experience a customer has with a particular business, from their discovery and awareness of the brand all the way through their interaction, purchase, use, and potential advocacy. To deliver an excellent customer experience, you have to think like a customer, or better, think about being the customer.