ULTIMATE CHEAT SHEET: DIGITAL MARKETING TERMS FOR NOOBS f rewards
TAKING ON ANY NEW CHALLENGE AND DIPPING YOUR TOES INTO A NEW ARENA IS ALWAYS INTIMIDATING. It s made even more so if that new arena is filled with terms, acronyms and jargon that you ve never heard before. There might not be a bigger culprit in this game of confusion than the world of marketing. Online marketing in particular. That s why I ve set out to lend a helping hand, by clearing up (or at least trying to describe) the most common terms that you ll run across as you begin to step into this world of online marketing to help grow your ecommerce business and ecommerce marketing strategy template. I might go so far as to call it the ultimate cheat sheet of marketing terms for noobs (well I ll try at least) Don t be afraid. They are just letters (and they do mean something important) Page 2
TABLE OF CONTENTS AOV... 4 API... 5 BANT... 6 CAN-SPAM... 7 CMS... 8 CPA... 9 CPC... 10 CPM... 11 CR... 12 CSS... 13 CTA... 14 CTR... 15 DM... 16 ECP... 17 FB... 18 FTP... 19 GA... 20 LTV... 21 MT... 22 NPS... 23 PPC... 24 PR... 25 PV... 26 RSS... 27 RT... 28 SEM... 29 SEO... 30 SERP... 31 WOMM... 32 ZMOT... 33 Page 3
AVERAGE ORDER VALUE AOV Average Order Value is a pretty straightforward measure. It is the size of the average total purchase a typical customer makes on your site. Another similar term for this from the world of brick and mortar retail is basket size. This is an important number for every ecommerce retailer as it will influence the traffic and number of shopper leads you will need to meet certain milestones in profit. Page 4
APPLICATION PROGRAMMING INTERFACE API Application Programming Interface. As you begin to expand or customize your online store, you ll begin to encounter various APIs. These are the connection points between different software packages or blocks of code. For example, if your site is built with Shopify and you want to customize your store with some third party apps, those apps will most likely be communicating with your store (sharing information and data) through the Shopify API. Page 5
BUDGET NEED TIME AUTHORITY BANT Budget, Authority, Need, Time. This is a simple model used to gauge the purchase readiness or qualification of a potential customer or sales lead. It s a model that helps to rank your potential customers by likelihood to buy. The more criteria you can check off, the more likely they are to buy something now. Do they have budget? Do they have the authority to make a purchase? Do they need what you have to offer? When are they looking to buy? No matter what you sell, or who you sell it to, BANT is a universal model that can be applied to almost any sales or marketing funnel. Page 6
CAN- SPAM CAN- SPAM CAN-SPAM is a US government bill with the full name being: Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003 In short it is a set of regulations that have been put in place to protect consumers from spam or unsolicited messages. The bill does allow marketers to send unsolicited messages provided they comply with the following 3 requirements Unsubscribed compliance; that is providing a clearly visible mechanism for recipients to opt-out of future messages. Content compliance; ensuring the subject lines and body copy are relative to the offer and do not make use of deceptive language or claims. Sending behavior compliance; restricting the volume and frequency of message broadcasts. Page 7
CONTENT MNGMT SYSTEM CMS A Content Management System is a computer program or set of software tools that allows publishing, editing, and modification of website content from a central console or user interface. The most popular CMS on the market is WordPress, which has a rich developer community as well as a broad user base of people who have leveraged its ease of use and flexibility to build their website assets. In the world of ecommerce there are also several commerce focused CMS tools such as Shopify. Page 8
COST PER AQUISITION CPA Cost Per Acquisition. This is how much it costs you to acquire a new customer. It s a simple but very important measure of your marketing effectiveness and cost. This is again one of the foundational numbers you can use to forecast out how much budget to allocate towards your marketing. If you have an accurate sense of what your CPA is then marketing budgeting becomes easy. For example if I know that my CPA is $10 and I need to find 50 new customers, then I can estimate that the marketing budget to reach this goal should be about $500. Page 9
COST PER CLICK CPC Cost Per Click is the measure of the price of having a web visitor click on one of your advertisements. It s one of the more common billing or cost metrics used by online traffic sources. From a marketer standpoint it s great because it means you only pay for usage. Whereas in the old media days, marketing return could be ambiguous. In the Cost per Click model you can see exactly how much your advertising costs, based on ad performance. Page 10
COST PER MILLE $ $ $ CPM Cost per Thousand (Mille). This is an alternative billing or cost model to the CPC model. Rather than paying for each individual click like with CPC, a CPM based online campaign instead is charged per thousand impressions. That is the advertiser or marketer is charged each time the advertisement is shown to 1000 website visitors. Page 11
CONVERSION RATE CR Conversion Rate. Every online marketing campaign is a series or chain of several events. Web visitors will see an ad, click on an ad, be sent to a website asset, and eventually be passed through to purchase a product or submit their name and contact information. The Conversion Rate is a measure of the overall effectiveness of that entire chain of events. Whereas numbers such as CPC can help manage advertisements at a very granular level, Conversion Rate is a number that marketers can use to gauge the total effectiveness of an entire campaign. Page 12
CASCADING STYLE SHEET CSS Cascading Style Sheets is a computer language used to define the look and feel of a website. CSS is designed to enable the separation of document content from document presentation, including elements such as the layout, colors, and fonts. Page 13
TO CALL ACTION CTA A Call to Action is the specific thing you re asking a website visitor to do on a page. For example if you have a landing page designed to capture email leads, then your call to action on that page would be some variation of please enter your email. Crafting an effective call to action is one of the most challenging tasks for any marketer. There are several factors that can influence their effectiveness, from both a copy and design standpoint. Page 14
RATE CLICK THROUGH CTR Click Through Rate. This is a measure of how many of the people who see your ads actually click on them. From an ad standpoint this is one of the key measures of effectiveness. Ads shouldn t be designed simply to be seen, ads (online) are only effective when they compel visitors to click on them to go through to your landing pages. For online marketers CTR is the main measure of ad effectiveness. Page 15
DIRECT MESSAGE DM Direct Messages are private messages that Twitter users that follow each other can send to one another. These are the Twitter versions of private messages or SMS messages. They still have the same 140 character restriction as public Tweets. Page 16
EARNINGS PER CLICK EPC Earnings Per Click. This is a measure of the value of sales generated for each advertisement click. Again another important granular measure to consider in your online ecommerce marketing strategy measuring the financial results or performance of an online advertisement. Page 17
FACEBOOK FB Facebook. You may or may not have heard of them :) They are the world s largest social network, and despite their many detractors are continuing to grow their user base, which is currently well over 1 billion total users. Page 18
FILE TRANSFER PROTOCOL FTP File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a standard network protocol used to transfer files from one host to another host over the Internet. This is a common way for different players in the ecosystem of ecommerce to communicate. For example it s common for ecommerce vendors to send batch orders for processing to a third party warehouse facility via FTP. Page 19
GOOGLE ANALYTICS GA GA is an acronym that some people use for Google Analytics. If you re unfamiliar with Google Analytics then you should stop here and start learning about it and how powerful the statistics it can provide can be. Understanding Google Analytics is that important. One place to start is this previous post. Page 20
LIFE TIME VALUE LTV Life Time Value is a measure of the value a customer has to a store over the course of their entire relationship or lifespan. This is one of the best measures of the longevity of a business. As important as it is for every retailer (online or offline) to get new customers, it s just as important to keep the ones you already have and keep them coming back. Page 21
MODIFIED TWEET MT Modified Tweet or MT is an acronym you ll see show up on Twitter occasionally, it s used to signify when a user shares a post originally posted from another user. They differ from a Retweet (RT) in that the original message has been modified slightly to account for character limitations or other reasons. Page 22
NET PROMOTER SCORE NPS Net Promoter Score. For some this might be one of the more obscure acronyms, but NPS is a generally accepted measure of customer loyalty. For more information on NPS I direct you to a full post dedicated to NPS that we posted a while back. Page 23
PAY PER CLICK PPC Pay Per Click is another way to describe CPC or the Cost per Click billing model for advertising online. Page 24
PAGE RANK PR PageRank is an algorithm used by Google to rank websites in their search engine results. PageRank is a way of measuring the importance of website pages. According to Google: PageRank works by counting the number and quality of links to a page to determine a rough estimate of how important the website is. The underlying assumption is that more important websites are likely to receive more links from other websites. This is one of the most important factors in where your website will appear when someone performs a Google search. Page 25
PAGE VIEWS PV Page Views are a measure of the number of views your website has had. The one nuance to keep in mind is that Page Views measure the total number of pages that were seen. Since most websites are comprised of several individual pages most users who land on your page will view multiple pages adding to your total page views. In fact a high number of page views per visit is a good indication of a higher user engagement rate since it shows they are spending extended periods of time exploring your site. Page 26
REALLY SIMPLE SYNDICATION RSS Really Simple Syndication, is a set of standard web feed formats to publish frequently updated information such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, video. Page 27
RETWEET RT A Retweet (RT) occurs when a Twitter users re-shares a post or piece of content posted from another source author. Page 28
SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING SEM Search Engine Marketing is the term used for all of the marketing techniques that serve to promote a website by way of improving the site s visibility and appearance in search engine results. Page 29
TION SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZA- SEO Search Engine Optimization is one of the most popular forms of Search Engine Marketing. It specifically refers to techniques that can be used to improve a website s ranking in search engine results related to their particular domain. Page 30
PAGE SEARCH ENGINE RESULTS SERP A Search Engine Results Page is the listing of results returned by a search engine in response to a user search request. The results normally include a list of items with titles, a reference to the full version, and a short description showing where the keywords have matched content within the page. A SERP may refer to a single page of links returned, or to the set of all links returned for a search. Page 31
WORD OF MOUTH MARKETING WOMM Word of Mouth Marketing is a term used for all of the tactics involved in promoting a business online through referral marketing software or refer-a-friend type programs. When implemented correctly these can be highly beneficial and cost effective programs for ecommerce businesses find new customers and build loyalty with their existing customers. Now that social media has become such an important part of all of our lives, WOMM has gained added traction since finding recommendations and providing them is easier than it s ever been. Page 32
ZERO MOMENT OF TRUTH ZMOT A term coined by Google. The Zero Moment of Truth refers to the initial point of influence that brands can have over customer s buying decisions. That is a point in time before a consumer even knows of the existence of your brand or has a need for your product. Online, this can happen through an unexpected insight resulting from a search, or from a coincidental product referral from a friend at a time when a consumer isn t even in a shopping or product research state. Page 33