The Digital Marketing Glossary: 150 Terms Explained in Plain English

Updated October 2026 · Written by Adrian Prokopiec · 33 min read

Digital marketing terms are the shorthand that marketers, ad platforms and analytics tools use to describe how people find a business online, what they do when they arrive, and what each of those actions costs. This 20 Minute Marketing glossary defines 150 of them in plain English for US small business owners and learners. Every entry is short enough to read once and use the same day.

Marketing has a vocabulary problem. Half the words were invented by software companies, a quarter are acronyms for other acronyms, and the rest mean something slightly different depending on whether you are in Google Ads, Meta Ads Manager or your email platform. None of it is hard. It just has never been explained in one place without a sales pitch attached.

This page is that place. Each term gets a definition you can lift straight into a conversation with a freelancer or an agency, plus a note on where it actually shows up. Where a definition depends on a platform rule, the rule comes from that platform’s own documentation, checked in October 2026. Where it depends on experience, I say so.

Use the letters to jump around, or bookmark a single term with its link. Every term on this page has its own anchor, so you can send someone to the definition of ROAS rather than the whole page. If a term you need is missing, it is probably in the marketing formulas cheat sheet or the digital marketing statistics page, which sit alongside this one.

A

A/B test

Showing two versions of one thing (an email subject line, a landing page headline, an ad image) to two similar groups at the same time, then keeping the version that performs better. The discipline is changing one element at a time, so you know what caused the difference. Also called a split test.

Above the fold

The part of a web page visible before anyone scrolls. Borrowed from newspapers folded on a newsstand. On a phone it is a very small area, which is why the headline, the one-line offer and the button need to fit in it.

Ad Rank

Google Ads’ internal score that decides whether your ad shows and in what position. Google lists six inputs: your bid, the quality of your ad and landing page, the Ad Rank thresholds, how competitive the auction is, the context of the search, and the expected impact of your ad assets. You never see the number itself.

Ad assets (formerly ad extensions)

Extra pieces attached to a Google search ad: sitelinks, a phone number, a location, callouts, prices. They make the ad bigger and give people more reasons to click, and Google counts their expected impact in Ad Rank. Free to add and routinely left empty by small businesses.

Advantage+

Meta’s family of automated campaign settings for Facebook and Instagram ads, where the system chooses audiences, placements and creative combinations for you. Less control, less setup time. Our Advantage+ setup guide for local business covers when it helps and when it burns budget.

AEO (answer engine optimisation)

Writing and structuring content so that AI-driven answer tools (Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini) quote it when someone asks a question. It rewards direct answers, clear headings and verifiable claims. Read what AEO is and how it differs from SEO.

Affiliate marketing

Paying a third party a commission for each sale or lead they send you, tracked with a unique link or code. Low risk because you pay on results, but the FTC requires affiliates to disclose the relationship to their audience.

AI Overviews

The AI-written summary Google shows at the top of some search results, with links to the pages it drew from. Being one of those linked sources is the new featured snippet. See how to rank in Google’s AI Overviews.

Algorithm update

A change Google makes to how it ranks pages. Google confirms a handful each year (core updates, spam updates) and makes thousands of smaller unannounced changes. Our Google algorithm updates timeline lists the confirmed ones.

Alt text

A short written description of an image, stored in the image’s HTML. Screen readers read it aloud to people who cannot see the image, and search engines use it to understand what the picture shows. Describe the image; do not stuff keywords into it.

Anchor text

The clickable words of a link. “Our pricing page” is anchor text; “click here” is anchor text that tells Google nothing. Descriptive anchors help both readers and search engines understand the page being linked to.

Aspect ratio

The shape of an image or video, written as width to height. A 1:1 image is square, 9:16 is vertical full-screen on a phone, and 16:9 is widescreen. Platforms crop anything that does not match the ratio of the placement, which is why the same photo looks fine in a feed and chopped in a Story. See the image size cheat sheet.

Attribution

Deciding which marketing touch gets credit for a sale when a customer saw several (an ad, then a Google search, then an email). Last-click gives all credit to the final step; data-driven models in GA4 share it. Different tools use different models, which is why your Google Ads and GA4 numbers rarely agree.

Audience

In ad platforms, a defined group of people you can show ads to: by location and interests, by having visited your site (a retargeting audience), or by uploading your customer list. In content, simply the people you are writing for.

Automation (marketing automation)

Rules that send messages or take actions without you touching them: a welcome email when someone subscribes, a reminder when a cart is abandoned, a review request three days after a job is finished. The sequence is built once and runs for every new contact.

B

B2B / B2C

Business-to-business and business-to-consumer. A commercial electrician selling to property managers is B2B; the same electrician fixing a homeowner’s switchboard is B2C. The distinction matters because buying cycles, channels and message tone differ.

Backlink

A link from someone else’s website to yours. Search engines treat them as votes of confidence, weighted by the linking site’s own authority. One link from a local newspaper beats fifty from directories nobody reads. The free backlink tools roundup shows how to see yours.

Bid

The most you tell an ad platform you are willing to pay for a click, a thousand impressions or a conversion. You rarely pay the full bid; the auction charges just enough to beat the next advertiser. Automated bidding sets this for you based on a target you choose.

Bounce rate

In GA4, the percentage of sessions that were not engaged: shorter than 10 seconds, with no key event and only one page view. It is the inverse of engagement rate. In email, a bounce is a message that could not be delivered, which is a different thing entirely.

Brand awareness

How many people in your market know you exist and what you do. Hard to measure directly for a small business; branded search volume (people typing your business name into Google) is the most honest proxy you have for free.

Breadcrumb

The trail of links near the top of a page showing where it sits in the site: Home › Services › Water heater repair. Helps visitors navigate and, with the matching schema markup, can appear in the search result itself.

Buyer persona

A written sketch of a typical customer: their situation, what they are trying to fix, what they worry about, where they look for help. Useful when it is built from real customer conversations and useless when it is invented in a meeting. Here is how to create buyer personas from real data.

C

CAC (customer acquisition cost)

Total marketing and sales spend over a period divided by the number of new customers won in it. If you spent $3,000 USD and gained 20 customers, CAC is $150. Only meaningful next to what a customer is worth to you (see LTV).

Call to action (CTA)

The instruction that tells a reader what to do next: Call now, Get a quote, Book online. Every page, email and ad should have exactly one primary CTA. Two competing buttons usually means fewer clicks on both.

Campaign

A set of marketing activity with one goal, one budget and a start and end. In Google Ads and Meta it is also the top level of account structure: campaigns hold ad groups or ad sets, which hold the ads.

CAN-SPAM

The US federal law covering commercial email, enforced by the FTC. In short: no misleading headers or subject lines, identify the message as an ad, include a physical postal address, and honour unsubscribe requests promptly. It applies to every business email that promotes something, not just bulk sends.

Canonical URL

A tag that tells search engines which version of a page is the original when the same content lives at more than one address (with and without “www”, with tracking codes, in two categories). It stops your own pages competing with each other.

Churn

The share of customers or subscribers you lose over a period. A gym losing 5 of 100 members in a month has 5% monthly churn. Reducing churn is almost always cheaper than replacing the lost customers with new ones.

Click fraud (invalid clicks)

Clicks on your ads from bots or people with no intent to buy, sometimes competitors. Google filters what it detects and refunds those as invalid clicks; what slips through you can see as sudden spikes with zero conversions.

Content calendar

A schedule of what you will publish, where and when. A spreadsheet is enough. Its real job is to make you decide a month ahead rather than at 9pm on the day, which is why a content calendar changes output.

Content marketing

Publishing useful material (guides, videos, answers to common questions) that attracts the people you want as customers, instead of interrupting them with ads. It is slow to start and compounds over time, because a good page keeps bringing visitors for years.

Conversion

The action you want a visitor to take: a purchase, a form, a phone call, a booking. You decide what counts. GA4 now calls these key events; ad platforms still say conversions. Define them before you spend a dollar, or you will never know what the dollar bought.

Conversion rate

Conversions divided by visitors (or clicks, or sessions), as a percentage. 1,000 visitors and 25 enquiries is a 2.5% conversion rate. What counts as good depends on the industry and the traffic source; our conversion rate benchmarks give the ranges.

Conversion tracking

The setup that tells an ad platform or analytics tool when a conversion happened, usually a small piece of code (a tag or pixel) that fires on the thank-you page or when a button is pressed. Without it, automated bidding is guessing.

Core update

A broad change Google makes to its main ranking systems several times a year, announced on the Search Status Dashboard and usually rolled out over one to four weeks. A core update is not a penalty: pages that drop have not broken a rule, they have been reassessed against other pages. Dates and durations are in the algorithm update timeline.

Core Web Vitals

Google’s three measurements of how a page feels to use: how fast the main content loads, how quickly it responds to a tap, and how much it shifts around while loading. They are a minor ranking factor and a major reason visitors leave. Start with fixing website speed for free.

CPA (cost per acquisition)

Ad spend divided by conversions from that spend. $500 of ads producing 10 leads is a $50 CPA. It is the number to watch in a lead-generation campaign, and the target you give Google or Meta when you use target-CPA bidding.

CPC (cost per click)

What you pay each time someone clicks your ad. Set by auction, so it moves with competition; a personal injury lawyer in Houston pays many times what a florist does. Average CPC is total spend divided by total clicks.

CPL (cost per lead)

CPA where the conversion is a lead rather than a sale. Spend divided by leads. Google Local Services Ads charge this way directly: you are billed per lead rather than per click.

CPM (cost per mille)

The cost of showing an ad one thousand times. “Mille” is Latin for thousand. Meta reports CPM on every campaign; rising CPM with flat results usually means your audience is tired of the creative.

Crawl / crawler

How a search engine discovers pages: a program (Googlebot) follows links from page to page and reads what it finds. A page nobody links to is hard to crawl, which is why internal links matter.

CRM (customer relationship management)

Software that stores every contact and every interaction with them: enquiries, quotes, jobs, emails. For a small business it is the difference between following up every lead and following up the ones you happen to remember.

CRO (conversion rate optimisation)

Improving the share of visitors who take action, without buying more visitors. Clearer headlines, shorter forms, a visible phone number, proof near the button. Our seven landing page fixes are CRO in practice.

CTR (click-through rate)

Clicks divided by impressions, as a percentage. An ad shown 2,000 times and clicked 60 times has a 3% CTR. It measures how well your headline or ad matches what people wanted. Expected CTR is one of the three parts of Google’s Quality Score.

Customer journey

The sequence of steps a person takes from first hearing about you to buying and, ideally, buying again. Mapping it shows where people drop out. Most small businesses discover the gap is after the enquiry, not before it.

D

Dashboard

A single screen showing the handful of numbers you check regularly, pulled from your analytics, ad and email tools. Looker Studio is Google’s free one. A good dashboard has five numbers; a bad one has fifty.

Deliverability

Whether your emails reach the inbox rather than the spam folder or nowhere. It depends on your sender reputation, your authentication records (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) and how recipients react to past emails. Here is how to stay out of the spam folder.

Demographics

Measurable facts about a group of people: age, gender, location, household income. Ad platforms let you target by them. They tell you who someone is, not what they want, which is why interest and intent signals usually matter more.

Direct traffic

Visits where analytics could not tell where the person came from, so it assumes they typed your address. In practice it also catches clicks from apps, untagged emails and some private browsers. A large direct number is usually a tagging problem.

Display ads

Image or banner ads shown on websites and apps, rather than in search results. Cheap per impression, low on intent. Useful for retargeting people who already visited you; expensive as a way to find new customers for a local service.

DKIM, SPF and DMARC

Three records on your domain that prove an email really came from you. SPF lists which servers may send for you, DKIM signs each message, DMARC says what to do when the other two fail. Gmail and Yahoo now expect bulk senders to have all three in place.

Domain authority

A score from 1 to 100 invented by third-party SEO tools to estimate how strong a website’s backlink profile is. Google does not use it and has never published anything like it. Handy for comparing two sites quickly; meaningless as a target.

Drip campaign (sequence)

A series of emails or texts sent automatically at set intervals after a trigger: day 0 welcome, day 2 your best guide, day 5 a customer story, day 9 an offer. Written once, sent to everyone who joins, forever.

Dynamic content

Parts of an email or page that change depending on who is looking: the reader’s first name, their nearest branch, products they viewed. The template is one; the message each person sees is personal.

E

E-E-A-T

Experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness: the qualities Google’s human quality raters look for in a page. Google says it is not a direct ranking factor and that trust is the most important of the four. Practically: a real named author, first-hand detail and verifiable claims.

Email list

The people who have given you permission to email them. The only audience you own outright; every social platform can change the rules or the reach tomorrow, your list cannot be taken away. See how to grow an email list to 1,000 subscribers without ads.

Engagement

Any measurable reaction to your content: likes, comments, shares, saves, clicks, time spent. On social it is the main currency. In GA4 an engaged session is one that lasts over 10 seconds, has a key event, or has two or more page views.

Engagement rate

On social media, engagements divided by reach or followers. In GA4, the percentage of sessions that were engaged, which replaced bounce rate as the headline quality number. The two uses of the phrase are unrelated; check which tool you are in.

Entity

A thing search engines and AI systems recognise as distinct: a business, a person, a product, a place. Google builds a picture of your business as an entity from your website, your Business Profile, reviews and mentions elsewhere. Consistency across all of them is what makes the picture sharp.

Evergreen content

Material that stays useful for years because the question it answers does not change: how to bleed a radiator, what to ask a wedding photographer. The opposite of news. Evergreen pages are where most of a small business blog’s long-term traffic comes from.

F

Featured snippet

The boxed answer Google sometimes shows above the normal results, pulled from one page. A paragraph, a list or a table. It goes to the page that answers the question most directly, not necessarily the one ranking first underneath.

First-party data

Information customers give you directly: email addresses, purchase history, what they filled in on your forms, what they did on your site. Yours to use within privacy law. Increasingly valuable as browsers and phones block the third-party tracking ad platforms used to rely on.

Frequency

The average number of times each person in your audience has seen your ad. Meta reports it per campaign. When frequency climbs and results stall, the audience has seen the ad enough; change the creative or widen the audience.

Funnel

A picture of the customer journey as stages that narrow: many people become aware, fewer consider, fewer still buy. Marketers talk about top of funnel (awareness content) and bottom of funnel (pricing pages, quotes). The shape tells you where to work.

G

GA4 (Google Analytics 4)

Google’s free website and app analytics tool, which replaced Universal Analytics in 2023. It records every interaction as an event and lets you mark the important ones as key events. Our GA4 setup guide for small business covers the 20-minute version.

Geotargeting

Showing ads only to people in a chosen area: a radius around your shop, specific ZIP codes, a metro. The single most important setting for a local service business, and the one most often left at the national default.

Google Ads

Google’s advertising platform. Search ads appear above and below results for keywords you choose; Display, YouTube, Shopping and Performance Max campaigns reach people elsewhere. Pay per click or per conversion. Start with the Google Ads setup guide for US small business.

Google Business Profile (GBP)

The free listing that puts your business on Google Maps and in the map pack of local search results, with hours, photos, reviews and posts. Formerly Google My Business. For most local businesses it produces more calls than the website does. See our Google Business Profile optimisation guide.

Google Search Console

Google’s free report on how your site appears in its search results: which queries show your pages, how often they are clicked, what position they hold, and which pages Google could not index. The first place to look when traffic changes.

Google Tag Manager (GTM)

A container you install once on your site, then use to add and manage all your other tracking codes (GA4, Google Ads, the Meta pixel) without touching the site again. Saves developer time; adds one more thing to learn.

Guest post

An article you write for someone else’s website, usually with a link back to yours. Legitimate when the site is relevant and the article is good; spam when it is bought in bulk from sites that exist only to sell links.

H

Hashtag

A word or phrase after a # that groups posts by topic on social platforms. Once central to discovery on Instagram and Twitter; now a minor signal on most platforms, where the algorithm reads the content itself. Three relevant tags beat thirty generic ones.

Heatmap

A colour overlay showing where visitors click, move and scroll on a page. Red means lots of activity. Tools like Microsoft Clarity provide it free. The usual finding: people click on things that are not links and never reach the button at the bottom.

Hreflang

A tag that tells Google which language and country version of a page to show which searchers, for sites that run separate pages per market. Only relevant if you sell in more than one country or language.

I

Impression

One instance of your ad, post or search listing being shown on someone’s screen. Not a view in any meaningful sense; it may have been scrolled past. Impressions are the denominator for CTR and the unit CPM is priced on.

Impression share

In Google Ads, the percentage of times your ad showed out of the times it was eligible to. Lost impression share is split into “budget” (you ran out of money) and “rank” (your Ad Rank was too low). It tells you which lever to pull.

Indexing

Google storing a page in its database so it can appear in results. A page can be crawled but not indexed if Google judges it thin or duplicate. Search Console’s Pages report tells you which of yours are in and which are out.

Influencer marketing

Paying or gifting someone with an audience to feature your product. For small business the useful end is local micro-influencers with a few thousand engaged followers. The FTC requires the paid relationship to be disclosed clearly in the post.

Intent (search intent)

What a person actually wants when they type a query. “Water heater leaking” wants help now; “best tankless water heater” wants a comparison; “plumber near me” wants a phone number. Matching the page to the intent is most of SEO.

Internal link

A link from one page on your site to another. It helps visitors find related material and helps Google discover pages and understand which ones matter. The cheapest ranking lever a small site has, and the most neglected.

J–K

JavaScript rendering

When a page’s content is built in the browser by code rather than sent as finished HTML. Google can process it but does so later and less reliably. If your key content only appears after scripts run, it may be invisible to search for a while.

Key event

GA4’s current name for a conversion: an event you have flagged as important, such as a form submission or a purchase. Renamed in 2024 so that “conversion” would mean the same thing in GA4 and Google Ads reports.

Keyword

The word or phrase someone types into a search engine, and the phrase you choose to target with a page or an ad. In SEO you earn the ranking; in Google Ads you bid for it. Both start with knowing which phrases people actually use.

Keyword research

Finding out which phrases your customers search, how often, and how hard each is to rank for. The useful ones for a small business are usually specific and local rather than big and generic. Here is how to find easy keywords to rank for.

KPI (key performance indicator)

The number that tells you whether the thing is working. Leads per week, cost per lead, repeat purchase rate. A metric is anything you can measure; a KPI is the one you would act on if it moved. Pick three, not thirty.

L

Landing page

The page a visitor arrives on, especially one built for a single campaign with one message and one button. Sending ad traffic to your homepage, which has ten messages and a menu, is the most common reason a campaign that gets clicks gets no leads.

Lead

A person who has shown interest and given you a way to contact them: a form, a call, a quote request. A qualified lead is one you have checked is a real fit. Lead-gen platforms sell these; your own marketing earns them.

Lead magnet

Something useful offered in exchange for an email address: a checklist, a price guide, a template. The best ones solve the exact problem that brought the person to the page. The worst are generic ebooks nobody opens.

Local pack (map pack)

The block of three Business Profiles with a map that Google shows for local searches. Winning a spot depends on relevance, distance and prominence (reviews, mentions, links), not on your website alone. It is where “near me” searches are decided.

Local SEO

Everything you do to appear when people near you search for what you sell: Business Profile, reviews, consistent name-address-phone across the web, location pages, local links. For most service businesses it matters more than general SEO.

Local Services Ads (LSA)

Google ads for local service providers that sit above regular search ads, show a verification badge after a background check, and bill per lead (a call or message) rather than per click. Available for a set list of trades and professions. Our Local Services Ads guide covers setup and lead disputes.

Long-tail keyword

A longer, more specific search phrase with lower volume and clearer intent: “emergency plumber Katy TX Sunday” rather than “plumber”. Easier to rank for and far more likely to convert. Small businesses win on the long tail.

LTV (customer lifetime value)

The total profit you expect from a customer over the whole relationship, not just the first sale. A customer worth $2,000 USD over five years justifies a $300 acquisition cost; one worth $150 does not. Pair it with CAC before setting any ad budget.

M

Marketing mix

The combination of channels and activities you use and how budget is split between them. The classic textbook version is the four Ps (product, price, place, promotion); in practice for a small business it means “how much goes to Google, Meta, email and the website”.

Meta description

The one- or two-line summary under a page title in search results. Not a ranking factor, but it decides whether people click. Google rewrites it when it thinks it can do better, which is often. Around 150 characters, specific, with a reason to click.

Meta pixel

A piece of code from Meta on your website that reports visits and actions back to Facebook and Instagram ads, so you can retarget visitors and measure conversions. Increasingly paired with the Conversions API, which sends the same data from your server instead.

Mobile-first indexing

Google ranks your site based on its mobile version, not the desktop one. If content is hidden or missing on the phone layout, Google does not count it. Check your site on a phone before anything else.

MQL / SQL

Marketing-qualified lead and sales-qualified lead. An MQL has shown enough interest to be worth a follow-up; an SQL has been checked and is ready for a quote or a call. Mostly B2B vocabulary, but the idea of grading leads applies to any business.

N

NAP (name, address, phone)

Your business name, address and phone number as they appear across the web. Google compares them across your site, your Business Profile and directories; mismatches (Suite 4 here, Ste 4 there, an old number on Yelp) weaken local rankings.

Negative keyword

A word you tell Google Ads never to show your ad for. A plumber adds “jobs”, “salary”, “DIY” and “course”. In the accounts I’ve managed, the first negative keyword review on a new account typically cuts wasted spend more than any bid change does.

Newsletter

A regular email to your list that is mostly useful and only partly promotional. The ones that work have a consistent day, a recognisable format and one idea per issue. Here is how to build a newsletter people read.

Nofollow

An attribute on a link telling search engines not to pass ranking credit through it. Used on paid links, user comments and untrusted sources. Google now treats it as a hint rather than a command. Related: “sponsored” and “ugc” attributes.

O

Omnichannel

Giving customers one consistent experience whether they reach you by website, phone, social message, email or in person, with each channel aware of the others. Mostly a big-company word; for a small business it means “the person answering Instagram knows what the website says”.

Open rate

The percentage of delivered emails recorded as opened. Since Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection began pre-loading emails in 2021, the number is inflated for many lists and is no longer a reliable measure on its own. Watch click rate alongside it; our email benchmarks show both.

Organic

Any visit, view or ranking you did not pay for directly. Organic search is the unpaid results; organic social is your posts reaching followers without boosting. Slower to build than paid, and it keeps working when the budget stops.

Owned, earned and paid media

Owned is what you control (website, email list). Earned is what others give you (reviews, press, shares, links). Paid is advertising. A healthy small business marketing plan builds owned, encourages earned and uses paid to speed things up.

P

Page speed

How quickly a page loads and becomes usable. Measured free with Google’s PageSpeed Insights. Oversized images are the cause nine times out of ten on small business sites, and the fix takes 20 minutes.

Paid search (PPC, SEM)

Ads in search engine results that you pay for per click. PPC (pay-per-click) describes the billing; SEM (search engine marketing) is the older umbrella term that technically included SEO but in practice now means paid. All three usually mean Google Ads.

Performance Max

A Google Ads campaign type that runs your ads across Search, Display, YouTube, Gmail and Maps from one budget, with Google’s automation choosing where. Needs solid conversion tracking and a decent budget to learn; without them it spends on the cheapest, lowest-intent inventory.

Personalisation

Changing a message based on what you know about the recipient: their name, their last purchase, their location. Done well it feels like service; done badly (“Hi FIRSTNAME”) it reminds people they are on a list.

Pillar page

A long guide covering a whole topic, linked to and from shorter articles (spokes) that each cover one part in depth. The structure shows Google you have real coverage of a subject rather than one page on it. This glossary is a pillar.

Privacy policy

The page explaining what personal data you collect, why, and what people can do about it. Required by California law for sites that collect data from its residents, by the ad and analytics platforms as a condition of use, and by common sense.

Programmatic advertising

Buying ad space through automated auctions across thousands of sites and apps, in real time, based on who is looking. Google Display and most “we’ll put your ad everywhere” offers are programmatic. Rarely the right first step for a local business.

Q

Quality Score

Google Ads’ 1-to-10 rating of each keyword, built from expected click-through rate, ad relevance and landing page experience. Google describes it as a diagnostic tool and states plainly that it is not an input to the auction. Treat it as a report card, as explained in our Quality Score guide.

Query (search term)

The exact words a person typed. In Google Ads, the keyword is what you bid on and the search term is what triggered the ad; they can be quite different. The search terms report is where wasted spend hides.

R

Reach

The number of different people who saw your content or ad at least once. Impressions count every showing; reach counts each person once. Reach of 1,000 with 3,000 impressions means each person saw it about three times (frequency).

Redirect (301)

An instruction that sends anyone (and any search engine) requesting an old address to a new one. A 301 is permanent and passes most of the old page’s ranking credit. Use it whenever you delete, rename or merge a page; otherwise you leave a dead link.

Referral traffic

Visitors who arrived by clicking a link on another website (not a search engine or a social platform). A local directory, a supplier’s partner page, a news article. Small in volume, often high in quality.

Remarketing / retargeting

Showing ads to people who have already visited your site or interacted with you. Cheap because the audience is small and warm. Cap the frequency; following someone around the internet for a month does not read as persistence.

Responsive design

A website layout that rearranges itself to fit the screen, from a phone to a wide monitor, from one set of code. Standard on every modern website builder. The thing to check is whether your tables and forms still work at phone width.

Review velocity

How steadily new reviews arrive, as opposed to how many you have in total. A profile gaining three reviews a week looks more active to Google and to customers than one with 200 reviews from 2022. Here is how to keep reviews coming in on autopilot.

Rich results

Search listings with extra features: star ratings, FAQ dropdowns, prices, event dates, breadcrumbs. They are earned by adding the matching schema markup to the page. Bigger listing, more clicks, same ranking.

ROAS (return on ad spend)

Revenue from ads divided by the cost of those ads. $5,000 USD in sales from $1,000 of ads is a ROAS of 5, often written 500%. It ignores your margin, so a ROAS of 3 can still lose money on a product with a 25% margin. ROI accounts for that; ROAS does not.

ROI (return on investment)

Profit from an activity minus its cost, divided by its cost. Unlike ROAS it uses profit, not revenue, so it tells you whether the marketing actually made money. The formulas for both are worked through in the marketing formulas cheat sheet.

S

Schema markup (structured data)

Code added to a page that labels its content in a vocabulary search engines understand: this is a business, these are its hours, this is a review with this rating. Uses the shared schema.org vocabulary. It earns rich results and helps AI systems read the page. See which schema a small business should add.

Segmentation

Splitting your list or audience into groups that get different messages: new subscribers versus past customers, one suburb versus another, bought product A versus product B. Smaller, better-matched sends outperform one email to everyone. Our email segmentation guide starts with three segments.

SEO (search engine optimisation)

Making your website more likely to appear, and rank higher, in unpaid search results. Three parts: technical (can Google read the site), content (does it answer what people search), authority (do others link to and mention it). Slow, compounding, and the channel most small businesses underinvest in.

SERP (search engine results page)

The page Google shows after a search. Now a mix of ads, an AI Overview, a map pack, videos, People Also Ask boxes and, somewhere, the ten blue links. “SERP features” are all the non-link elements, and each is something you can target.

Session

One visit to your site: everything a person does from arriving until they leave or go quiet for 30 minutes. One person can have many sessions. GA4 counts sessions, users and views separately; sessions is usually the one to compare month to month.

Sitemap (XML)

A file listing every page you want search engines to know about, usually at yoursite.com/sitemap.xml. Most platforms generate it automatically. Submit it in Search Console once, then forget it, unless pages are not getting indexed.

SMS marketing

Promotional or service text messages to customers who have agreed to receive them. Very high open rates, very low tolerance for abuse. In the US the TCPA requires clear prior consent and a working opt-out; our SMS marketing compliance guide covers the rules.

Social proof

Evidence that other people chose you and were glad they did: reviews, testimonials, customer counts, logos, case studies. Placed next to the button, it does more for conversion rate than almost any wording change.

Spam policies

Google’s published list of practices that get pages demoted or removed: hidden text, bought links, scraped content, pages generated at scale with no oversight. Google’s own guidance says using AI mainly to manipulate rankings is a violation; using it with real editing and expertise is not.

Split test

Another name for an A/B test. See A/B test. For email specifically, our email A/B testing guide shows what to test first.

Subject line

The headline of an email, and the main thing that decides whether it gets opened. Specific beats clever. Under about 50 characters so it survives a phone screen. The preview text that follows it is the second most important line you write.

T

Target audience

The specific group of people your marketing is aimed at. “Everyone who needs a plumber” is not a target audience; “homeowners in these five ZIP codes with houses over 20 years old” is. The narrower it is, the cheaper it is to reach.

TCPA

The Telephone Consumer Protection Act, the US federal law governing marketing calls and texts. It requires prior express consent for marketing texts to mobile numbers and carries per-message statutory damages, which is why class actions follow careless SMS campaigns.

Technical SEO

The part of SEO about whether search engines can find, read and index your site: speed, mobile layout, broken links, duplicate pages, redirects, sitemaps. Unglamorous and usually fixable in an afternoon with the technical SEO checklist for small business.

Third-party cookie

A small file set by a domain other than the one you are visiting, used by ad networks to follow people across sites. Safari and Firefox block them by default and Apple limits app tracking, which is why ad platforms now lean on first-party data and server-side tracking.

Title tag

The page title shown in the browser tab and, usually, as the blue link in search results. One of the few on-page elements that directly affects ranking. Keep it under about 60 characters, put the main keyword near the front, and make every page’s unique.

Tracking code (tag)

Any snippet of code on your site that reports visitor behaviour to another system: the GA4 tag, the Google Ads tag, the Meta pixel. Google Tag Manager exists to hold them all in one place. Each one you add should have a reason.

U

UGC (user-generated content)

Photos, videos, reviews and posts made by customers rather than by you. More trusted than anything you produce, and free if you ask. A customer’s phone photo of the finished deck will outperform your professional shot in an ad.

Unsubscribe rate

The percentage of recipients who opted out after an email. A few tenths of a percent is normal. A spike after one send tells you exactly which email crossed a line. Under CAN-SPAM, opt-outs must be honoured within ten business days.

URL (slug)

A page’s web address. The slug is the last part, after the final slash. Short, lowercase, hyphenated and descriptive is the rule: /water-heater-repair rather than /services?id=7. Changing a slug later needs a redirect.

UTM parameters

Tags added to the end of a link (?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=spring) so analytics can tell exactly which email, post or ad sent the visitor. Without them, half your email traffic shows up as “direct”. The UTM parameters guide includes a naming convention.

UX (user experience)

How easy and pleasant a site or app is to use: can people find the price, fill in the form, tap the phone number. Good UX is invisible. Bad UX shows up as a high bounce rate and a quiet phone.

V–Z

Value proposition

The one clear statement of what you offer, for whom, and why it is a better choice than the alternatives. It belongs at the top of your homepage, in your Business Profile description and in every ad. If you cannot say it in a sentence, customers cannot repeat it.

Video marketing

Using video (YouTube, Reels, TikTok, Shorts, a clip on your homepage) to explain, show and sell. Phone-shot and honest beats polished and generic for a small business. Start with the YouTube marketing beginner’s guide.

Voice search

Searches spoken to a phone or a smart speaker. They are longer and phrased as questions (“who does gutter cleaning near me”), and the assistant usually reads out one answer, typically from a Business Profile or a featured snippet.

Webinar

A live or recorded online presentation, usually used to teach something and collect email addresses. Works for consultants, coaches and anyone selling a considered purchase. Rarely worth the effort for a trade or retail business.

White hat / black hat

SEO slang. White hat follows search engine guidelines; black hat tries to trick them (hidden text, bought links, cloaking) and risks penalties. If an agency promises page one in 30 days, ask which hat they are wearing.

Zero-click search

A search where the person gets what they need on the results page (an AI Overview, a map pack, a phone number) and never clicks through. A growing share of all searches. The answer is to be the source Google shows, so the business gets the call even when the site does not get the visit.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the most important digital marketing terms to learn first?

Start with the ten that appear on every report: impression, click, CTR, CPC, conversion, conversion rate, CPA, ROAS, session and engagement rate. Once those make sense, add the local terms (Google Business Profile, local pack, NAP) if you serve a local area, or ROAS and LTV if you sell online.

What is the difference between SEO, SEM and PPC?

SEO is earning unpaid search rankings by improving your site and content. PPC is paying per click for ads, usually in Google. SEM originally covered both but in everyday use now means the paid side. If someone sells you SEM, they almost always mean running Google Ads.

What does CTR mean in digital marketing?

CTR is click-through rate: clicks divided by impressions, as a percentage. If an ad is shown 1,000 times and clicked 30 times, its CTR is 3%. It measures how well the headline or ad matched what the searcher wanted, and expected CTR is one of the three components of Google Ads Quality Score.

What is the difference between ROAS and ROI?

ROAS compares revenue to ad spend; ROI compares profit to total cost. A campaign returning $4 in sales for every $1 of ads has a ROAS of 4, but if the product margin is 20% that is $0.80 of profit per $1 spent, a negative ROI. ROAS is quick to read; ROI tells you whether you made money.

What is the difference between a conversion and a key event in GA4?

They are the same idea under two names. In 2024 Google renamed GA4 conversions to key events so that the word conversion would mean the same thing in GA4 and Google Ads. A key event is any event you have marked as important, such as a form submission or a purchase.

Is domain authority a Google ranking factor?

No. Domain authority is a score created by third-party SEO tools to estimate the strength of a site’s backlinks. Google has never used or published it. It is useful for a quick comparison between two websites, but chasing a higher number is not a strategy.