47 Key Digital Marketing Terms You Must Know

If you are an online marketer or even if you are not, these key terms will be helpful in most corporate offices and, of course, in the realm of digital marketing. Digital marketing covers the selling and purchasing of products through the internet, but wait—it’s much more than that.

Digital marketing terms refer to any specific word or phrase commonly used within the context of digital marketing practices and strategies.

Here are 47 such digital marketing terms in alphabetical order:

Digital Marketing Terms Starting From A to F

A

• Analytics: Refers to the process of measuring data from channels like websites, email, social media, and more to gain an understanding of consumer behavior, user experience, and business impact. Analytics are crucial for digital marketing firms to optimize their strategies.
• Affiliate Marketing: Involves a third party referring visitors to a product or service on a digital platform. Social digital marketing often leverages affiliate marketing to extend reach and increase sales.
• A/B Testing: Also known as split testing or bucket testing, is a methodology for comparing two versions of a web page or app against each other to determine which one performs better. This is a key practice in digital marketing topics to improve user engagement and conversion rates.

B

• Backlink: A backlink is a link that one website gets from another. In addition to driving brand awareness and referral traffic, backlinks can benefit your SEO performance. This is an essential concept in b2b digital marketing strategies.
• Bounce Rate: Refers to the percentage of visitors who leave a website after viewing only one page. There are three important bounce rates: hard bounces, medium bounces, and soft bounces. Also, you can calculate the bounce rate by this formula: Bounce rate = # unengaged sessions / total # of sessions. A good bounce rate is around 40% or lower, while a rate of 60% or higher may indicate a need to evaluate your page content and make it more helpful and engaging for users.
• BOFU (Bottom-of-Funnel): This is the closing stage where the marketer goes for the sale. The primary goal of the BoFu stage is to convert potential customers into actual customers, a critical phase in digital marketing and advertising agency strategies.

C

• CTR (Click-Through Rate): This can be used to gauge how well your keyword ads and free listings are performing. CTR is the number of clicks that your ad receives divided by the number of times your ad is shown. The formula is clicks ÷ impressions = CTR. For example, if you had 5 clicks and 100 impressions, your CTR would be 5%.
• CTA (Call to Action): Refers to the action that the marketer wants the consumer to take, such as clicking a button, signing up for a newsletter, or making a purchase. CTAs are crucial elements in marketing materials, driving engagement and conversions. I’ll use a CTA at the end of this blog for better understanding.
• CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization): Focuses on increasing the percentage of website visitors who take desired actions. It is done by optimizing elements on the webpage through testing and analysis. You can calculate it as the total number of conversions divided by the total number of people who visited your website.

D

• Domain Name System (DNS): The phonebook of the Internet. Humans access information online through domain names, such as nytimes.com or espn.com. Web browsers interact through Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. DNS translates domain names to IP addresses so browsers can load Internet resources.
• DAM (Digital Asset Management): A software and systems solution that provides a systematic approach to efficiently storing. The purpose is to efficiently organize, store, retrieve, and distribute various digital files and assets.

E

• Engagement Rate: Used in digital marketing to measure the level of interaction and engagement that an audience has with a particular piece of content, such as a social media post, email, or webpage. It is calculated as the percentage of total audience interactions (likes, comments, shares, clicks, etc.) divided by the total number of impressions or reach, multiplied by 100 to get the percentage.
• Editorial Guidelines: A set of rules that dictate the style, structure, and strategy for an organization’s brand and branding consistency when creating content.

F

• Funnel (Conversion Funnel): One of the main tools of digital marketing. It determines the different phases that a user goes through, from the moment they detect a need related to a brand’s product or service until they become a customer.
• Frequency (In Advertising): Measures how often a person or group sees an ad within a specific time frame, showing ad exposure frequency.

Digital Marketing Terms Starting From G to L

G

• Google Trends: Provides access to a largely unfiltered sample of actual search requests made to Google. You can find related topics to find new niche areas for your business.
• Google Ads: When you search for something, you may see an ad at the top of the search results. Google Ads is a product you can use to promote your business, help sell products or services, raise awareness, and increase traffic to your website. Digital marketing firms often use Google Ads to reach their target audience.

H

• Hashtag: Used to refer to the symbol (#), which is a combination of the word hash from the hash mark and the word tag. It is a way to mark something as belonging to a specific category.
• Header Bidding: An advanced programmatic advertising technique used by publishers to maximize their ad revenue. It allows publishers to offer ad inventory to multiple ad exchanges simultaneously before making ad calls to their ad servers.

I

• Infographic: A collection of imagery, data visualizations like pie charts and bar graphs, and minimal text that gives an easy-to-understand overview of a topic. Make sure your infographic contains a clear purpose and focus, clean design, visuals, engaging information and data, and reputable sources.
• Impressions: The number of times your content was seen, including multiple views from individual users such as an advertisement or a social media post. Impressions are used to measure the reach and visibility of digital marketing campaigns.

J

• Journey Mapping: A visualization of the process that you go through to accomplish a goal. In its most basic form, journey mapping starts by compiling a series of your actions into a timeline. The timeline is fleshed out with your thoughts and emotions to create a narrative.
• Job Title: A strategy for advertising campaigns to specific job titles or professional roles. This strategy is particularly common in B2B marketing. In this, you can specifically target individuals based on their job titles, company names, schools, fields of study, etc.

K

• Keyword: A word or a group of words an internet user uses to perform a search in a search engine or search bar. In an SEO strategy, keywords are very important and should be the core of any copy written for the web. Digital marketing and advertising agencies heavily rely on keywords for effective campaigns.
• Knowledge Graph: A system used by Google to enhance its search engine’s understanding of the world and deliver more relevant and contextually rich search results to users. It collects information from various sources across the web and organizes it into structured data, enabling Google to provide direct answers to user queries within search results pages.

L

• LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing): A technique used by search engines to analyze the relationship between words and phrases in a body of text. LSI keywords help search engines get a better understanding of the meaning of a search query. Instead of concentrating on single keywords, Google looks at the whole context and meaning of a web page. This helps match users with search results that are more relevant to their queries.
• Link Profile: A collection of inbound links pointing to a particular website or web page. A strong link profile is characterized by high-quality backlinks from authoritative and relevant websites. It influences a site’s credibility, search engine rankings, and overall SEO performance.

Digital Marketing Terms Starting From M to R

M

• Map Pack: A set of the top three search results that appear on Google Maps when conducting local searches for businesses. It typically appears prominently at the top of the search results, above the organic search listings.
• Metadata: Describes the content, quality, condition, and other characteristics of data. It allows users access to help understand the content and find data. There are several types of metadata like meta description, meta keywords, canonical tag, title tag, etc.

N

• Nofollow: (rel=“nofollow”) A link attribute that instructs search engine crawlers not to follow the link and thus not to crawl the linked page. We use Nofollow when a site owner wants to link to another site without passing authority.
• NORA (Non-Obvious Relationship Awareness): Used in marketing and sales to identify non-obvious connections and relationships between entities or individuals within a dataset. NORA analyzes large volumes of data to uncover hidden patterns, correlations, and relationships that may not be immediately apparent through traditional methods.

O

• Organic Marketing: A long-term digital marketing strategy that allows companies to build brand awareness, engage and entertain leads using non-paid tactics such as SEO, blog posts, user-generated content, guest posts, video content, social media marketing, and email marketing. It is used to describe unpaid or natural methods of driving traffic, visibility, and engagement to a website or digital asset.
• Out of Home (OOH): Also called outdoor advertising, outdoor media, and out-of-home media, is advertising experienced outside of the home. Advertising billboards, bus shelter posters, and checkout advertising all fall into this category.

P

• PPC (Pay-Per-Click): A model in which advertisers pay a fee each time one of their ads is clicked. It is a popular form of online advertising used to drive traffic to websites, generate leads, and increase sales. CPC equals the average amount paid for each click on an ad. A high number of clicks or visits on an ad means that the ad is getting attention from customers.

Q

• Qualitative Research: A type of research that aims to gather and analyze non-numerical data to gain an understanding of individuals’ social reality, including understanding their attitudes, beliefs, and motivations.

R

• Reverse Marketing: The concept of marketing in which the customer seeks the firm rather than marketers seeking the customer. Usually, this is done through traditional means of advertising, such as television advertisements, print magazine advertisements, and online media. Amazon is a great example of reverse marketing in India.
• ROI (Return on Investment): The profit earned from every rupee your business spends on marketing efforts. A positive ROI means that you’re making more than you invest—the customers you attract as a result of a campaign more than offset the cost of that campaign.

Digital Marketing Terms Starting From S to Z

S

• SEO (Search Engine Optimization): The process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or a web page from search engines. SEO targets unpaid traffic rather than direct traffic or paid traffic.
• SMM (Social Media Marketing): The use of social media platforms and websites to promote a product or service. Although the terms e-marketing and digital marketing are still dominant in academia, social media marketing is becoming more popular for both practitioners and researchers. Social media as digital marketing firms can significantly boost brand visibility.

T

• TOFU (Top of the Funnel): The initial stage of the buyer’s journey, where potential customers become aware of a product or service for the first time. It represents the critical brand awareness stage. It sets the foundation for further engagement and moves individuals closer to conversion as they move down the funnel stages.
• Traffic: A flow of visitors who access a website or web page through various channels, including search engines, social media platforms, referral links, direct visits, and online advertisements.

U

• User Persona: A fictional character created to represent a user type that might use a site, brand, or product similarly. Personas represent the similarities of consumer groups or segments.

V

• Virality: A piece of content, such as a video, image, article, or meme, spreads rapidly and widely across the internet through social sharing and word-of-mouth. When content goes viral, it gains significant attention and engagement from a large number of people in a relatively short period.

W

• White Hat SEO: Refers to any practice that improves your search rankings on a search engine.
• Webinar: An online seminar used to train, inform, or sell to an audience of viewers who signed up to view the presentation.

X

• XML (Extensible Markup Language): A document in XML format that categorizes all relevant pages, posts, files, etc. of a website. This document is not intended for human use, though it can be viewed by humans.

Y

• Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) Pages – A category of web pages identified in the Google Quality Rater Guidelines as potentially impacting the future happiness, health, financial stability, or safety of users.

Z

• Z – ZMOT (Zero Moment of Truth): A concept coined by Google to describe the moment when a consumer researches a product or service online before making a purchasing decision. It represents a significant concept in consumer behavior and online marketing strategies.

If you want to start your career in digital marketing, do check out this digital marketing program.