Native advertising
Content on an online publication or channel that has the look and feel of normal media, but is paid for by an advertiser. You might be familiar with the term ‘advertorial’, or seen popular YouTube channels create paid-for content on a particular product.
Optimisation
Making adjustments to your marketing strategy based on gathered data to better achieve your marketing objectives. This could be refinements to an existing strategy, or a more radical overhaul if your initial implementation isn’t providing the results you want.
Organic traffic
Traffic that reaches your website through non-paid for means. This could be through word-of-mouth referrals (or, more commonly, via social media) or through finding your website through a search engine.
Pay-per-click (PPC)
Ad advertising model commonly used in search engines and social media where an advertiser only pays when a user clicks on their ad.
Qualified traffic
Qualified traffic refers to people that visit your website who have a genuine possibility - or high likelihood - of buying your product or service. It differs from general traffic who might just browse your website as QT consists of people who make purchasing decisions when entering the site.
Quick wins
These are often low/no cost changes, and can be a great opportunity to empower your marketing teams to try new things.
Never underestimate the power of a quick win. The quick win is the simple or easy to implement change or tactic that can have a positive effect on your marketing strategy.
Quality score
This is a diagnostic tool in a number of ad platforms that give you an idea of the quality of your ads compared to other advertisers. They take into account both the quality and relevance of your keywords and PPC ads.
Return on Investment (ROI)
Simply put, this is how much money you make that can be directly attributed to the marketing budget you allocated. A higher ROI is better, as it means you generated significantly more revenue than you spent.
Retargeting ads
Have you ever spent time researching a product, only to then have that product advertised to you across the web? That is retargeting – it’s targeted advertisement to users who have engaged with a website or brand to keep the brand in their mind.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
The process of optimising your website so it appears higher on search engine result pages. This is done through a mix of on-page (eg. copy that includes high performing, relevant keywords) and off-page (eg. backlinks) optimisation. There are also technical improvements you can make to your site to perform better on search engines, such as having good mobile support, improving page speed, fixing site errors and creating a site-map.
SERP
Search Engine Results Pages. This is the page you see after typing your query into a search engine, such as Google, Bing, or Duck Duck Go.
Testimonials
Testimonials are reviews written by satisfied customers about how much they love your product or service. They’re really useful for creating trust with potential customers and improving brand credibility.
Thought leadership
The process of demonstrating your expertise and authority by providing insights into your industry. This can be done through a number of channels, including blogs, white papers, or speaking engagements. This helps increase brand awareness and can support your marketing through backlinks if the content is hosted on other platforms.
User experience
The user experience focuses on the usability, accessibility and satisfaction a user has when interacting with your website or digital product. This can be dictated by the user interface (UI), which dictates the human/digital interaction. A clean, easy-to-use interface will likely provide a better UX when compared to one that’s overly busy and unintuitive.
Vertical segmentation
Segmentation is a marketing technique to target specific types of audiences in the marketplace. Vertical segmentation is targeting a narrower segment of the audience base, whereas horizontal segmentation means selling to a wide range of consumers. An example of vertical segmentation would be marketing your product to a very niche audience, such as a web development agency that targets the healthcare industry – allowing them to tailor and focus their offering to the specific needs of that industry.
Viral marketing
Using social media to spread awareness of a product or message very quickly. They can use shock, humour or surprise to grab attention, or encourage participation – for example, the ice bucket challenge in 2014.
Web crawler
Often shortened to crawler, or referred to as a spiderbot, this is an internet bot that trawls the web, following hyperlinks in an effort to index web pages. These are commonly deployed by search engines, and the ease with which they can index your website can impact your search rankings.
X - cross-channel marketing
Different social media channels attract different types of audiences. Cross-channel marketing is the use of multiple marketing channels to provide a cohesive message to reach those different market segments. Multiple channels will be commonly planned for in a marketing campaign.
eXtensible Markup Language Sitemap (XML)
This is a file that lists all of the URLs on your website, making it easier for web-crawlers to index your website. This is one of the technical improvements you can make to increase the performance of your website in search engines.
YoY
Year-on-year growth or decline, presented as a percentage. It’s a commonly used metric when assessing performance over a period of time.
Zero click search optimisation
Zero click search results are where an end-user never needs to click on a link from the SERP to get the information they want. This is because they either gleaned the information from effective snippets in the results, or a search engine such as Google have extracted the information and presented it at the top of the search results. Depending on your marketing objectives, this can be useful or detrimental to you, as it can quickly raise awareness, but it can also lead to less traffic coming to your website.
Z-score
A statistical score that is used to measure a company’s performance against that of its peers.
