There are a LOT of things to keep up with if you’re learning digital marketing or the art of marketing via the digital world of technology. This article is simply going to help you understand what all these acronyms mean so you can more easily decipher through things. We will explain only some of the acronyms as you’re more likely to see or hear them vs. others. Again, these are just the more common ones used in the current world of digital marketing.
Digital Marketing Acronyms
B2B – Business to business.
B2C – Business to consumer.
CLV – Customer lifetime value. This is the prediction of the net profit attributed to the entire future relationship with a customer.
CPA – Cost per acquisition/action. The real cost to obtain each client.
CPC – Cost per click. The amount of money you pay when customers click through to your info. The metric involved in determining the cost, not the act of advertising itself. That’s PPC and that’s discussed later.
CPL – Cost per lead. The amount of money you pay for lead generation. This is per lead.
CR – Conversion rate. The average number of conversions per ad click, shown as a percentage. They are calculated by simply taking the number of conversions and dividing that by the number of total ad clicks that can be tracked to a conversion during the same time period. Much like a close rate in sales, but measuring click based marketing.
CTA – Call to action. A piece of stimuli used to influence someone to do something. The goal is to gain a lead.
CTR – Click-through rate. The percentage of people visiting a webpage who access a link to a particular advertisement.
EPC – Earnings per click. A metric used to indicate the average earnings generated as a result of 100 clicks on an affiliate marketing link or ad. Only measurable per every 100 clicks based on the formula.
GA – Google Analytics. Tracks and reports your website traffic.
PPC – Pay per click. A type of advertising where each user clicks through a link to your content and in turn, you pay per each click. Most commonly used on Google. Here, the user can establish a budget, limiting the number of clicks. Higher budgets rank higher in the listings.
PPL – Pay per lead. A service where you buy leads. This cost is per lead.
PR – PageRank. The calculation that evaluates the quality of links to a webpage. This determines a relative score of that page’s importance and authority.
PV – Pageviews. A user visiting a particular website on the internet. Measurable on per person basis.
ROI – Return on investment. This measures the gain, or loss, generated on an investment relative to the amount of money invested. Generally expressed as a percentage.
SEM – Search engine marketing. The process of incorporating digital tactics, and technology, to increase the visibility of your web pages on the internet. Includes various types of strategies like search engine optimization and social media marketing. SEO would be a piece of the SEM pie chart.
SEO – Search engine optimization. The process of affecting the visibility of a website or a webpage in a web search engine’s unpaid results.
SERP – Search engine results page. The page displayed by a search engine in response to a search by a user. The main component is the listing of results that are returned by the search engine in response to a keyword search. The page may also contain other results such as advertisements.
SMO – Social media optimization. The process of increasing awareness of a product, brand, event, etc by using a number of social media outlets and communities to generate viral publicity.
SMM – Social media marketing. The form of Internet marketing that leverages social networking websites as a marketing tool. The goal is to produce content that users will share with their social network to help a company increase brand exposure and broaden customer reach. Works in conjunction with SMO. SMM is a piece of the SMO pie chart.
UV – Unique visitor. The number of distinct individuals requesting web pages during a given period of time. This is regardless of how often they visit the website. Visits refer to the number of times a site is visited, no many how many visitors made up those visits.
In Closing
Keep in mind there are many more acronyms involved in digital marketing, but as we mentioned, these are just the ones that more commonly are used in the industry. Some companies will choose to use a number of these when presenting proposals for digital marketing services. We will discuss more opinions on these things in a later article, but for now, we simply wanted to help you understand the simple terms of what these digital marketing acronyms mean. We hope that this will help you better decipher the meaning behind each term, and help you research each a little better. There’s a lot at stake when making decisions about investing in digital marketing, so we hope this helps you start the process of understanding them, and processing them.
As always, if you have any questions, or want more detailed information on any of these, Let’s Chat! If you didn’t see an acronym of digital marketing on this list that you’re looking for, let me know. We’ll help by getting you some answers. We may even know an expert or two that can help as well. Digital Marketing can definitely seem overwhelming, but we’ll always do our best to bring you content and tools that we hope will make it all a little easier.
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