Marketing Glossary

This digital marketing glossary helps you understand specific terms and expressions used in web marketing, communication and social media marketing.

Digital marketing

Marketing of products or services using digital devices in order to reach consumers. The objective is the promotion of brands by using various forms of digital advertising.

Internet marketing

Also called Online Marketing, describes the marketing of products and services on the Internet. It includes for example email marketing or social media marketing.

Mobile marketing

Mobile marketing is the promotional activity of products or services for mobile phones and devices such as smartphones.

Social media marketing

Social media marketing is a form of internet marketing that refers to the process of promoting a brand, product or service through social media channels. A key objective of SMM is to create content that will be shared with other users.

Social network

A social network is a virtual community consisting of individuals or groups who are communicating in a central location, like a platform. The idea of social networks is to share interests or informations, in form of texts, pictures or videos at any time with any person.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

SEM is a form of Internet marketing that is used to improve the ranking of a website in search engine result pages through marketing acitivites.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

SEO is the process of improving naturally and without paying the ranking of a website in search engine result pages. The objective is to increase the traffic of a website by employing SEO techniques that lead to a higher result in a search engines such as Google.

Pay per click (PPC)

PPC is a form of internet advertising used on search engines and websites. Every time a visitor clicks on the advertisement, the advertiser is charged an amount by the publisher.

Email marketing

Email marketing is a type of direct marketing that uses the way of electronic mail as a communication channel. The emails are sent to a targeted list of recipients in order to achieve marketing objectives, such as acquiring or converting customers.

E-commerce

Electronic commerce is the buying and selling of goods and services on the internet or other electronic networks.

Online reputation management

ORM is the managing of an individual’s or company’s reputation on the internet. It contains the building and maintaining of a reputation according to the setted goals and the recovering in case of a bad reputation.

Banner Ad

Also called web banner, is a form of internet advertising. In general these banners appear at the top or bottom of a web page as a rectangular graphic display.

Skyscraper

The Skyscraper is a form of internet advertising in the shape of a “skyscraper”: narrow and tall. They are often placed on the left or right of a web page.

Interactive television

Unlike traditional television the viewer now has the possibilty to communicate with the programm he is watching through a two way TV system. ITV enables consumers to vote, shop or play games in real time with their television.

Advergaming

Advertising is integrated into a video game to promote a brand or product, often in form of mobile applications or online games.

Gamification

Gamification means the involvement of games into a non-game environment with the objective to increase user engagement and to create fun.

Application Program Interface (API)

An API is an interface that can be used by programmers when building software. An API makes it possible to use programs within programs and facilitate information sharing.

Multichannel marketing

Marketing that uses different kinds of communication channels (website, email, telephone call) to interact with customers. The main objective is to facilitate the process of purchasing.

Pay per click (PPC)

PPC is an internet advertising model. Every time a visitor clicks on an ad, the advertiser has to pay an amount to the web publisher.

Cost per action (CPA)

CPA is an internet advertising model that defines how much revenue an internet publisher receives when a user clicks on an advertisement on a website and then completes a certain action.

Cost per mille (CPM)

Also called cost per thousand (CPT) is a method to measure the cost of displaying an advertisement. The CPM is calculated by dividing the advertising cost by the total number of generated views.

Content Management Software (CMS)

A CMS is a software application which provides capabilities for multiple users to manage, edit and upload data or information. A common CMS is wordpress.

QR-Code

A QR-Code is a two-dimensional barcode which can be read by mobile phones, computers, etc. in order to provide information.

Co-registration

The subscriber of a newsletter is asked to opt-in to other newsletters, for exemple from partners.

Hosting services

Is the business to provide individuals or organizations server space in exchange of a fee. The web host can offer different types of hosting services, like web hosting, file hosting, image hosting or email hosting.

Display advertising

A type of online advertising that contains images, audio and video elements instead of text messages. Display ads appear in different forms like rich media or banner ads.

Crowdsourcing

The outsourcing of internal tasks and decisions to an external group, that is willing to share informations for free or low rates of pay or services. The main goal is to gain new or more developed information.

Agile marketing

Agile marketing means responding quickly to changing demand and new marketing conditions through more flexibilty. This is achieved with small steps and shorter campaigns.

Community Manager

A Community Manager builds, grows and monitors online communities, for exemple in social networks or blogs. They are the voice of their brand who generates the buzz with the brand’s community.

Virtual community

Virtual community is also called online community and defines a group of people sharing common interests or ideas over the internet.

Conversion

In a marketing sense this term is used when a prospect is converted to a customer.

Call to action

Call to action means asking the consumer to take a desired action immediately. Common exemples are “Buy now” or “Click now”.

Behavioral targeting

Marketing activities that include the browsing habits of online visitors. The selected data (visited websites, etc.) is used to better understand the customer’s needs and to increase the range of a campaign.

Web analytics

Web analytics is the process of analyzing collected data about the user behaviour on a website. A special software measures for exemple how long a user stayed on the website and how often they clicked on a button. The objective is to create better user experience.

Content marketing

Content marketing is about delievering valuable content to attract prospects and retain customers. The idea is to change a consumer behavior by offering relevant content, and not by convincing the customer to buy a product.

Microblogging

Microblogging is a web service that enables users to publish short text messages in form of blogging. In general they are restricted to 200 characters and they can be distributed to a private group or made public.

Opt-in

The process of demanding the permission to send advertisement to an individual or an organization is called Opt-in. This is often the case when someone subscribes to a newsletter.

Mini-site

A minisite is a small website that is part of a larger website. It often contains only one specific topic.

Hashtag

A hashtag is a number symbol (#) followed by one or more keywords. You can find these hashtags especiallly in social networks such as Twitter, Tumblr or Facebook. The users who are looking for a certain topic, can find all conversations among these tagged keywords.

Plateforme

In computing technology the term is used for an underlying computer system which allows software to run. A computer platform generally means the operating system.

Page impression

The number of times a website or element on this website has been clicked or viewed by a user is called page impression or page view.

Interstitial

Interstitial means “in between” and is used for an advertisement appearing in a separate window while downloading a web page. Unlike banner ads they contain large graphics which disappear after some seconds or have to be closed by the website visitor.

Infographic

An infographic is a visual representation of information or knowledge designed to make the data easily understandable. On the web they are often used to attract attention or get backlinks to a website.

Homepage

The main page of a website is called hompage. Usually it presents the purpose and serves as a sort of table of contents to other informations of the site.

SoLoMo

The 3 terms social-local-mobile or short SoLoMo refer to the trend of sharing location-based information on the mobile. SoLoMo is the convergence of geolocalisation and the popularity of using social medias on smartphones.

Engagement Rate

The Engagement Rate measures a brand’s effectiveness in engaging with their audience. It is calculated by dividing the total engagement (likes, comments, shares) by the total number of fans.

Web visitor tracking

Storing and analysis of every visit on the website. The goal is to better understand the visitor behaviour on a website.

Landing page

A landing page is a web page where visitors arrive after clicking on a search engine result or an advertisement. A landing page can be the homepage or any other content page.

Permalink

Short for permanent link. A permalink is a URL that directs to a single entry in a blog or forum and remains unchanged.

Internal link

An internal link is a hyperlink on a web page that directs to another page on the same domain or site.

External link

An external link is a hyperlink that directs to another domain than the current website.

Retargeting

Retargeting is a form of online advertising. The behavior of website visitors is tracked with cookies and used to deliver targeted advertising on other websites to the same user.

Web traffic

Number of people who visited a website.

Geolocation

Geolocation is the technological process of identifying a geographic location of an internet user. The term geomarketing is used when geolocation is implemented in marketing activities such as the recommendation of nearby events.

Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing describes the cooperative partnership between merchants and publishers. Every time a visit is generated through an advertisment on the publisher’s website, they will be rewarded with a commission fee by the merchant.

HTML5

HTML5 (HyperText Markup Language) is a markup language used to structure and present web contents. The 5th revision includes more functions to embed graphic, audio and video documents.

JavaScript (JS)

JS is a scripting language that can be integrated into HTML pages and enables programmers to design interactive web pages.

CSS3

CSS3 is short for Cascading Style Sheets 3, the latest standart of CSS. It is used to control the layout and style of a web page.

Webinar

A webinar is a live seminar or presentation taking place on the internet. The participants can see and hear each other through a voice and video chat.

Widget

In computing, a widget is an application that displays information. The objective is to facilitate the access to frequently used programms and to deliver visual information.