Digital marketing
glossary

An A-Z guide on digital marketing terms to know

With the digital world filled with terms and acronyms that could be overwhelming to understand, Croud’s glossary covers the most commonly used digital marketing terms to know. You can explore our full list of helpful terms, or click on one of the letters directly below to find the exact term you’re looking for!

If there are any terms we’re missing, please get in touch using the form at the bottom of the page and we’ll be happy to add them to our glossary.

A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z | # 

A

Above the fold

To be positioned in the upper half of a web page, and therefore visible without scrolling down the page.

Ad 

The first point of contact between a client and the customer. This directs the customer to the site to buy the products and/or services our client offers, acting as an online shop window to the customer.

Ad extensions

A PPC ad copy feature that shows extra business information with your ad, like an address, phone number, store rating, or more webpage links. They normally show as part of the ad, but underneath the headline and description lines, and are not always clickable.

Ad group

A set of keywords, ads, and bids that is a key part of how your account is organised. Each campaign is made up of one or more PPC ad groups, while each ad group typically includes about 5-10 keywords.

Ad Rank

A value that’s used to determine your PPC ad position in relation to other ads on a page and whether your ads will show at all. Ad Rank is calculated using your bid amount, your auction-time ad quality, the Ad Rank thresholds, the competitiveness of an auction, the context of the person’s search, and the expected impact of extensions and other ad formats.

AdSense

A PPC program run by Google that allows website publishers to earn money by serving targeted Google ads on their website. The publisher can choose where on their website they want the ads displayed, and can then earn money through ad clicks or, in some cases, views. 

AdWords

The former name for what is now known as ‘Google Ads’. This is the online advertising platform developed by Google, where advertisers manage their PPC activity. 

Alt tag

It is an HTML attribute applied to image tags to provide a text alternative for search engines to identify images. Applying images to alt tags informs Google what a photo is, and helps with website accessibility and image SEO. 

Analytics

The examination and discovery of meaningful patterns, trends and insights in data to make better informed, strategic marketing decisions. 

Anchor text

Every link consists of two main elements; the web address that the link is pointing to (the destination) and the anchor text. The anchor text is the text in an HTML hyperlink displayed when linking to other parts of the website. SEO-friendly anchor texts can usually provide search engines and users with relevant information about the content of the link’s destination.

App campaign

An automated Google Ads campaign type that enables you to drive and track app installs and in-app conversions, by promoting your PPC ads across Google’s networks. Google Ads will automatically generate and optimise ads for you using your ad text ideas and assets.

Attribution

Attribution allows you to control how credit for a particular conversion is given to the marketing channels that led to the action taking place. It takes into account the channels and traffic sources used across multiple sessions for a user. You can set the amount of historical data included in the reports using the lookback window, First Interaction and Last Interaction.

Auction insights

A report that lets you compare performance with other PPC advertisers participating within the same auction. This information can help you make strategic decisions about bidding and budgeting by showing what’s successful and where opportunities exist for improved performance.

Audience targeting

In PPC advertising, audience targeting allows you to be more accurate when choosing who sees your ads. You can reach people based on who they are, their interests and habits, what they’re actively researching or how they’ve interacted with your business.

Average cost-per-click (avg. CPC)

The average amount you’re being charged per each click on your PPC ad. This can be calculated by dividing the total cost of your clicks by the total number of clicks.

Average Order Value (AOV)

The average amount of money spent by a customer when placing an order online or on a mobile device. It is calculated by dividing the total revenue by the total number of orders.

Average position

An old Google AdWords metric used in PPC that describes how your ad is typically positioned on search results pages.

Automated extension

PPC ad extensions created by Google’s algorithm that gives advertisers a better chance of gaining conversions. When the algorithm predicts that an automated extension will improve an ad’s performance, the extension is automatically created and added to the ad. 

B

Backlinks

Links placed on another website that points back to your site. Backlinks are an important factor for SEO – earning a lot of high-quality backlinks with relevant anchor texts can be helpful for improving SEO.

Bidding strategies

In PPC marketing, automated bidding takes the heavy lifting and calculations of setting bids to meet performance goals. Each type of automated bid strategy is designed to help achieve a specific goal for your business.

Black hat SEO

Black hat SEO is the name for all SEO practices that are known for being manipulative or unethical. This can cause your site to be penalised by search engines.

Bounce

A bounce is reported when a user’s session only contains a single pageview and ‘takes no action’. The idea is that someone comes to your website and they ‘bounce’ away, and leave after only viewing a single page without triggering any events.

Bounce rate

Bounce rate is the percentage of sessions reported as bounced. Bounce rate can provide top-level insights about the performance of your content.

B2B (business-to-business)

A term used to describe a company that sells its products or services to another company, as opposed to selling to consumers. 

B2C (business-to-consumer)

A term used to describe a company that sells its products or services to consumers, as opposed to selling to another business.

C

Call extensions

Call extensions allow you to add a phone number to your PPC ad. When a call extension shows, people can click to call your business directly, which can lead to increased customer engagement with your ad and a higher chance of gaining conversions. Clicks on your phone number are considered the same cost as headline clicks. 

Callout extension

Callout extensions allow PPC marketers to promote unique offers to shoppers, such as free shipping or 24-hour customer service. When customers see your ads, they get detailed information about your business, products, and services.

Call-to-action (CTA)

A type of content (text, button, web link, etc.) that typically uses an imperative verb, encouraging users to immediately respond by performing a specific requested act. This could help drive leads and conversions. Examples include “Add to Cart,” “Subscribe now,” and “Register here.”

Campaign

A set of PPC ad groups (ads, keywords, and bids) that share a budget, location targeting, and other settings. A Google Ads account typically has many ad campaigns running at once.

Canonical tag

A tag which allows the webmaster to inform a search engine that a specific URL represents a master copy of a page. The main idea is that when using a canonical tag, it prevents problems caused by “duplicate” content appearing on multiple URLs, and tells search engines which version of the URL you want showing on search results. 

Churn rate

A metric used to determine how many customers a company retains and at what value. It is calculated by dividing the number of customers lost during a specified timeframe by the total number of customers that the company originally had at the beginning of that timeframe.

Clicks

When someone clicks your PPC ad, like on the blue headline of a text ad, Google Ads counts that as a click.

Click share

A PPC term that refers to the clicks that you’ve received on the Search Network divided by the estimated maximum number of clicks that you could have received.

Clickthrough rate (CTR)

This metric tells you how successful your ads are in terms of driving traffic to a particular web location. It’s a percentage arrived at by dividing the number of times your ad was clicked by the number of times it was seen or had an impression.

Cloaking (page cloaking)

The practice of taking a webpage and building it in a way so it displays different content to people and search engines. In theory, you could improve your SEO by presenting an optimised page to the spiders and then present users with unrelated content, but this is not encouraged – this is a black hat technique that will get you penalised or even banned by search engines.

Cookie

A piece of data that a website or third party stores in a user’s browser to fulfill a variety of functions, from tracking browsing behaviour to authenticating user accounts (so you don’t have to login every time you visit a site).

Content management system (CMS)

A program application or software that allows marketers to create, edit and manage digital content on their websites. 

Content marketing

Focusing on creating engaging, relevant content that attracts/retains a fixed audience; it will ultimately increase page rankings organically, and drive profitable customer actions.

Conversion

The execution of a predetermined goal or specific action. Examples include sales, registrations, subscriptions, downloads, etc. 

Conversion rate (CVR)

The percentage of users who execute the predetermined goal or specific action. The higher the conversion rate, the better. 

Conversion rate optimisation (CRO)

The process of using testing, analytics, and research to increase the percentage of users who perform a desired action on your website, app, etc. 

Cost per lead/cost per acquisition (CPL/CPA)

A cost per lead, also referred to as cost per acquisition (CPA), refers to the amount of money an advertiser pays search engines and other internet publishers for a lead generated on its advertisement.

Customer Match

Customer Match lets you use your online and offline data to reach and re-engage with your customers across Search, YouTube and Gmail. Using information that your customers have shared with you, Customer Match will target ads to those customers and other similar customers.

Cost per thousand (CPM)

The price of 1,000 impressions on a webpage. 

Crowdsourced content

The process of accumulating content by inviting other freelancers, customers, etc. typically in your online community to engage with your brand.

Customer acquisition cost (CAC)

The total cost (in sales and marketing) within a given amount of time needed to acquire a customer. This is calculated by adding up your marketing and sales expenses within a specified timeframe, and then dividing that number by the total number of new customers within that set time period.

Customer relationship management (CRM)

A set of strategies, practices and software programs that allows a company to oversee and manage all of its customer interactions, with the goal of improving relationships with customers. 

D

Daily budget

An amount that you set for each PPC ad campaign to specify how much, on average, you’d like to spend each day.

Deep linking

Creating a hyperlink that points to a specific page or image on a website, instead of that website’s main or homepage. Deep links are particularly valuable for SEO – linking to specific pages within your site with a good anchor text is one of many factors that could be beneficial for your SEO.

Description

This is the part of a PCC ad copy that sits underneath the headline. The description field should be used to highlight details about your product or service and include a call-to-action. A maximum of two description lines will show, with a maximum of 90 characters each.

Direct-to-consumer (DTC)

A term used to describe a company that sells its products and services directly to consumers without the involvement of a third party.

Display URL

Display URLs give people an idea of where they’ll arrive after they click on a PPC ad. The landing page that you define with a final URL tends to be more specific. For example, if your display URL is www.example.com, your final URL might be example.com/sweaters

Display advertising

A form of digital advertising with the functionality of general advertisement, retargeting, and delivering brand messages. They differ from text ads as they will not appear in search results. Display ads can come in the form of banner ads, interstitial ads, rich ads and video ads. 

Do-follow link

A do-follow link in SEO is a standard HTML link that doesn’t have the rel=”nofollow” attribute. They allow both search bots to follow a link. 

Domain name (and hosting)

The domain is a website’s unique address on the internet, which can affect your site’s overall SEO. For example, this website’s domain is www.croud.com. Hosting, or a web host, is where your website is kept/stored on the web and is needed in order to be a website owner.

Duplicate content

When two or more separate pages within your website have the same, or very similar, content. Having duplicate content on your website is considered to be bad for SEO, as search crawlers may miss some of your unique content. Also, large-scale duplication may dilute your ranking ability and search engines may pick the wrong URL as the “original” to appear in search results. 

Dynamic content

A component of a website, email or mobile app that is customised for users based on information already known about them. Dynamic content software allows companies to use a web-visitor’s  data and behaviours to personalise content for them. 

Dynamic search ads

A component of a website, email or mobile app that is customised for users based on information already known about them. Dynamic content software allows companies to use a web-visitor’s  data and behaviours to personalise content for them. 

E

Engagement rate

A social media metric used to measure the success of a campaign based on the amount of user interaction. The number of likes, comments, shares, etc. can be telling of the effectiveness of your content. 

Enhanced CPC (eCPC)

An automatic bid management feature in PPC advertising designed to increase your ROI by raising or lowering your bids for keywords that the system predicts are more likely to convert.

Expanded text ads

The latest version of text ads that can be shown for a PPC ad. ETA’s have its name as this new format provided advertisers with more characters within the text ads, compared with the previous standard text ads.

Event

A custom interaction that is tracked from your website into Google Analytics. Each event can include up to three dimensions (category, action and label) and a metric (value). Events require custom implementation to be tracked and are then reported inside the standard ‘Behaviour’ reports. Events can also be used to configure event-based goals.

F

Final URL

The URL address of the page in your website that people reach when they click your PPC ad.

Form

The portion of a webpage that invites users to willingly offer information about themselves in exchange for the company’s offer. This can ultimately increase sales, leads, etc.

G

Goal

Goals are used to track desired actions on your website. Goals can be configured inside Google Analytics and can be based on people traveling to a particular page (or pages), triggering an event, sessions of a certain duration or viewing a certain number of pages.

Google Analytics

A program that tracks, stores, and analyzes data from your website traffic, search queries/results, and user behaviour within your site.

Google Display Network (GDN)

The Google Display Network can help PPC marketers reach people while they’re browsing their favorite websites, showing a friend a YouTube video, checking their Gmail account or using mobile devices and apps. Typically ads are visual, in terms of banner ads or video. 

Google forwarding number

A unique, temporary phone number, different from the number on your website, assigned to a Google Ads call extension that advertisers can use in their PPC ads to forward business calls to their own personal phones for the purpose of tracking call conversions. It can be used by turning on call reporting in your account settings.

Google My Business (GMB)

A product often used in PPC advertising that lets you create and manage free business listings in Google Maps so that people can see your business when doing a local search. It was formerly known as ‘Google Places’. 

Gmail ads

Interactive PPC ads that show at the top of your inbox tabs within Gmail. Some of these ads are expandable (they can expand just like an email). The expanded ad can include images, video or embedded forms. Gmail ads help you connect with potential customers in a more personal format.

H

Headline

This is the first piece of text at the top of a PPC ad copy. Ad copy now consists of up to three headlines (previously it was two), each of which can be a maximum of 30 characters and separated by a vertical pipe (“|”) or a dash (“-”).

I

Impressions

A metric used in PPC marketing to track the number of times an ad appeared on any user’s screen (not a count of how many unique individuals saw your ad). One person seeing the ad twice from the same browser will count as two impressions. In programmatic, most buys will include a minimum number of impressions served.

Impression share

In PCC, impression shares are the number of impressions you’ve received divided by the estimated number of impressions you were eligible to receive. Eligibility is based on your current ads’ targeting settings, approval statuses, bids, and Quality Scores. Data is available at the campaign and ad group levels.

Invalid clicks

Clicks on PPC ads that Google considers to be illegitimate, such as unintentional clicks or clicks resulting from malicious software. Google will provide refunds for these clicks. 

J

K

Key performance indicators (KPI)

Performance measurement that stems from your primary metric or what is most important to a particular business’s success. For example, conversions and cost per acquisition can be popular KPIs for many PPC advertisers.

Keyword

A word or phrase that PPC advertisers use to target and display their ads in the sponsored search results.

Keyword density

A number referred to by SEO marketers that describes how often a specific phrase appears in a piece of text. Calculate it by dividing the number of times your keyword appears in a piece of text by the total number of words, and then multiply the result by 100 (to express as a percentage score). A high density score means that the text is most likely about the specified phrase. 

Keyword insertion

An advanced Google Ads feature used in PPC advertising that dynamically updates your ad text to include one of your keywords that matches a customer’s search terms.

Keyword planner

A PPC keyword research tool built into AdWords that gives you access to keyword ideas, statistics and traffic estimates to guide you through the process of finding new keywords for a new ad group/campaign. 

Keyword stuffing

Keyword stuffing is when someone attempts to manipulate their position in search results by concentrating relevant keywords. Filling pages with keywords can result in a negative user experience, and can even harm your site’s ranking. Instead of keyword stuffing, your SEO marketing strategy should aim to focus on creating useful, informative content that uses keywords appropriately and in context. 

L

Landing page

A single webpage that brings visitors to a form containing a call-to-action (CTA) specific to a brand’s campaign (i.e. a marketing offer, service or product). The specified CTA is what makes a landing page differ from any other webpage that may typically include multiple goals, information, etc. A strong landing page can lead to high conversion rates.

Latent semantic indexing (LSI)

Latent semantic indexing is a concept that search engines like Google use to discover how a keyword and content work together to mean the same thing. It is based on a series of mathematical equations and can be quite complex to fully understand. LSI keywords are simply words that are frequently found together because they share the same context.

Lead

A person or company who may potentially become a customer or client, after having previously shown interest in your product or service. Generating more leads can ultimately lead to more conversions. 

Lifetime value (LTV)

The total amount of net profit expected to be generated from the entirety of a relationship with a customer. This can be calculated by subtracting the gross margin from the revenue the customer paid you in a given timeframe, and then dividing that number by the estimated churn rate for that customer.

Limited by budget

A campaign status that appears on your campaigns table when your average daily budget is lower than the recommended amount. This could mean that your budget can’t accommodate all of the traffic available for your campaign targeting settings, and you may be missing out on opportunities to gain more exposure. 

Link building

Link building in SEO marketing is a coordinated process of getting backlinks to your page. If you want to have a well-ranked page, it’s recommended that you get (quality) backlinks to it.

Link farm

This term refers to a network of websites that link to each other for the sole purpose of increasing their rankings (Google Search’s PageRanks). It typically utilises different websites on different services, with each page linking to every other page. However, this is considered a “black hat” SEO technique and should not be used, unless you want your site to get penalised.

Link sculpting

By using a link “nofollow” attribute, you can make some of the links on your site unimportant from an SEO point of view. Consequently, by using this attribute skillfully, you can “sculpt” the PageRanks of certain pages within your website. You can increase the visibility of some pages by boosting them with follow links and decrease the visibility of others by using nofollow links.

Linkbait

Highly viral content that attracts a lot of links and therefore, can effect SEO. Linkbait content is not only text. Videos, pictures, graphics, and audio work equally well.

Localization

Localization involves taking a product and making it linguistically and culturally appropriate to the region where it will be used and sold. These changes are visible to the purchaser of the product or service.

Local campaign

Local campaigns are focused on driving offline goals with the purpose of bringing people to your storefront. Once you promote a specific store location, your shop can be advertised across the Google Search Network, Maps, YouTube, and the Google Display Network, with the goal of maximizing store visits and promoting your store location. 

Low search volume

A status given to keywords that have very little to no search traffic on Google, indicating that they are not popularly searched by customers. Thus, keywords with a low search volume status will remain inactive until its search traffic increases and can begin triggering ads to appear.

M

Manual bidding

Default bidding option in PPC advertising where CPC bids are set manually for a particular keyword, placement, etc. Advertisers also have the option to turn on Automatic Bidding if they don’t want to control their CPC bids manually.

Match types

Keyword match types help control which searches can trigger your ad. For example, you could use broad match to show your ad to a wide audience or you could use exact match to hone in on specific groups of customers. 

Maximum cost per click (Max CPC)

A maximum cost per click in PPC is a bid that you set to determine the highest amount that you’re willing to pay for a click on your ad. A higher bid generally helps your ad show up in a higher ad position on the page. 

Meta description

A short description of a blog/page/post used mostly by search engines. This description is not displayed anywhere on the blog.

Meta tags

Meta tags consist of two main elements: meta description and meta keywords. Meta tags are placed in the <head> section of the HTML structure of your page. The information contained in those tags is for the search engines to determine what the page is about.

Monthly recurring revenue (MRR)

The total amount of revenue a business can predict to generate on a monthly basis. 

My Client Center (MCC)

In PPC, My Client Center is an AdWords “umbrella” account type (now known as Manager Accounts) for advertisers or agencies who are managing multiple client accounts. This is ideal for larger agencies, looking to access multiple AdWords accounts through a single log-in.

N

Native advertising

A type of digital advertising that matches the form and function of the platform that it lives on. These types of ads are not as jarring to viewers, rather they seamlessly blend in with the other editorial content it is surrounded by – they serve as a sponsored ad that naturally melds into the conversation. 

Natural links

All links your page has acquired naturally without you actively building them. These can affect SEO. 

Negative keywords

PPC marketers add negative keywords to their account so their ads do not display when a customer types in a search query containing that keyword. Negative keywords help you filter the clicks to your site more effectively.

Nofollow link

Nofollow links in SEO are hyperlinks with a rel=“nofollow” tag. This tag tells search engines to ignore that link, so they’re likely to not have an impact on your search engine rankings for the destination URL. From a user’s perspective, however, a nofollow link looks exactly the same as a do-follow link.

O

Off-page SEO

There are two main elements of SEO: “on-page” and “off-page”. Off-page practices are everything you do outside your own page or website to impact its rankings. Optimizing for off-site ranking factors is accomplished when other reputable places on the Internet links or promotes your website, and effectively vouches for the quality of your content.

On-page SEO

There are two main elements of SEO: “on-page” and “off-page”. On-page practices are everything you do on your page. This includes tuning the HTML structure, improving title tags and meta descriptions, making your site load faster, checking keyword usage and density, and improving the internal linking structure, etc.

Organic search

Organic search occurs when you visit a search engine, such as Google, input one or several search terms or phrases, and push the search button.

Organic search results (natural search results)

When you do a search on Google, two types of results will most often be displayed. The first will be paid results (E.g. AdWords ads that someone has bought) that appear near the top and bottom, as marked with an “ad” label. The other listings are the organic search results. Understanding organic search results is helpful for SEO marketing.

P

PageRank

PageRank is a Google Search algorithm to calculate the importance of a given website within the internet or a specific webpage within a site. Broadly speaking, the calculation uses weighted backlinks and internal links to assign a PageRank score to the website or page.

Price extension

A type of ad extension that can add more value to your Search Network text ads by giving you a bigger showcase for your services and range of products, by linking people directly to what interests them on your website. They appear below your text ad and give you more space to tell people details about what your business offers.

Promotion extension

A type of ad extension that can add more value to your text ads by highlighting your sales and promotions for people that are searching for the best deals your business has to offer. They appear below your text ad and take people directly to the special offer that interests them on your website when they’re clicked on.

Pay-per-click (PPC)

PPC stands for pay-per-click, a model of internet marketing in which advertisers pay a fee each time one of their ads is clicked on. Essentially, it’s a way of buying visits to your site, rather than attempting to “earn” those visits organically.

Product listing ads (PLA)

In PPC marketing, product listing ads are search ads that include rich product information, such as images, pricing, and business names, without requiring additional keywords or ad text. Ads of this nature appear under the Google Shopping results automatically for consumer queries relating to one of your product offerings. Under Google, these are also known as Shopping Ads.

Q

Qualified lead

A contact that has shown interest in continuing communication with your company about your product or service. 

Quality score

A complex and partially hidden formula used in PPC by search engines that takes CTR, landing page experience, ad relevance and several other factors into account in order to decide whether your keywords are relevant to your ads and landing page. This is multiplied with your max CPC to calculate your Ad Rank to see where your ad will appear on the SERP.

R

Reach

A media metric that tells you how many unique users have been exposed to your post.

Responsive ads

Responsive ads are ads that can transform and adjust to their size, format and appearance to fit available ad spaces in the Display Network. Thus, a single responsive ad may appear one way in one place, and appear slightly differently in another. They can even take on native formatting to take on the tone of the websites they show on.

Return on ad spend (ROAS) / Return on investment (ROI)

Ratio of money gained or lost on an investment relative to the amount of money invested, usually with the formula ‘Revenue / Cost’. 

Remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA)

Feature that lets you target people who have previously visited your site with your search ads and optimise your PPC bids to increase the likelihood of reaching the audience. Targeting and optimizing remarketing lists can lead to highly qualified customers visiting your site.

Robots.txt

This is a file that notifies the search engines which areas of your website are restricted for them. This could be used to exclude all your admin pages from being indexed or to prevent certain subpages from being included in search results. 

S

Sandbox (supplemental index)

Google is believed to have a second index called the sandbox. Some new pages are believed to be put into the sandbox until Google decides they are worthy of appearing in the main index – the one seen when you do a standard search. Websites placed in the sandbox don’t appear for normal searches, making it harmful to your site for SEO.

Search engine marketing (SEM)

SEM describes marketing or promoting your products or services either through PPC or SEO. 

Search engine optimization (SEO)

The practice of improving a site’s rankings in search engines for given keywords. When doing SEO, you need to take care of both on-page and off-page SEO. Search engines like Google change their algorithms to produce better results for the user. This means that SEO tasks can change regularly as different factors increase or decrease in importance.

Search engine results page (SERP)

The listings a user sees in the search engines after typing in a search query. The results typically consist of a series of organic listings and paid or sponsored search ads.

Search partner

Websites partnered with Google or Microsoft to show PPC ads on the Search Network. They can be opted out of in their respective interfaces, but advertisers don’t have the ability to bid exclusively on search partners.

Search query

A basic search query is an important part of PPC advertising, and refers to what the user enters when searching on any search engine. If their search includes the keywords that you are bidding on, your ad will appear (depending on match types and all of the other targeting options, of course).

Search query report

Also known as a “search terms report”, this allows advertisers to review the actual search queries that triggered their PPC ads. This report is great for identifying new profitable keyword ideas and blocking irrelevant queries.

Short tail keywords

Keywords or search terms that typically contain less than three words. They typically have lower relevancy, but higher search volume compared with long tail keywords.

Showcase Shopping ad

A type of ad that shows up on Google Search, Google Search Partners and Google Shopping when people search more general terms than individual products – a Showcase Shopping ad may display several products as they relate to a general search rather than one specific product. This could be useful when introducing your brand and its selection of products.

Sitelinks extensions

In PPC, a sitelink extension is a feature that displays links to different pages of a website beneath the ad text. Sitelinks can appear in ads at the top and bottom of the SERPs and for some search partners. Sitelinks need to direct users to a different destination URL than what your main ad points to.

Smart Shopping campaign

A type of Google Ads campaign that uses automated bidding and ad placement to promote your products and business across networks. Google’s machine learning is used to test different combinations of assets in your existing product feed, and then display the most relevant ads across Google networks. This can maximise your conversion value and expand your reach. 

Social media

Digital media platforms focused on allowing users to create their own content and share it with select groups of other users. 

Social media marketing

The use of social media to advertise a brand, product or service. Social media posts can be both organic or promoted.

Spider (crawler, bot, robot)

In SEO, a search engine spider is a special piece of software that browses the web looking for new sites, checking what is on them and sends the data back to the search engine. It stores this information for the search engine to index and rank these sites.

Store visit

A PPC term that refers to a conversion recorded when a user visits your physical store after making an impression or clicking through to one of your ads. Tracking store visit conversions could help you better understand your ROI and see which campaigns, keywords and devices are bringing customers to your storefront. 

Structured snippets

In PPC marketing, structured snippets show beneath your text ad in the form of a header (ex: “Destinations”) and list of values (ex: “Hawaii, Costa Rica, South Africa”). These are not clickable.

Supplemental result

A supplemental result is an SEO term that refers to a URL placed within Google’s supplemental index, or sandbox. This is a secondary database for pages noted to be less important, as measured by Google’s PageRank algorithm. A supplemental page can rank in search results, but only in circumstances when there are not enough pages within the main index when returning the search.

T

Title tag

Every page has a title tag and can affect your SEO. From a user’s standpoint the title tag is visible only in one place – your browser’s title bar. www.domain.co.uk/title-tag URL. This is the address, or URL, of a specific web page. For example, the URL of Croud’s homepage is www.croud.com. This is what is typed in a browser’s address bar to reach that specific page.

TrueView

YouTube’s advertising platform that allows advertisers to only pay when someone chooses to watch their video ads. It’s a win-win situation, as viewers get to engage with content they’re interested in, and advertisers can target the right audience at the right price. You can find these ads in several forms, including an in-stream ad, reach ad, action ad and video discovery ad.

U

Unique visitor

An individual user who has visited a website at least once within a specified timeframe. Unique visitors are not to be confused with website visits, as website visits track the total number of times a page has been visited, regardless of how many different users make up those visits. 

User experience (UX)

A customer’s overall experience interacting with a brand and its products/services. This includes everything from discovering the brand, navigating through a website, purchasing, etc. To deliver a great user experience, it is important for companies to consider the customer and their needs, values, etc. 

User interface (UI) design

Designing a software application or hardware device to ensure optimal functionality and a quality user experience.

V

View rate

A metric used to track the value of your video campaigns on YouTube and the Display Network. It is calculated by dividing the total number of paid views of a video ad by the total number of impressions. 

View-through conversion

View-through conversions in PPC provide a measurement of the number of online conversions that happened within 30 days after a user saw a Google ad, didn’t click on that ad, and then converted via other means.

W

White hat SEO

White hat SEO refers to the usage of Google-approved website optimization strategies that search engines encourage you to use. There is no official reference place or ranking for SEO practices, so it’s important to stay up to date with recommended best practices, as discussed on SEO blogs and some in-house publications. (Opposite to black hat SEO).

X

XML sitemap

A file (usually sitemap.xml) used in SEO. Its main function is to give search engines a map of all the different URLs that your website contains (all pages, posts, archives, etc).

Y

Z

#

301 redirect

301 redirect is a permanent redirection that informs search engines that the page they’re trying to access has changed its address permanently. With SEO, this means that whatever ranking the page already has should be transferred to the new address (this doesn’t happen with a temporary redirection).

404

The HTTP 404, 404 Not Found, and 404 error message is a SEO term and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) standard response code in computer network communications, to indicate that the client was able to communicate with a given server, but could not be found by the server. The hosting server will typically generate this web page when a user attempts to follow a broken or dead link.