Marketing glossary

20 terms

This is a page create to help you learn new marketing words that helps on a business context.

Affiliate Network: A specially selected group of website publishers who partner with an advertiser to deliver leads or sales and receive a commission based solely on their performance. Here’s a simple example: A shoe company partners with a few highly influential fashion bloggers. The bloggers include ads and links promoting the company’s shoes on their sites. The shoe company pays the bloggers a commission on the sales generated. Affiliate networks offer advertisers "prepackaged" affiliate programs.
BIMI: Brand Indicators for Message Identification; Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) is an emerging security technology that helps authenticate your email marketing and builds trust with your customers. BIMI works with DKIM, SPF, and DMARC protocols to protect your domain from being used by malicious actors to send fraudulent email. It causes your logo to appear right next to your messages in a user’s inbox, so that your contacts and their email service will know these emails are really from you or your business.
Black Hat SEO: Not a great idea. Black hat SEO is an approach to search engine optimization (SEO) that focuses on gaming the system and disregards the human experience. These practices don’t follow search engine rules, and search engines can exclude entire sites for using them. The colorful term “black hat” comes from old Western films in which the villains wore black hats and the heroes wore white hats so viewers could tell them apart in the days before Technicolor.
Canonical URL: The "master version" of a page on your website that you want search engine crawlers to find. As you launch marketing campaigns and track users, information gets added to the end of your unique page URLs. From the crawlers’ point of view, this means you have multiple versions of the same page without a clear indication of which one is "right." When you set up a canonical URL in the page's HTML, you tell search engines which version of the page you want visitors to see.
CSS: Cascading style sheet; Cascading style sheet (CSS), a language that dictates how a web page looks. It covers layout, colors, fonts, font sizes, and more. The advantage of using CSS is that its rules can apply—cascade—across all of your web pages, reducing the time to code each page from scratch. CSS also enables responsive web design, which aims to reuse code across desktop and mobile devices and keep the user experience (UX) consistent.
Display Ads: A type of online advertisement that combines text, images, and a URL that links to a website where a customer can learn more about or buy products. These ads can be static with an image or animated with multiple images, video, or changing text. Some display ads educate about the product while others are designed to entertain and engage through simple games or puzzles. Banner ads are a common form of display ads.
DNS: A domain name system; A domain name system (DNS) takes a human-friendly internet address, such as Website.com, and translates it into a computer-friendly IP address a web browser can use to find and display a website. DNS is often described as the “phone book” of the internet that does the heavy lifting of remembering the “phone number” of a website so humans only have to know the name.
End User: The person who uses a product or service. If you make T-shirts, a person wearing your shirt is the end user. If you make websites, the person who hires you is your client or customer and the person using the website is the end user. Either way, do your best to avoid referring to people as “users” in your marketing materials. It’s accurate but not ideal.
Extensible Markup Language (XML): A human- and machine-readable coding language that adds structure, meaning, or context to a text document. Extensible markup language (XML) ranges from very simple to highly complex (hence “extensible”). Today’s version of HTML is a specialized example of XML. Schema markup is an example of how XML can be used to improve the user experience (UX) of search engine results pages (SERPs).
Eye Tracking: Measuring and recording the movement of eyes as they look at a web page. In digital marketing, eye tracking is often used to figure out what parts of a web page or email people look at first or spend the most time looking at, which is often displayed as a heat map. Marketers use this data to strategically place elements, such as call-to-action buttons, where they are most likely to be seen and clicked on.
FCC: The Federal Communications Commission; The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is a United States government agency that regulates communication devices and systems, which includes the internet. They ensure all citizens have fair access to these communication platforms and that they’re safely performing in the interest of the public and national security. In most cases, the FCC is the agency responsible for crafting consumer protection rules such as privacy protections, while the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) enforces these rules.
FTC: The Federal Trade Commission; The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is tasked with promoting competition in the United States marketplace and protecting consumers. In the world of e-commerce and digital marketing, the FTC is responsible for providing rules and guidance around online advertising, which it refers to as the “rules of the road.” It enforces the CAN-SPAM Act to ensure email marketing isn’t misleading or harassing.
GPT-3: GPT-3, or Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3, is a remarkable language model that has taken the world by storm. With its ability to generate human-like text, it has revolutionized the field of natural language processing. Learn more about how it works and the advantages and limitations of this large language model.
H1: An HTML tag used to identify the highest level of information on a page. In practice, page titles and headlines are usually marked with H1 tags and are the largest pieces of text on a page. H1 tags can be associated with specific styles or formatting in a web page’s CSS so that headlines always appear in a certain font, color, and size. H1s play an important role in search engine optimization (SEO) and make it easier to index content. If something is in an H1 tag, search engines know it’s important.
KPI: Key performance indicators; Key performance indicators (KPIs) are quantifiable measures that help businesses evaluate their progress toward achieving important objectives. Although different businesses use different metrics, KPIs are always central to understanding how your company is performing and how you can improve that performance.
Psychographics: Your target audience’s values, beliefs, and behaviors that are relevant to your product or service. Like demographics, psychographics can help you segment your audience into highly relevant subgroups. That way you can tailor your messaging and get better advertising campaign results. Psychographics give you a peek into the minds of your customers so you can communicate more effectively.
RSS: Really simple syndication; Really simple syndication (RSS) takes the content of a website and packages it into a feed that can be easily displayed on other websites. Aggregators take multiple RSS feeds and combine them into a single interface, which can help people track updates to multiple websites at once. RSS also allows websites to syndicate content from third parties.
Schema Markup: Bits of code added to a web page that help search engines understand the content of the page. With better understanding comes the ability to format content when it appears on the search engine results page (SERP). Photos of a recipe appear next to its description, for example, or a list of upcoming events is added to the results blurb of a concert venue’s website. Schema markup generate featured snippets on Google’s SERP.
Search Query: The string of words users enter into a search engine to receive a result. Search queries are the raw text that people type into the search engine, such as, “Will it rain today?” When you look at search queries that lead to your website, you can determine which keywords to include for search engine optimization (SEO). In this instance, “rain forecast” may be a more popular query.
White Hat SEO: Search engine optimization (SEO); Search engine optimization (SEO) techniques that benefit both websites and the people who use them. White hat SEO fights for the users. It also improves the accessibility and quality of a website’s content, boosting its ranking and relevance. For example, it can examine search queries to identify new target keywords and create original content to support them.