The Green Geek: Techno-Marketing Jargon Dictionary
Q:
Dear Geek,
I read with interest your article on building a web site and I’m happy to say I went and got a web designer to put one together for me. However, she is now talking to me about online marketing using a language I simply don’t understand. I know about online ads and spam, but that’s about as far as I go. She’s talking about viral-hyperlink-spider-thingies and other stuff that sounds like it’s out of Doctor Who. Can you help me make sense of it all?
Sincerely,
Sarah Jane Smith
A:
Dear Sarah,
How to get the most from online marketing is a huge and ever-changing topic, and worthy of several articles covering different areas. We’ll need to look at how Google and other web search engines list web sites and how they place ads based on what words people type in when searching. We’ll need to examine how banner ads get placed on specific web sites. Finally, we’ll need to look at how you go about budgeting for your online ads!
However, before we can start any of that, let’s first cut through the jargon. I’ve prepared a list of online marketing terms and given them everyday definitions. At the very least, this dictionary will help you understand what your web designer is talking about.
Above the line: Marketing where messages are broadcast or mass distributed, e.g. advertising, advertorials, static web site development and banner ads, public events run directly by you, etc.
Banner ad: A graphical or Flash advertisement placed on web sites. There are several common sizes of banner ads, and generally you will need to provide an ad of each size for a successful online banner campaign.
Banner ad exchange: A link exchange specifically catering for banner ads.
Below the line: Marketing that is more directly targeted to specific consumers, including direct marketing, public relations, analyst relations, government lobbying, development of online communities, ‘viral marketing’ campaigns, participation in external events, development of staff as ‘industry spokespeople’ or ‘experts,’ etc.
Bid ranking: A company’s sponsored link position on a search engine result page based on how much money it is willing to pay versus other advertising bidders.
Blind links: A link on a web site or email that takes a user to a web landing page that they not have been expecting.
Blog: A ‘web log’ is an online location where a series of messages from one or more authors is posted. A small number of blogs have readership in the thousands and are influential in political and industry commentary.
Click Through Rate (CTR): The number of clicks through to a linked website per online ad impression, expressed as a percentage.
Contextual Ad: Banner or text ads placed by sponsored link services on web pages whose content is directly related to the ad. Google AdSense is the best known service.
Consumer created content / advertising: Content created by consumers to support (or lampoon) a organisation and its products and services.
Content Creation: In relation to above, increasingly made by consumers and users with low cost technology and distributed over sites such as Flicker, FaceBook, YouTube and mobile devices. Consumer-created advertising is growing.
Cost Per Click (CPC): The average cost (over a given period of time) incurred by the advertiser by the action of an Internet user following a link found on a web site (e.g. a link from a banner ad, text ad or paid content.)
CPM: 1. Traditional - A measurement of advertising costs. Cost per 1000 impressions (an impression being the circulation of a magazine that carries an ad, or estimated audience of a TV or radio show.) 2. Online – A measurement of the cost per number of views of a specific online advertisement, measure in cost per 1000 views. The key difference with the traditional use of the term CPM is that online CPM may not represent individual user views (i.e. just the numbers of hits) or it may be used in relation to unique user views. It is important to reconfirm the exact meaning of the term CPM when discussing with online marketing.
Customer Relationship
Management (CRM): An application that tracks customer interactions with an organisation and support marketing and sales processes.
Email marketing: Using email to communicate messages to a predetermined audience, either to establish new relationships or to build and maintain relationships with existing customers. This is not to be confused with spam.
eZine: A regular “magazine format” online resource, either emailed to subscribers in full or via emailed links back to a web site, via a mailer.
Flash: An interactive, animated interface file format available as a plug-in for web pages. Often used to create marketing web sites and in banner ads.
Hyperlink: A reference within a document to another document or resource. Generally used in relation to linked information on the world wide web. However, hyperlinks can also be placed in most digital media, including software, PDF documents, and music and video files.
Guerrilla marketing: Marketing activities that make use of competitors’ campaigns or leverage public events to gain visibility. Often of a controversial, or at least ‘cheeky’ nature. E.g. The distribution of email joke or movies.
Hits: A raw measure of the number of times a file or web page is requested from a server. This metric is more or less useless when compared to today’s more sophisticated approaches to measuring consumer online behaviour.
Impressions: 1. Traditional – the number of readers of a publication. 2. Online web site viewed, calculated in ad views or CPM, now transacted on cost per click.
Keyphrase: Also known as search term and search phrase. Combinations of keywords entered by people into search engines when searching for specific information. As user-entered search strings have grown longer over the past decade, keyphrases are becoming a more important than keywords for marketers. Also called search terms.
Keyword: 1. The word(s) entered by users when into search engines when searching for specific information. 2. Words used to describe a specific page in meta tags and site copy.
Key Performance Indicator (KPI): A measurable activity that is used to determine the level of performance of a marketing or sales program (or other business process). KPIs are often used to determine the performance of different parts of marketing campaign.
Landing page: The web page a prospective customer will be sent to after clicking on a link. Often marketers will have multiple landing pages with messaged tailored specifically for the context of the link clicked on by the prospect.
Link: The more generic term for a hyperlink. Often used when discussing online advertising to describe the text, banner ad or search engine response that directs a prospect to and advertisers own web site. In this sense, a link has both a description (how it looks to the prospect), a context (where and when it is show) and a destination (the web site the prospect will be taken to if they click on the link.)
Link farm: The creation of many hundreds of pages under multiple domain names that contain links back to specific web pages in order to gain a better ranking on search results. The reason behind this strategy is that search engines such as Google factor how many other web sites link to a web page as part of the algorithm for determining position. However, commercial link farms are now more or less blocked by major search engines and may actually hinder, rather than help your ranking.
Link tracking: The practice of tracking which web pages a user has visited during an online session.
Mailer: An automated email application that sends emails to multiple recipients. Most mailer applications allow emails to be customised based on information contained in subscriber databases.
Marcom: Short for “Marketing and Communications”, this is the combination of all marketing activities, including corporate communications, public relations, advertising, events, product packaging, etc.
Multi-channel: Using more than a single method to reach a consumer: e.g. online web sites, TV advertisements, in-store promotions are all different channels. When used together as part of a single marketing campaign, the campaign is said to be multi-channel.
Natural listing: Also known as natural links and organic listings. These are results returned by a search engine which have not been paid for (i.e. they are not sponsored links).
Opt-in: The process of asking a consumer if they wish to be added to a database related to specific marketing objectives, with the default response is for the consumer to NOT be added to the database.
Opt-in list: Lists of email addresses of people who have agreed to receive messages on specific topics from one or more organisations. These lists are required when developing email marketing to avoid being accused of propagating spam.
Opt-out: Same as opt-in, with the default response being for consumer to be automatically added to the database.
Paid Link: See sponsored link.
Pay Per Click (PPC): A charging model where the advertiser pays each time a user clicks on their online advertisement, such as a banner ad or sponsored link. This is the most common method used to generate revenue from search engine listings. Yahoo! Search Marketing and Google AdWords are examples of such services. Such services use the terms Cost Per Click and Click Through Rate extensively.
Ranking: A link’s position on search engine result pages based on specific keyphrases, with the first listing on the page being the number 1 ranking. It has been noted that more than 80% of all click-through occur within the top three ranked links on a search engine result.
Really Simple Syndication (RSS): A form of online syndication used by news sources, blogs and podcasts that notifies a subscriber of updated or new content and provides online links or direct download of the new content for offline use (such as in an iPod, mp3 player, PDA or ebook reader.)
Return on Investment (ROI): 1. In marketing - A measure of the success of a particular marketing campaign by comparing the growth in sales against the money spent on the campaign. ROI of online marketing is more easily traceable than off-line marketing. 2. In technology – a measure of the direct business savings or increased revenues against the amount spent on technology (including hardware, applications, and human capital needed to support the technology), usually specified over a specific time period. It should be noted that the ROI for most online marketing campaigns overlap the ROI of the supporting technology.
Robot: See spider.
Rotation: Automatically changing on a rolling basis an online advertisement between two or more advertising messages or banner ads. This allows marketing to review which ad is the most successful, usually in terms of click-though rate.
Search engine: A website that provides users with lists of useful links in response to a text query. Different search engines have very different models of indexing web content, ordering results to user queries and business models. Search engines are further defined as pure search engines, such as Google, and portals, such as Yahoo! and MSN.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): Also know as web site optimisation. A broad term that describes the process of customising web sites into order to increase their position (ranking) on search engines’ natural links (i.e. where they are listed on search results.)
Search term / phrase: See keyphrase.
Shopping cart: 1. Software running on a web server that enables online customer to purchase from a web site. 2. The virtual ‘basket’ in which a customer can place orders on an online web site.
Shopping cart abandonment: The measurement describing the number users starting the purchasing process on a web site, without completing the process. Used as a KPI to determine the ease and effectiveness of a shopping cart system and its related billing system.
Site conversion: Various practices attempting convert web traffic into specific actions, such as sales, brochure requests, subscription to an RSS, entry of email addresses, etc.
Site map: 1. A page on a website offering links to every page or major section on the site.
2. An XML document attached to a web site that allows a search engine’s spider to better index the site.
Spider: Also known as a robot. A search engine application that scans web sites and ‘climb down’ through all available links on those sites in order to capture information used to process user search queries.
Sponsored link : Also known as paid links. These are hyperlinks (links) returned by search engines or on context-specific web sites that are paid for by an advertiser. In some search engines, such as Google, it is clearly indicated which links are sponsored and which are natural listings. On other search engines it is not clearly indicated which are sponsored and which are natural links. Sponsored links may also appear automatically from a search engine on third-party pages that have a context similar to the keyphrases of the sponsored link.
Social networking: The effect of many people connecting via an online service (such as FaceBook or LinkedIn) and joining to create a community working towards specific shared goals. Through the line Marketing programs that rely on mixed media – a blend of TV, radio, print and on-line activities.
Traffic: Online visitors entering, moving within and leaving a web site. Increasingly, traffic is being monitored both within and outside of a single web site to develop better understandings of consumer behavior.
Viral marketing: The application of ‘meme theory’ to create packages messages that are passed through a social network by members of the network. This term is also sometimes used to (inaccurately) describe unusual or controversial guerrilla marketing tactics.
Volume of traffic: Also called traffic volume. The number of consumers entering, moving about and leaving a web site. Normally measured as hits and frequently interchanged with that term.
Web 2.0: Web-based social-networking services that connect people in an ad-hoc collaborative manner to perform specific functions.
Zero-cost marketing: A marketing campaign where the total costs of running the campaign are disbursed among business partners or the consumers themselves. For example, SMS-based marketing programs may pay for themselves through partnerships with telecommunications companies.