Marketing Glossary of Terms

Marketing your business and listings, especially through digital ads, is important to success in today’s market. When marketing for the first time it is common to come across terms or phrases that you are not familiar with. To set you up for success we have provided a brief list of important industry terms that will be a helpful point of reference.  

Audience: The target demographic to focus your ads to attempt to convert. The audience can vary depending on marketing channel, content, product, service, etc. It is also common for an advertiser to have multiple audiences. 

Campaign:  A series of advertising messages that share a theme, and market a product or service. In the context of digital marketing, campaigns can be run through search and display network advertising platforms (i.e., Google, Bing), social media, email, or other online platforms. Campaigns can also refer to a comprehensive digital marketing strategy or project. 

‍Content: Any form of online media that can be read, watched, or provides an interactive experience. Content commonly refers to written materials, but also includes images and videos. 

Call to Action (CTA): The part of a marketing message that attempts to persuade a person to perform a desired action. A CTA can be a clickable button, an image, or standard text. 

Click-through: The process of clicking through an online advertisement to the advertiser’s destination. 

Click-through Rate (CTR): The average number of click-throughs per hundred ad impressions, expressed as a percentage. ‍Click-Through-Rate - A metric showing how often people click on an ad or search result after they see it. It can be calculated by dividing the number of clicks, by the number of impressions (how many times the ad or search result was seen). This ratio can be useful when determining whether the messaging matches what the consumer is searching for, and if it resonates with them. A higher click-through-rate means more engagement, which generally leads to more quality conversions. 

Conversion Rate: The percentage of visitors who take a desired action 

Cost Per Click (CPC): The cost or cost-equivalent paid per click-through. 

Cost Per Lead (CPL): The online advertising payment model in which payment is based on the number of qualifying leads generated 

Channel: The avenue or outlet an advertiser chooses to use to market to their audience. Common marketing channels can be Google, email, social media, organic, or paid. 

Copy or Ad Copy: The text associated with an ad. Copy can also be referred to as the main content on the pages of a website, but when talking about ad copy it is usually in reference to the headlines and description that accompany the ad. 

Demographics: Statistical data relating to the general population or the smaller groups within it. Demographics are broken down by age, gender, location, income, occupation, ethnicity, and race. It is a customary practice in marketing campaigns to target advertisements towards one or several demographics. 

Dashboard: A web page that contains and displays aggregate data about the performance of a website or digital marketing campaign. A dashboard pulls information from various data sources and displays the info in an easy-to-read format. 

Personal Facebook Page: A personal Facebook page is what you use to share photos and information about yourself, this page is not associated with a business or able to be used to market a business through Facebook Ads. Your personal Facebook Page is vital to setting up a Facebook Business page. You must have a personal Facebook page to link to a Facebook Business page as an admin. 

Facebook Business Page: A Facebook business page refers to a marketer’s business profile page on the Facebook social media platform. The page is similar to a personal Facebook page; only it is a business profile. Local businesses, online marketers, and entrepreneurs can create a Facebook business page to promote their brands, products, and services. Marketers can use their pages to post status updates, provide links, make comments, announce events, and display photos and videos. 

Facebook ‍Business Manager: A Facebook platform that allows marketers to manage multiple pages and ad accounts in one central location. 

‍Facebook Ads Manager: Ads Manager is a tool for creating Facebook ads, managing when and where they will run, and tracking how well campaigns are performing on Facebook, Instagram, or their Audience Network. 

Google Ads: Google Ads refers to the Google online advertising service. Google AdWords allows marketers to reach consumers through the Google search pages and their display networks. Advertisers bid on keywords and keyword phrases. The service provides marketers with different strategies to reach their marketing goals, such as bidding on keywords to display ads to show in the Google search pages results or on Google’s network of partner websites. 

Impression: A single instance of an online advertisement being displayed. Impressions: The number of times an ad is seen by a potential customer. This can be through a search engine results page or through display advertising, and a user does not need to interact with the ad for it to be considered an impression. This is a common metric tracked in pay-per-click campaigns. 
return on investment (ROI) – the ratio of profits (or losses) to the amount invested. 

Marketing analytics: Marketing analytics and digital marketing go hand in hand. Marketing analytics, or digital marketing analytics, is a data-driven approach to the measurement of marketing effectiveness. With the data marketers can capture from social media, web forms, and other mediums, marketing analytics can enable insights that make future campaigns more effective. 

Lead: A conversion from an ad that gives information on a potential customer that a sales team can then convert into a sale. This is a commonly used metric or KPI in any PPC Account. 

Page Views: The number of times a user has visited a web page. Whether there are unique users visiting a page, or the same user visiting a page multiple times, they are all counted as a page view. 

Personal Facebook Page: A personal Facebook page is what you use to share photos and information about yourself, this page is not associated with a business or able to be used to market a business through Facebook Ads. Your personal Facebook Page is vital to setting up a Facebook Business page. You must have a personal Facebook page to link to a Facebook Business page as an admin. 

Reach: The total number of views content receives over a specified period of time. With paid reach, a business will pay money to have an ad with higher visibility within a targeted time frame and demographic, while organic reach requires SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to have users find the business themselves. 

Target Audience: Target audience refers to a specific group of people with shared characteristics that meet a marketer’s buyer personas. In other words, they are the audience that is likely to be the most interested in a marketer’s product or service and to purchase. Typically, a target audience is defined through demographic information. 

Unique Visitors: A metric used in web analytics to show how many different, unique people view a website over a period of time. Unique visitors are tracked by their IP addresses. If a visitor visits the same website multiple times, they will only be counted once in the unique visitors metric.