Digital marketing glossary: plain-English Digital marketing terms
Updated
12 Digital marketing terms explained in plain English: what each one means, why it matters, a worked example with real numbers and the terms it gets confused with. Each one links to the free digital marketing lessons where you use it.
B
- Bounce rate
- Bounce rate is the percentage of website visits in which the visitor leaves without meaningfully engaging. In Google Analytics 4 it is the share of sessions that were not "engaged": shorter than 10 seconds, with only one page viewed and no key event. It equals 100% minus the engagement rate.
C
- CPA (cost per acquisition)
- CPA, or cost per acquisition (also cost per action), is what an advertising campaign spent for each conversion it produced, such as a sale, a sign-up or a booked call. It is campaign spend divided by conversions: $3,000 for 60 sign-ups is a CPA of $50.
- CPC (cost per click)
- CPC, or cost per click, is the average amount an advertiser pays each time someone clicks one of its ads. It is calculated as total ad spend divided by total clicks: $900 spent for 450 clicks is a CPC of $2.00.
- CTR (click-through rate)
- CTR, or click-through rate, is the percentage of people who click something after seeing it: clicks divided by impressions. An ad shown 20,000 times and clicked 500 times has a CTR of 500 / 20,000 = 2.5%.
I
- Impressions
- An impression is counted each time an ad, social post or search result is shown on someone’s screen, whether or not they notice or click it. If one person sees the same ad three times, that is three impressions.
K
- Keyword research
- Keyword research is the process of finding the words and phrases people type into search engines about your business, then judging each one by search volume, competition and intent (what the searcher is trying to do) before writing pages or buying ads for it.
M
- Marketing funnel
- A marketing funnel is the path a person takes from first hearing about a business to becoming a customer, split into stages (usually awareness, consideration and conversion) so you can count how many people reach each stage and see where most of them drop out.
O
- Organic traffic
- Organic traffic means visits to a website that come from unpaid search engine results, such as someone searching on Google and clicking an ordinary listing rather than an ad. In Google Analytics 4 it appears as the "Organic Search" channel.
P
- PPC (pay-per-click advertising)
- PPC, or pay-per-click, is online advertising where the advertiser pays only when someone clicks the ad, not when it is shown. Google Ads search campaigns are the best-known example; Microsoft Ads, Amazon and most social platforms offer PPC too.
R
- Retargeting
- Retargeting is advertising aimed at people who have already interacted with a business, usually by visiting its website, so its ads follow them as they browse other sites and social media. It brings back people who showed interest but did not buy.
- ROAS (return on ad spend)
- ROAS, or return on ad spend, is the revenue an advertising campaign brought in divided by what it cost. A campaign that spent $2,000 and drove $9,000 in sales has a ROAS of 4.5, often written 4.5x or 450%.
S
- SEO (search engine optimization)
- SEO, short for search engine optimization, is the work of making a website easier for search engines like Google to understand and more useful for searchers, so its pages appear higher in the unpaid (organic) results for the searches its customers make.
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