Glossary of Terms used in the Online Marketing Business

Acquisition rate - The total participants who accepted and offer on a marketing campaign divided by the total audience.

Ad - An online advertisement. Ads are placed on websites and served from an ad server. Ads usually come in two forms, text ads and display ads. Ads can be served based on the visitor’s preferences; what they purchased or viewed before on the specific site or displayed based on the visitors demographic or geographic information. Ads can be targeted to specific websites, or across the complete advertising network.

Advertising Network - A service where ads are bought centrally through one company, and displayed on multiple web sites that contract with that company for a share of revenue generated by ads served on their site.

Aggregator - A company who provides an intermediary service between content providers, website, or mobile suppliers offering services including campaign management, analytics, administration as well as billing.

Algorithm - The process programmed into a software program that a search engine uses to deliver results to a query. Search engines utilize several algorithms in tandem to deliver search results.

Bandwidth – This is a measurement of how much data can be pushed through a connection. The measurement is based on the number of bits per second (bps), kilobits per second (Kbps), or megabits per second (Mbps). The bandwidth for data delivered to your home of office is usually faster for data delivered to you (download) than the data going back to the internet (upload). When you click a link, a tiny amount of data (just a few bits) that is sent back to the server that delivered the page, when the next page is delivered this download data is typically on the order of 100 Kbps.

Behavioral Targeting – This is the process of monitoring what a user does to determine their preferences. Ads are then served accordingly. For example if a guy searched for cars and other car related searches, then searched for "hose", most likely the search engine would return "radiator hose" instead of something less relevant like "garden hose”. Amazon uses this technique by serving you products that they’ve observed that you like when you first arrive at their page. They store your preference information in a cookie on your browser and when you return, they access this cookie, then pull content specifically to your preferences.

Below the Fold - When a webpage is delivered into your browser, the page is usually taller than the browser can display (the browser displays a scroll bar on the right hand side of the page so you can scroll down to see the rest of the page). The fold is an imaginary line at the bottom of the page delineating the part of the page visible when you first pull up the page, below that makes up the rest of the page.

Bid – The amount of money that an advertiser is willing to pay each time someone clicks on their ad. Bid prices can vary widely depending on competition from other advertisers and keyword popularity. Maximum bid is the highest amount that an advertiser is willing to pay.

Black Hat SEO – This is the process of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) using unethical techniques. This is an unethical process of trying to get a better organic position on the search engines by tricking them. Some examples are cloaking, link farming, keyword stuffing, etc. This is a very bad idea. If search engines detect this they will penalize you by positioning your website always many pages from the first page or not at all. This penalty may last several months to a year once you stop this process.

Blog – This is an online forum where people write opinions or other information that they want to publish online.

Bounce Rate – This is the percentage of visitors who come to your site and within a few seconds leave "bounce" to another site.

Broad Keywords – this refers to keywords that are so broad as to not be clear what they describe. For example the keywords “carpet cleaning” clearly defines that you’re looking for a person that cleans carpets, however, if we just used the word “carpet”, this would give very little information because this keyword is too broad. That is to say it doesn’t describe enough information to be clear. If someone just said to you, “carpet”, you won’t know if they were selling carpet, wanted to clean carpet, remove carpet, home carpet, car carpet ect.

Browser – This is a program that you run to view information on the Internet. Some browsers include Internet Explorer (IE) browser, which ships with Microsoft’s Operating Systems (OS); Firefox browser – developed independently, Chrome browser developed by Google and Safari browser developed by Apple. All browsers are free and can be downloaded from the respective developers.

Negative Keyword - This is a keyword used in keyword based advertising that when added to a list of keywords inhibits an ad from being displayed when the negative keyword is present. For example, when marketing the keywords "real estate agent" –commercial (negative keyword commercial), will display an ad result for the terms for real estate agent, but not if the term "commercial" is in the search query.

Non-Personally Identifiable Information (NPII) - This is data that provides metrics and statistics, but does not provide specific information to contact or identify a specific end-user. Usually this data is aggregated with other data providing an additional level of privacy for the user before being utilized.

Call-to-Action (CTA) – This is an instruction to the reader to act on the message that was received. The action could be to click a link, call a phone number, place an order, or other types of actions.

Clicks – This is the action of a user clicking on an ad or link with their mouse.

ClickBot – Machine generated clicks, often used to artificially increase clicks on a page, sometimes at the detriment of a competitor. Google and other search engines are very good at detecting clicks to your ads that are not from real customers and usually these are removed from your billing immediately. We also have tools integrated into your website to detect this. When this happens, we notify Google for a credit and block the offending IP address.

Click Through Rate (CTR) - The rate (expressed in a percentage) at which users click on an advertisement. This is calculated by dividing the total number of clicks by the total number of ad impressions. CTR is an important metric to measure the performance of an ad’s effectiveness. The higher the CTR the better the ad performed.

Cloaking - Cloaking is a Black Hat Search Engine Optimization (SEO) technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different to that presented to the user's browser.

Common Short Code (CSC) - This is the numeric digits entered by a mobile device user to send a message related to a marketing campaign. For example “text WIN to 12345 for your chance to win this prize!” The 12345 is the CSC code, and can be anywhere from 4 to 6 characters in length. These codes are registered through the Common Short Code Administration organization.

Content Network - A group of web sites that agree to show ads on their site, served by an ad network, in exchange for a share of the revenue generated by those ads. Google uses contextual advertising to match up ads appropriate with the content on each page of these sites.

Contextual Advertising - Advertising that is targeted to a web page based on the content on the page. Ads are displayed based on the keywords found on the page.

Contextual Targeting - Targeting ad placement on website with pages relevant to the goods and services being advertised. For example, if you were advertising sportswear, ads for your products would be targeted to websites about sports, rather than websites about medical.

Content Network - An ad serving process used by Google and Yahoo! that displays keyword triggered ads related to the content or subject (context) of the website a user is viewing

Conversion – The number of times clicks have led to a business result such as a purchase, lead, signup, etc.

Conversion Rate (CVR) – The number of conversions divided by the number of ad clicks

Cookie – This is a small text file that website servers can place in your browser when you arrive at their website that stores your interests or other information. When you return, the web server pulls information stored in your cookie and displays a personalized webpage based on the information that was stored before in your cookie. A great example of this is Amazon. If you look at Greek history books, then return even months later, Amazon will display Greek history books as you arrive to the site or other things you’ve shown interest in .

Cost per Action (CPA) - A form of advertising where payment is dependent upon an action that a user performs as a result of the advertisement. The action could be making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or asking for a follow-up call. An advertiser pays a set fee to the publisher based on the number of visitors who take that action. Many affiliate programs use the CPA model.

Cost per Click (CPC) - A performance based advertising model where the advertiser pays a set fee for every click on an ad or link. The majority of text ads sold by search engines are billed under the CPC model.

Cost per Thousand (CPM) – This is an ad model that charges advertisers every time an ad is displayed to a user, whether the user clicks on the ad or not. The fee is based on every 1,000 ad impressions (M is the Roman numeral for 1,000). Most display ads, such as banner ads, are sold by CPM.

Crawler – Also referred to as a robot (bot) or spider. This refers to the process of a computer automatically going through your website and cataloging your pages. Googlebot is an example of crawler. Google uses its computers to access websites and index the content to build their search database.

Data Collection – The process of collecting a variety of metrics, demographics, and statistics to analyze and plan campaigns.

Direct to Consumer (D2C) – The services or products delivered to directly to the consumer. The provider could be a third party, or directly from the company who is providing product or service.

Directory – This is a listing of businesses. If you go to www.yellowpages.com, and type in a business type and state or city, you’ll see a listing of businesses. Unlike a search engine that will match the search term to the best fit on the Internet, directories have a much more limited scope and the search in a directory is typically only the business type, location and other information related to that business.

Display Network – A large group of websites and other online products, such as email programs, blogs, and feeds who display ads.

Domain Name – Also referred to as a URL or Internet Address, this is the information you type into the address bar of your browser, e.g. www.PerformanceLocalListings.com

End-User – This is the person who actually uses the product or service that is provided. The end-user is sometimes referred to as the consumer.

IP Address - Also known as Internet Protocol Address. This is a numerical value given to you when you arrive on the Internet so information can be delivered to your browser. Addresses are also assigned to websites. The address to our website, www.PerformanceLocalListings.com is 216.117.81.244.

Impressions - This is a measurement of the number of times a person is viewed an ad or message.

Inbound Link - An inbound link is a hyperlink to a particular webpage from an outside site, bringing traffic to that webpage. Inbound links are an important element that most search engine algorithms use to measure the popularity of a webpage.

Indexing – This is the process of a search engine cataloging the keywords on your website. Google, for example, indexes information it doesn’t store website pages. They do not store the content on your website on their servers, but rather they create an index such that people searching on Google can easily search for and find the content on your site based on the queries they make in Google.

Information on Demand (IOD) - This is the act of delivering real-time information to subscribers as this information is updated, such as sports scores, weather alerts, and stock alerts.

Interactive Voice Response (IVR) - This technology allows users to respond to questions using voice instead of text or numeric responses. IVR systems are very common sophisticated phone systems.

Interstitial Ads - These are ads that are displayed before the requested page. You can usuall click skip ad, or the ad will disappear after a certain amount of time, displaying the requested page.

Keyword – This is the term that people searching on Google or some other search engine put in the search box when searching for something. For example if someone is looking for a plumber, they might enter "plumber" or "leaky pipe" to find a plumber. Also referred to as "search terms".

Keyword Stuffing – This is the process of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) whereby someone adds many of the same or similar keywords on a webpage in an attempt to give that page a higher placement in search results pages. Search engines often see this for what it is and will penalize your website if detected by pushing it off the first page by many pages. This is Black Hat SEO.

FAQ – Frequency Asked Questions

Premium Placement – This is the process of putting a customer on Google for all the relevant keywords, usually 24/7.

Flash – Also referred to as Adobe Flash. Adobe Systems Inc. (NASDAQ:ADBE) developed this technology in 1996 to allow browsers to display high resolution moving text and images quickly. Unlike video where each frame contains pixels and is displayed in the browser many times a second, flash is a program that operates in the browser and renders flash script in the browser. Flash manipulates vector graphics, so sizing text and moving it across the screen is smooth and fast. There is little upload time as script is delivered to the browser and is much smaller than video. You will see Flash updates quite frequently when you first boot your computer. It’s OK to install and we suggest allowing these updates.

Geo-targeting – This is the term for running a marketing campaign in a specific geographical location, such as a city, county, or defined region. We typically market our customers by cities, but also use areas such as a radius from the home city or polygons to outline where we want our marketing campaigns to run.

Google Ads –This is the same as paid listings and Google Sponsored Ads. Google Ads show up when a person searching a search engine types in a keyword that matches a keyword paid for by an advertiser. On Google Ads, you will show up on the top or the right hand side of the page.

Googlebot - Google uses many programs (spiders) to crawl and index content on your website for the Google search engine. Googlebot describes all Google spiders. All Googlebots begin with "Googlebot"; for example, Googlebot-Mobile: crawls pages for Google’s mobile index; Googlebot-Image: crawls pages for Google’s image index.

HTML – This is an abbreviation for HyperText Markup Language, this is the text used to build a webpage that is read and interpreted into a webpage in your browser. This includes the text on the page, its formatting, hyperlinks, inclusion of photos and videos, etc.

Hyperlink – This is a link on a page that, when clicked, takes you to another page on the website or to another website.

Keyword - This is the term that people searching on Google or some other search engine put in the search box when searching for something. For example if someone is looking for a plumber, they might enter “plumber” or “leaky pipe” to find a plumber. Also referred to as “search terms”.

Landing Page - This is the page that potential customers are taken to when they click on an ad which we place for our customers on Google. This page is necessary when we sell a premium placement campaign. (see our white paper on "Why We Require Our Landing Page".) This can also be referred to as a webpage, we offer multi-page versions of the landing page, which can become our customer’s entire website.

Link Building - The process of getting quality websites to link to your website, in order to improve search engine rankings and your position on a search results page. Link building techniques can include buying links, reciprocal linking, or entering barter arrangements.

Local Directory – These are directories that focus on small businesses for local markets. There are many local directories, often hosted by cities or communities, or as a national company. Examples of these include; Yelp!, Merchant Circle, Insider Pages, AOL City Guide, etc.

Location Based Services (LBS) – This is the process of serving information based on the user’s location. If you make a local query in Google using the word “plumber” Google will display plumbers in and around your city. They determine your location if you state that on the resulting Google page or by using your IP address (which often isn’t very accurate), or if you have given your location in the process of registering for some product such as a toolbar.

Link Farming – This is the process of trying to get others to link to your website in an insincere way. This is a bad idea. Search engines see these links for what they are and in some cases search engines such as Google will penalize your site by always placing it several pages down.

Local Search – This is a special result in Google search, which results when local searches are made in Google. There are two ways a local search can be made; 1) the person enters a search term and the location. For example, “plumber in Tustin, CA” or “garage door repair Costa Mesa, CA”. Or 2) if the user just puts in certain search terms such as “chiropractor” or “plumber” and Google recognizes this as a local search. Yahoo and MSN (Bing) also host local search.

Marketing Campaign – This is a broad term for the whole marketing program that our customers will be doing with us. This typically includes search marketing, but could also include social marketing, reputation management, etc.

Meta Tags - Information placed in the HTML header of a web page, providing information that is not visible to users, but can be used in varying degrees by search engines to index a page. Common meta tags used in search engine marketing are title, description, keyword and geo tags.

Meta Description – This is a hidden tag on each webpage that describes what the page is about. This is very important information, because this is often the information that Google and other search engines display in search results as a snippet of information.

Meta Geography – This is a hidden tag on a web page that contains all the cities, states, or countries this web page is targeted to.

Meta Title – This is a hidden tag on each web page that describes the page in a very short sentence. This is very important information, because this information usually shows up in bold in search results above the Meta description as the first part of the snippet displayed in a search engine results.

Meta Keywords – This is a hidden tag on each web page containing a list of keywords for that page to guide the search engine as to what keywords (queries) should be referenced to this page. Some search engines use these tags, but Google does not use these.

MMS Messaging – Multimedia Messaging Service, or MMS, is very common with the increase in bandwidth in mobile technology. Multimedia messages can be a picture, a video clip, or an audio clip.

Mobile Marketing Association – This non-profit trade association is dedicated to the education and standardization of mobile marketing technologies and practices.

Online Performance Marketing (OPM) – This is the process of gathering metrics and statistics over a period of time, then analyzes the results to predict and report trends and habits of subscribers.

Open Directory Project (ODP) – The world's largest volunteer-run web directory (a list of Internet links collected on a large scale and then organized by category).

Opt-In/Opt-Out– This is a decision mechanism that allows a subscriber to become part of an email campaign or online offer.

Organic Position – This is your position in the organic search results to a specific search query.

Organic Search Results – These are the results that show up on a local search result page below the map (see The Anatomy of a Search Page below). These results are automatically chosen by Google. Google makes the closest match to all the information on the Internet. Organic search has only a minor affect on local marketing (see our white paper on “Our Position on SEO”).

Page Rank (PR) – This is a number between 1 and 10 (10 being the most important) which Google assigns to a page which ranks its importance based on quality/authority/credibility. Google uses a number of undisclosed factors to determine this number including visits, links to the page, etc. Page Rank numbers are exponential (non-linear), meaning that an improvement from 3 to 4 is many times harder to achieve than from 2 to 3. If you download the Google Toolbar it will display this number for every page you visit. You can simply mouse over the icon to see the result shown as a number.

Page View – This is the action of a visitor viewing a page. If a visitor views the same page more than once, the additional views are usually counted as multiple page views. This count is typically per day, week or month. There is also Unique Page Views, which is the measure of how many unique visitors arrive to your website per day, week or month.

Paid Listings – This was previously known as sponsored links and is now called Google Ads. Paid listings show up when a person searching a search engine types in a keyword that matches a keyword bided by an advertiser. On Google, paid listings show up on the top and the right hand side of the page (see The Anatomy of a Search Page below).

Permanent Redirect – Also called a 301 redirect. This is the process of redirecting one domain name (URL) to another. This is useful if you’ve purchased a new domain name that you like much better than your current domain name. You can set a 301 redirect on your old domain name such that when past customers type that in the address bar of their browser, your website will show up with the new domain name displayed in their browser. You should be aware that when you purchase a domain name, e.g. yourdomain.com, you must setup a 301 redirect such that www.yourdomain.com and yourdomain.com are seen as the same website online.

PFP (Pay for Performance) – This is the process of paying for an action, such as a potential customer to fill out a form, generating a phone call to a customer, an actual purchase, etc.

PPC (Pay per Click) – This is the process of paying for clicks to your website. This is our primary business. We put our customer on the paid section of Google by bidding them there and achieving very high quality scores (see Quality Score above) to achieve high placement on Google at an efficient price.

Quality Score - A score assigned by Google to each keyword marketed that is calculated from an ad's click-through rate, keyword relevance per keyword group and the relevance of the landing page, which Google accesses over 200 factors. Those who achieve higher quality scores are rewarded with top placement and lower bid cost. The exact algorithm is kept secret and changes frequently.

Query - This is the process of putting keywords in the search box of a search engine.

Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP) – This method is used to provide streaming media end users allowing them to begin viewing video or other streaming media without first dowloaind this media. Users are given basic control command such as pause, play, rewind, etc.

Relevant Keywords – These are all the keywords that are used by potential new customers to find your business. For example, if you do plumbing in Costa Mesa the search "plumber in costa mesa” would be very relevant to your business. However, the keyword "pipes in costa mesa”, would not be relevant even though you work on pipes.

Return on Investment (ROI) – This is an extremely important term for your business. Return on Investment is calculated by the amount of profit that’s earned per advertising dollar spent with us. Any number greater than 1:1 is profitable investment. Industry statistics indicate that the average small business should achieve $7 in profit for each $1 spent on search marketing with us (a 7:1 ratio). This is a very powerful statistic. For this reason, many of our customers start with us then expand their marketing campaign. To estimate a ROI, please try our ROI calculation located at /ROICalculator.asp

Search Query – This is the search terms placed in a search engine by placing keywords in the search box and hitting submit.

Search Result Page – This is the page that’s displayed when a search is made in a search engine. Please see Anatomy of a Search Page below.

SEM - This term stands for Search Engine Marketing. This covers all search, both paid search (pay-per-click) PPC and SEO (search engine optimization). SEO is very appropriate for large companies such as Amazon and eBay but is only moderately effective for local search (please see our white paper "Our Position on SEO").

SEO – This term stands for SearchEngine Optimization. This is the practice whereby SEO companies make changes and modifications to their customer’s websites such that they show up more frequently in the Organic Search section of a search page (see below for the anatomy of a search page).

SERP – Search Engine Results Page. This is the page that a visitor to a search engine sees when they enter a query in the search box. This page generally varies based on the search term entered into the search engine and may display both organic and paid search results and may also display local results if the results relate to local information.

Social Marketing – This is the practice of marketing customers on the Internet using social media. This can include blogging, placing ads on social sites like Facebook or creating Facebook pages and placing information on your page, tweeting or creating twitter accounts for the customer, etc.

Snippet – Text displayed beneath the title of a corresponding web page on the search results pages of a search engine. This is usually the first 160 characters in the meta description or some text that the search engine found on your page that is felt was relevant to the page.

Spider – Also referred to as a crawler. This refers to the process of a computer automatically going through your website and cataloging your pages. Googlebot (discussed above) is an example of a spider. Google uses its computers to access websites and index the content to build their search database.

Sponsored Links – This is the same as paid listings and is now been renamed Google Ads. Sponsored links show up when a person searching a search engine types in a keyword that matches a keyword paid for by an advertiser. On Google Sponsored Links (Ads) you will show up on the top or the right hand side of the page.

SMB – Small to Medium Sized Businesses – This is a commonly used term to refer to most of the 22 million businesses in the US. Typically these businesses have less than $10M in sales and 200 employees. This is the market we serve. SMB’s make up most of the businesses in the US.

SMS – Short Message Service (SMS) is a very common method of sending text messages through mobile devices, more commonly referred to as texting.

Tag Clouds – An area to a website where keywords relative to the subject matter on that page are placed to give search engines more information about the subject matter on the page. Usually more important keywords are larger or displayed in bold. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_cloud

Text Ad – This is an advertisement shown in search results or placed on a website in an ad network that is completely text. An example of a text ad are the ads shown in Google search results.

Unique Visitor – This is an actual visitor to your website (as opposed to a search engine spider or other spider). If a visitor clicks on 100 links on your website, they are still counted as one visitor. Typically unique visitors are spoken of as Unique Visitors per month. If the same visitor arrives many times within a month, they are still only counted as one unique visitor.

URL – This stands for Uniform Resource Locator, this is also called the domain name or Internet address. This is what you type into the address bar of your browser to access a website, i.e. www.PerformanceLocalListings.com

Yellow Pages Online – The Yellow Pages and Super Pages online are the largest directories of businesses on the Internet. Despite this, they are rapidly disappearing as a source of information in favor of search engines. Whereas Google has over 70% market share in the overall search market, the Yellow Pages currently only has 0.30% market share.

Web Crawler – Also called a spider, robot, crawler, this is just another name for the software that search engines use to search through your site for information.

Website Template – This is a way of structuring a website to make them faster to build and to avoid errors. Website templates can vary from very primitive to very sophisticated. We have developed our own proprietary website template builder which not only makes developing websites with a sophisticated look and feel very quickly, but also error free and this semi-automates the hidden text necessary for Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

White Hat SEO – Is the ethical conduct of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This is the process of doing everything you can in an honest and sincere way when building your website and does not include tricks. The link below from Google provides some useful information on how to properly structure your website and bad practices (Black Hat SEO) to avoid.
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769

White Paper – This is a position piece on a specific subject, usually written in an objective form. These are used to explain specific subjects to our customers, such as "Our position on SEO”. We have white papers on many subjects relevant to online marketing.

WYSIWYG – (pronounced wziwig), Is an acronym for What You See Is What You Get. An example of this would be Microsoft Word. When you write in Word, what you see on the screen will appear the same on your printer.

Glossary of Terms for Online Marketing & Advertising