9 Digital Marketing Terms You Need to Know

You’re sitting in your first digital-marketing meeting, and you’re sweating bullets. Your new colleagues are tossing around unfamiliar words and terms – “multivariate testing”, “heatmap,” “geo targeting.’’ Your head’s spinning, clueless as to what many of them mean. But you don’t dare indicate that you’re a bit behind with everything going on in the last few years, especially with your boss in the room.

Knowing key digital marketing terms, and having the confidence to talk shop with peers and clients, is vital to succeeding in this fast-moving, creative arena. Marketing lingo and idioms change almost as fast as you can say and spell “key performance indicator.”

But don’t worry -- we’ve got you.  Check out our brief, digital-marketing glossary for some of the more prominent, frequently used terms and their meanings. Take time, too, to check ZAG Interactive’s comprehensive list of common digital-marketing terms.

• ADA-compliant website – A site designed against current Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) standards. These standards aim to ensure that persons with disabilities – from visual to audio to mobility impairments -- can successfully access and navigate web pages and mobile apps.

• Bounce rate – Measures the percentage of site visitors who open only a single page on your site before exiting. Marketers will want to look into reasons for a high bounce rate on a site to understand if there’s something about the audience, the user experience, or another factor that is causing this.

• Cost per click (CPC) – A vital source of online revenue, this is the price digital advertisers pay per click for paid ads on search engines, social media sites and other online publishers. Closely monitoring your CPC allows you to understand how your ad is performing and what you’re spending to generate a lead to your website.

• Customer segmentation – As a popular digital marketing strategy, through customer segmentation, consumers are grouped based on their shared likes, interests or behaviors. Today’s digital marketers go deeper, divvying people and markets into ever smaller niches, enabling them to personalize their product or service pitches. This is also an important tactic in email marketing.

• Geo targeting – To comb for and better identify potential customers, digital advertisers rely on location data, including ZIP or area codes, or virtual locations, such as internet protocol (IP) addresses. For instance, using geo targeting, a local pizza shop could email digital coupons to pie-eaters only within a 10-mile radius and by ZIP code.But don’t confuse it with “geofencing,’’ a virtual boundary marketers create around smartphones and digital devices to pitch only users entering a target geographic region.

• Heatmap – This colorful graphic visually displays how people are interacting with a web page. This will allow you to see where visitors click, how far they scroll, what draws their eye, what they ignore, among other interactions. HotJar, for instance, is a popular heatmapping tool but some other tools have integrated heatmap features.

• Impression – Every online ad that appears on users’ screens counts as an impression. Web publishers bill digital advertisers for impressions, whether visitors click on the ads or not. Viewed as less efficient and less costly than other ad-billing options, tracking impressions is another way publishers and advertisers gauge the relative success of online campaigns. It’s important that digital marketers further connect the dots between impressions and site actions so truly understand how ads are performing and ultimately contributing to return on investment (ROI).

• Multivariate testing (MVT) – When site owners want to test multiple elements on a page to determine which visitors will perform best (aka result in conversions), they will use multivariate testing (MVT). Different from A/B testing which just tests a single variable, MVT might include changing a headline and a call-to-action button name for example. This is a feature often built into a content management system, but third-party tools can also be used.

• Website personalization – Today’s consumers respond better when content is personalized for them, so website personalization is an increasingly popular tactic to customize content on a site based on specific criteria. Marketers will need to first create personas which represent a specific audience segment and then implement the personalized content through a built-in feature of a CMS or  implemented through a third-party tool. Popular ways to personalize content on a website: Include a previous page a visitor clicked on, their geographic location or based on a form submission.

Knowing how to talk the “talk’’ is the first step to digital-marketing success. Contact ZAG Interactive about how combining your digital strategy and brand marketing can do just that.

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