The ABCs of Online Marketing

By Hector Cisneros

Image courtesy Pixabay

Online marketing has come a long way since the turn of the century.  Yet the underlying principles remain the same.  That being said, if it seems as though your marketing people are speaking in tongues every time they open their mouths, it’s high time you got up to speed on what the acronyms that marketers use actually mean.  Below is an alphabetized list that will allow you to translate most of what any marketer says into plain English.

1.    AIDA – Attention, Interest, Desire, Action – This is the buying funnel from top to bottom.

2.    ADA – Ada may have been your maternal aunt’s name, but in the parlance of marketing it stands for the Americans for Disabilities Act.  In today’s politically correct Internet, a website doesn’t only need to be attractive and informative, it also needs to be ADA-compliant.

3.    B2B – Business to Business – A market segment for companies that sell products and services to other businesses.

4.    B2C – Business to Consumer – A market segment for companies that sell to consumers.

5.    BR – Bounce Rate – When the marketer is speaking email campaigns, this is the ratio of undeliverable email addresses. When speaking about website traffic, it refers to the number of visitors who leave after only visiting the page they initially linked to

6.    CAC – Customer Acquisition Cost – Is how much it costs your company on average to acquire a new customer.

7.    CPA – Cost per acquisition or action. This is the total money spent to acquire a new customer or to get a customer to buy. Example you spent $1,000, and you closed ten customers, so your CPA is $100 each.

8.    CR – Conversion rate. - The ratio of clicks on an ad or link to the number of visitors who then took the next desired action, whether it was to click on another page, fill out a form, call you, or buy something.

9.    CTR – Click-through rate. – The CTR is a measure of the number of clicks an advertiser received on their ads, per the number of impressions also received from that ad. This is a measure of ad effectiveness, its draw rate.

10.  EPC – Earnings per click, and EPM – Earnings per thousand. Earnings Per Click can be calculated by taking the total earnings generated over a given period and dividing that by the number of clicks you have generated for that same period. This gives you an estimate of the kind of expected return in a given period.

Image courtesy Pixabay

11.  GA – Google Analytics – Google analytics is the most commonly used tracking tool to measure website performance. It provides a multitude of measurements, including number of visits, unique visitors, time on page, bounce rate, referring sites and much more.

12.  Impressions – is the number of times an ad or web page is exposed to a potential customer. This measurement doesn’t count the number of times an ad was seen since it’s possible that a person tuned out when your ad was displayed on any given webpage.

13.  Inbound marketing Vs. Outbound Marketing – Inbound marketing is also called content marketing or pull marketing where a prospect comes to you based on something they found online, like a blog post, podcast, social feed, or video that drew them to you. In contrast, Outbound Marketing can be equated with email and newsletter marketing, pay per click ads, boosting posts, etc.

14.  KPI – Key performance indicator – are the indices marketers pay attention to in your marketing campaign, like CPC (i.e., Cost Per Click), CR (Conversion rate), BR (bounce rate) etc.…

15.  LTV – Lifetime value –This is the value of a new client when you keep them for at least a year or more. The ratio tells you if it's cost-effective to buy your advertising based on the acquisition cost.

16.  PPC – Pay per click – Is paid advertising sold by the click.  Search engines and social nets sell this kind of advertising either on a flat rate or based on an auction where the more you pay, the higher up on the website your ad is placed.

17.  PR – PageRank – This is the page number your listing shows up on in a search engine for a keyword or phrase you’re listed under. If you are a moving company in Jacksonville and someone enters “mover Jacksonville” in Google search, and you show up on page one, your page rank is one. If you show up on page 10, it’s a ten. However, if you show up on any page other than one, you’re virtually invisible since most web surfers never look past page one of search.

18.  PV – Pageviews – Pageviews refers to the number of times a browser went to a given webpage. Pageviews are not a strong indicator of performance because a browser can visit a page multiple times by clicking backward or forward which doesn’t indicate additional traffic.

Image courtesy Pixabay   

     19.    RTD – Real Time Data – Most online analytical measurement tools don’t provide live data. Google Adwords (now Google Ads) wasn’t designed to provide real time information. However, Google Analytics does provide traffic metrics in near real time which can help you make quantifiable marketing decisions as to the effectiveness of your online copy and ads.

       20.    SEO – Search Engine Optimization is the art of creating content that is not only engaging to your target audience but is also compelling to search engine bots that scour the web looking to rank and post sites on search engines.

      21.    TM – Target Market – Do you know which market segments best fit your products or services? If you want to use web marketing effectively, you need to know the target age group, income, demographics, and psychographic info like political, social and religious affiliations, the books they read, music they like that best fit your ideal customers.

      22.    UV – Unique visitor – is an important metric for websites and online ads because it indicates how many new prospects your website, landing pages, podcasts, blogs and videos received.  

23.    WOM – Word of Mouth marketing – is often referred to as the best kept secret in marketing because most businesses don’t know how to replicate WOM online. While your company may have a presence on the social nets, the skillset needed for turning it into an affective WOM campaign could fill up a book.

Hector Cisneros is COO and Director of Social Media Marketing at Working the Web to Win, an award-winning Internet marketing company based in Jacksonville, Florida.