Business and Marketing vocabularies

20 Business and Marketing terms

A glossary is for the student who wants to find a future job in sales or marketing.

Ad Copy: The words in your advertising messages to customers. Ad copy can be the headline of a display ad, the subject line of a marketing email, the call to action (CTA) of a Facebook ad, or the script of a video or TV spot. Ad copy is distinguished from ad design elements such as photography and illustration, although copy and design should always work together as a whole.
Ad Extensions: Specific information you can tack onto your Google Ads to help them perform better. There are several options, including: store location, call button, product pricing, seller rating, app download, and additional website links. Google doesn’t charge extra for having extensions. But it does charge a pay-per-click (PPC) fee when users click on most types of extensions, just like when users click on an ad itself.
Ad Network: A service that offers online ad space for sale to advertisers. This space can represent inventory from hundreds and thousands of websites. A general rule is that some inventory is more valuable than others, so it costs advertisers more. Think of buying a TV ad placement during “the big game” versus during a mop infomercial at 3 am. Depending on the ad network, the payment structure may be based on cost per thousand impressions (CPM), cost per click (CPC), or cost per acquisition (CPA).
AdSense: A Google marketing program that pays website publishers for allowing relevant ads from Google to run on their sites automatically. Keywords determine relevance. The ads can include text, images, and video. They are designed to be high quality but unobtrusive to the website’s content across desktop and mobile devices. Publishers have some control in rejecting ads they don’t like and prioritizing ads they like best. Payment to publishers is usually on a pay-per-click (PPC) basis.
Advertising Budget: The money a company puts toward promoting its products and services to its target audiences. An advertising budget typically spans the cost of paid media, photography, printing, mailing, and the support of advertising professionals. Some businesses set their advertising budget based on a percentage of sales. Whatever your method, keep your return on investment (ROI) in mind. Any vendor should be able to give you a clear idea of what you should expect in return for the expense.
Advertorial: Advertising and editorial content combined. If you think of a traditional printed magazine or newspaper, the line between ads and editorial articles is distinct—and often literal. An advertorial brings the 2 formats together to educate readers about a product through an editorial-esque storytelling experience. They’ve become a popular online advertising tactic that is typically labeled "sponsored" or "paid" so as not to mislead users about the source of the information.
Affiliate Marketing: Marketing based on a relationship between an online advertiser and website publishers where the advertiser pays for leads or revenue that comes from the publishers’ sites. It’s a form of value sharing or commission sharing. Partnering with affiliates extends your advertising reach and increases your relevance with target audiences for a limited investment. You only “pay for performance.” Bloggers can make great affiliates.
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.
Alt Text: Text that shows in place of images or pops up when you hover your mouse over an image. Alt text, or alternative text, is written into the HTML code of a web page to describe an image in case the image doesn’t show. This can happen for a few different reasons. Some users may have images turned off so web pages load faster. Other users may have low vision or blindness, so they use special screen readers that translate web page text into an audio or a Braille-like touch format. Alt text also helps search engines "understand" images better.
Anchor Text: The wording of a link on a website, in an email, or within another digital asset. One example of anchor text is “read more.” Anchor text is an important part of the user experience. You want your users to be clear on where your links are going and be satisfied that the destination is what they expected. Search engines also take your anchor text into account when they rank your site pages for relevance.
Backlinks: Links on websites other than your own that go back to a page on your website. Backlinks are also called inbound links because they represent traffic coming to your website from somewhere else. The quality and quantity of your backlinks can help you rank higher in search engines such as Google and Bing. This is because your backlinks are considered an indicator of how popular your website is with users.
Banner Ad: A standard horizontal ad placement at the top of a web page. The term “banner” is borrowed from print newspapers. It can refer to the newspaper’s name at the top of the front page or a story headline that spans the full width of the front page. Banners have been around since the early days of the web. While their popularity has decreased as newer display ad formats have become available, they can still be an effective element in your advertising mix, offering visibility at a relatively low cost.
BIMI: 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.
Bing Ads: Pay-per-click (PPC) ads that run on Bing and Yahoo search engines spanning desktop and mobile devices. Bing Ads is a form of paid search similar to Google Ads, and Google campaigns can be imported easily into Bing. That means you can use both services without reinventing the campaign. Like Google Ads, Bing Ads can be targeted using customer geography and demographics, although specific capabilities vary.
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.
Blog: The short form of "web log." A blog is a collection of journal-like articles written about a particular topic and published on a website. New articles are added frequently and comments from users are encouraged. Anyone can publish a blog. Successful bloggers attract advertisers through affiliate marketing because they add credibility to the messaging for their followers.
Bounce Rate: The percentage of visits to your website where only 1 page was viewed. When we say users "bounce," we mean they viewed a page of your site or a landing page but didn’t engage further. They didn’t click on links or view more pages. There are many methods for improving your pages so more users stick around. An offer, call to action (CTA), ad copy, and design can all be optimized through A/B testing.
Brand: The experience a customer has with a product or service that makes it different from others in the same category. More than just a name, a brand is where features, benefits, and customer perceptions meet. Successful brands have a unique identity, image, and emotional connection with their customers. It’s why we choose a brand over another every day.
Brand Identity: The experience a customer has with your product or service visually. A brand identity is made up of elements like the brand’s name, logo, color palette, and type style to convey a distinct brand image to customers. It also includes consistent standards for words, images, voice, and tone.
Brand Image: How your customers perceive your products, services, and company. This is ultimately something you can’t control. But the goal of raising awareness of your brand, improving recognition, nurturing favorability, and winning affinity is to grow market share. A solid brand identity and relentless brand management are 2 keys to success.