Above the fold

With reference to the top part of a newspaper, the term is used in Internet marketing to describe the top part of the page that the user can see without scrolling down.

Ad Clicks

Number of times users click on an ad banner.

Ad Groups

A group of ads within a Campaign.

Ad Scheduling

In internet marketing, Ad Scheduling is the practice of scheduling the day into several parts, during each of which a different t advertising rule is applied based on advertising objective, budget, and competitors.

Advertising Network

an aggregator or broker of advertising inventory for many websites. Advertising networks are the sales representatives for the Web sites within the inventory.

Ad Views (Impressions)

Number of times an ad banner is downloaded and presumably seen by visitors. If the same ad appears on multiple pages simultaneously, this statistic may understate the number of ad impressions, due to browser caching. Corresponds to net impressions in traditional media. There is currently no way of knowing if an ad was actually loaded. Most servers record an ad as served even if it was not.

Affiliate

A marketing partner that promotes your product or services under a pay-for-results agreement.

Affinity Marketing

Marketing targeted at individuals sharing common interests related to a product. Also, a campaign jointly sponsored different organizations.

Anchor Text

Anchor text refers to the visible clickable text for a hyperlink. For example: < a href=”http://www.lazworld.com/” >This is the anchor text< /a >. The text usually gives visitors or search engines important information on what the page being linked to is about.

Auto-responder

The first auto-responders were created within mail transfer agents that found they could not deliver an e-mail to a given address. These create bounce messages such as “your e-mail could not be delivered because…” type responses. Today auto-responders are often used as e-mail marketing tools, to immediately provide information to their prospective customers and then follow-up with them at preset time intervals.

Average Page Depth

The average number of pages on a site that visitors view during a single session.

Average Response Value

The average revenue value of each click, calculated as total revenue divided by total clicks.

Backlinks

Backlinks are incoming links to a webpage. Backlinks are important for search engine optimization (SEO) because some search engines, give more credit to websites that have a good number of quality backlinks. Sites with better backlink counts usually rank better in SERPs

Banner

Banners are the 468-by-60 pixels ad space on commercial Web sites that are usually “hot-linked” to the advertiser’s site.

Below the Fold

Below the Fold refers to having to scroll down to view information on a website.

Blog

A blog is an online journal or “log” of any given subject. Blogs are easy to update, manage, and syndicate, powered by individuals and/or corporations and enable users to comment on postings.

Bookmark

A bookmark is an easy way to find your way Back to a web site . Just like a real bookmark helps you keep your place in a book you are reading.

Bot

Abbreviation for robot (also called a spider). It refers to software programs that scan the web. Bots vary in purpose from indexing web pages for search engines to harvesting e-mail addresses for spammers.

Bounce Rate

This shows a percentage of entrances on any given page that resulted in an exit from the page without entering any other page on the site.

Brand

A name, term, sign or symbol used for identification and recognition purposes of products or services. Both a physical and emotional trigger to create a relationship between consumers and the product or service.

Brand Attributes

Functional or emotional associations that are assigned to a brand by its customers and prospects. Brand attributes can be either negative or positive and can have varying degrees of relevance and importance to different customer segments.

Brand Equity

The value – both tangible and intangible that a brand adds to a product/service.

Brand Extension

Using an existing brand for new products or services.

Brand Loyalty

The strength of preference for a brand compared to other similar available options. Often measured in terms of purchase behavior or price sensitivity.

Brand Management

The process of managing brands of an organization in order to increase long-term brand equity.

Brand Positioning

The space a brand is perceived to occupy; the part of the brand identity that is to be actively communicated in a way that meaningfully sets it apart from the competition.

Broadcasting

Delivering content through radio or television to a “broad” audience” over the airwaves. See “Narrowcasting”.

Business to Business (B2B)

Sales focused on business customers, either for internal use or resale. B2B is an acronym for “business-to-business” referring to commerce between businesses. Most commonly used in connection with e-commerce and advertising, when you are targeting businesses as opposed to consumers.

Business to Consumer (B2C)

Sales focused on consumers, typically for personal consumption.

Buyer persona

A Buyer Persona is a detailed profile of an example buyer that represents the real audience. An archetype of the buyer that the company hopes to persuade to choose its products, services or solution.

Buzz

“Word-of-mouth” marketing, where product information is communicated by consumers.

Campaign

Defines the daily budget, language, geographic targeting, and location of where the ads are displayed.

Chat Room

An area online where you can chat with other members in real-time.

Call to Action

Whatever you want your customer to do through a given marketing effort. Some examples would include purchasing a product, signing up for your service, filling out a form, etc.

Churning

The practice of customers switching to another supplier based on special discount offers.

Click-through

The percentage of ad views on a Web page that resulted in an ad click.

Click-Through Rate

Percentage of times a user responded to an advertisement by clicking on the ad button/banner. At one time the granddaddy of Web-marketing measurements, click-through is based on the idea that online promotions that do what they’re intended to do will elicit a click. CTR is one metric Internet marketers use to measure the performance of an ad campaign.

Community

Nowadays this refers mainly to online community. A virtual or online community is a group of people that primarily interact via communication media such as e-newsletters, internet, social networks or instant messages, rather than face to face, for social, professional, educational or other purposes.

Competitive Advantage

The product, proposition or benefit that puts a company ahead of its competitors.

Content (A/B) Testing

Testing the relative effectiveness of multiple versions of the same advertisement, or other content, in referring visitors to a site. Multiple versions of content can be uniquely identified by using a utm_content variable in the URL tag.

Content Marketing

In content marketing you create and share content in order to engage current and potential consumers. In contrast to traditional marketing methods that aim to increase sales or awareness through interruption techniques, content marketing subscribes to the notion that delivering high-quality, relevant and valuable information to prospects and customers drives profitable customer action.

Content Network

A group of websites that agree to show ads on their site, served by an ad network, in exchange for a share of the revenue generated by those ads.

Contextual Advertising

Advertising that is targeted to a Web page based on the page’s content, keywords, or category. Ads in most content networks are targeted contextually.

Conversion Rate

This is the percentage of your clicks that generate sales or leads. This number is given by dividing the number of sale/leads by the number of clicks you send to the offer. For example, if 100 clicks generated 100 visitors to your site, and they generate 5 sales/leads then your conversion rate would be 20%.

Coverage

The percentage of a population group covered by the Internet.

CPA

Cost Per Action. A form of advertising where payment is dependent upon an action that a user performs. The action could be making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or asking for a follow-up call. An advertiser pays a set fee to the publisher based on the number of visitors who take action. Many affiliate programs use the CPA model.

CPC

Cost Per Click. Also called Pay per Click (PPC). A performance-based advertising model where the advertiser pays a set fee for every click on an ad. The majority of text ads sold by search engines are billed under the CPC model.

CPC Campaign

A website marketing campaign based on a cost-per-click price where you only pay for the visitors that click on your listings. Hitwise Search Marketing provides guaranteed traffic at competitive cost per click prices. Due to our relationships with search engines combined with our optimization techniques, the price of marketing your website is lowered drastically.

CPL

Cost Per Lead

CPM

CPM is the cost per thousand for a particular site. An advertiser that charges every time an ad is displayed to a user, whether the user clicks on the ad or not. The fee is based on every 1,000 ad impressions (M is the Roman numeral for 1,000). Most display ads, such as banner ads, are sold by CPM.

CPS

Cost Per Sale

CPT

Cost Per Transaction

CPTM

Cost per targeted thousand impressions.

Crawler

A program used by a search engine to “crawl” links on the Internet to find and index content. Also called a robot or spider. Can be used to identify and differentiate between types of crawlers indexing your site.

CRM

Acronym for Customer Relationship Management, which is also applied to Customer Relationship Management software. CRM entails all aspects of interaction a company has with its customer, whether it be sales or service related.

Cross-Sell

Encouraging customers to buy products from other departments or categories.

CSS

Cascading Style Sheet (file.css)

CTA

Abbreviation for Content Targeted Advertising. It refers to the placement of relevant PPC ads on content pages for non-search engine websites.

Customer engagement

This refers to the engagement of customers with one another, with a company or a brand. The initiative for engagement can be either consumer- or company-led and the medium of engagement can be on or offline.

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Profitability of a customer during the lifetime of the relationship, as opposed to profitability of one transaction.

Customer Service

Process designed for assuring customers a positive buying experience. When executed correctly, it can improve customer loyalty, increase cross-selling, and promote positive word-of-mouth.

Customer testimonial

One of the most powerful marketing tools. Companies let their customer speak about their experiences with a product or service. This can be in writing or on video.

Data-mining

Using technology to break down information, often used to aid forecasting and prediction of marketing data.

Decision Makers

In business-to-business, executives who have the authority to make or influence a purchase. Also known as Business Decision Maker (BDM).

Differentiation

Identification, definition, and communication of a product’s unique selling proposition or USP. See “Unique Selling Proposition”.

Direct Marketing

All activities which make it possible to offer goods or services or to transmit other messages to a segment of the population by post, telephone, e-mail or other direct means.

Directory

An index of websites based mainly on human editing and categorization. In most cases the content is submitted to the directory, the editorial team will then approve a title and description and place the URL in an appropriate category. For example, Yahoo! is a human edited directory.

Directory Optimization

The process of creating a submission that is designed to increase the ranking according to relevant search terms. This process is especially important for paid submissions as an optimized submission greatly enhances the chances of receiving a good ROI.

DHTML

Dynamic Hypertext Markup Language

Dynamic Rotation

Advertisements rotate on a timed basis.

E-Book

An electronic book (e-text) that forms the equivalent of the conventional printed book.

E-Commerce/E-Marketing

Sales or marketing conducted through the Internet.

Email marketing

The use of email to develop relationships with potential customers and/or clients and to promote products and/or services.

FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)

FAQ is a commonly used abbreviation for “Frequently Asked Questions”. Most Internet sites will have a “FAQ” to explain what is in the area and how to use its features.

Flash

A vector based animation program that has become a popular technology used to deliver content.

Focus Group

Study of a cross section of people used to predict response to a product or service. Often conducted with group of customers who are assembled together in a conference room to discuss a particular product.

Forms

The pages in most browsers that accept information in text-entry fields. They can be customized to receive company sales data and orders, expense reports or other information. They can also be used to communicate.

Four M’s

Money, Material, Machine and Manpower. Business resources referenced in a marketing plan.

Four P’s

Product, Price, Placement and Promotion. The basic foundational elements of traditional marketing.

Frequency

Amount of exposure your target market has to your marketing message, or how many times someone buys a product.

Google+

Google+ is a Google social networking project. The Google+ design team sought to replicate the way people interact offline more closely than is the case in other social networking services, such as Facebook and Twitter.

Google adwords

AdWords is Google’s flagship advertising product and main source of revenue. It helps marketeers to advertise online.

Googlebot

The name of the spider used by Google. Instructions to Googlebot can be directed in the robots.txt file. Googlebot statistics can be viewed with web analytics software, on web server logs, and in Google webmaster tools.

Hotlists

These can be pull-down or pop-up menu’s on browsers that contain new or popular sites. Major browser and search engine home pages also contain updated hotlists, and there are entire sites.

HTML

HyperText Markup Language is a coding language used to make hypertext documents for use on the Web. HTML resembles old-fashioned typesetting code, where a block of text is surrounded by codes that indicate how it should appear. HTML allows text to be “linked” to another file on the Internet.

Impressions

Every exposure to an advertising message is an “impression.”

Inbound Link

An inbound link is a hyperlink to a particular Web page from an outside site, bringing traffic to that Web page. Inbound links are important because many search engine algorithms use the quality and quantity of inbound links to measure the popularity of a Web page.

Inbound marketing

Other word for pull marketing; a way of marketing where you help yourself “get found” by people already learning about and shopping in your industry. In order to do this, you need to set your website up like a “hub” for your industry that attracts visitors naturally through the search engines, through the blogosphere, and through the social media sites. Opposite of outbound marketing or push marketing where you are sending information to potential receiver.

Influentials

People who can influence buying habits of others.

Integrated Marketing Communications

This is a concept of marketing communications that recognizes the added value of assuring that all communication vehicles (including sales force, customer services, and any other employees who have customer contact) portray a clear and consistent message about the company, business, or product that follows and illustrates the company’s vision and mission.

Keyword

A word – or often phrase – used to focus an online search. A keyword is a database index entry that identifies a specific record or document. Keyword searching is the most common form of text search on the web. Most search engines do their text query and retrieval using keywords. Unless the author of the web document specifies the keywords for her document (this is possible by using meta tags), it’s up to the search engine to determine them. Essentially, this means that search engines pull out and index words that are believed to be significant. Words that are mentioned towards the top of a document and words that are repeated several times throughout the document are more likely to be deemed important.

Keyword Audit

Independent third-party verification of your keyword use, strategy, bidding, and return on investment.

Keyword Bidding

Keyword Bidding is the process or method used by search engines marketers to determine the ranking of paid keywords results in AOL, Google, MSN, Yahoo, and other search engines that require pay per click advertising to determine your ranking and positioning in their search results and in content results on networked partners’ sites

Keyword Research

Keyword research includes the processes and methodologies to research key words that would be used for search and internet marketing campaigns.

Keyword Marketing

Keyword Marketing is the act, process, or technique of promoting, selling, and distributing a product or service on-line.

Online: Keyword Marketing

Lag

The amount of time between making an online request or command and receiving a response. Until lag time becomes no time at all the Internet will not be consumer-friendly, and its profit potential will remain limited.

Landing page

In online marketing a landing page, sometimes known as a lead capture page, is the page that appears when a potential customer clicks on an advertisement or a search-engine result link. The page will usually display content that is a logical extension of the advertisement or link, and that is optimized to feature specific keywords or phrases for indexing by search engines.

Lead

A prospect who has responded is called a Lead.

Lead generation

Lead generation is the creation or generation of prospective consumer interest or inquiry into a business’ products or services. Leads can be generated for a variety of purposes – list building, e-newsletter list acquisition or for winning customers.

Link Building

The process of getting quality Web sites to link to your website, in order to improve search engine rankings. Link building techniques can reciprocal linking, entering barter arrangements, and may include buying links.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a social networking website geared towards companies and industry professionals looking to make new business contacts or keep in touch with previous co-workers, affiliates, and clients.

Link Popularity

A measure of inbound links. Several search engines have included this factor into their algorithms, the most notable being Goggle with their trademarked PageRank.

Listserver

A program that automatically sends email to a list of subscribers. It is the mechanism that is used to keep newsgroups informed.

Load

Usually used with up-load or down-load, it means to transfer files or software — to “load” — from one computer or server to another computer or server. In other words, it’s the movement of information online.

Mailing list

A list of customers or prospects used to mail catalogs or sale announcements. It is not a marketing database because it does not provide for a two-way communication with customers.

Marketing Communications

All methods used by a firm to communicate with its customers and prospective customers.

Marketing Metrics

Measurements that help with the quantification of marketing performance, such as market share, advertising spend, and response rates elicited by advertising and direct marketing.

Marketing Mix

Variety of the elements in marketing efforts. Can include details such as pricing, product features, packaging, advertising, merchandising, distribution, and budget.

Market Penetration

The percentage of actual customers as compared with the total number selected as the market.

Market position

The perception of a product or an organization from the view of the consumer.

Mass Marketing

Selling to everyone through mass media such as radio, TV, or a newspaper, as opposed to database marketing which is aimed at a small selected audience.

Medical marketing

Marketing in medical industry requires expertise and knowledge about building relationships with physicians, patients, and at the same time balancing between health, regulation and commerce.

Meta Data

Data about Data.

Meta Search Engine

A search engine which gathers the results of other search engines to provide an wider range of results.

Microblogging

Microblogging is a broadcast medium in the form of blogging. A microblog differs from a traditional blog in that its content is typically smaller in both actual and aggregate file size. Microblogs “allow users to exchange small elements of content such as short sentences, individual images, or video links”. A type of microblogging is Twitter.

Mobile marketing

Marketing on or with a mobile device, such as a mobile phone.

Narrowcasting

Delivering targeted content over a broadcasting system, but directed to audiences with special or “narrow” interests. See “Broadcasting”.

Naymz

Reputation Management and Networking for Professionals. Online Naymz

Netiquette

A term that is used to describe the do’s and don’ts of online behavior. There are books out about it. Read them if you want, or for a detailed online explanation go to The Net: User Guidelines and Netiquette. But it all comes down to good business — and social — practice. Be polite, be aware of the folks you are talking to, talk nicely and not too much.

Niche Marketing

The process of concentrating your resources and efforts on one particular segment.

Online lead generation

A lead is a sign-up for an advertiser offer that includes contact information and in some cases, demographic information. There are two types of leads in the lead generation market: sales leads and marketing leads.

Sales leads are generated on the basis of demographic criteria such as income, age, etc. These leads are resold to multiple advertisers. Sales leads are typically followed up through phone calls by the sales force. Sales leads are commonly found in the mortgage, insurance and finance markets.

Marketing leads are brand-specific leads generated for a unique advertiser offer. In direct contrast to sales leads, marketing leads are sold only once. Because transparency is a necessary requisite for generating marketing leads, marketing lead campaigns can be optimized by mapping leads to their sources.

Online marketing

The Internet has brought many unique benefits to marketing, one of which being lower costs and greater capabilities for the distribution of information and media to a global audience. The interactive nature of online marketing, both, in terms of providing instant response and eliciting responses, is a unique quality of the medium.

Online PR

Online PR involves activities geared towards influencing media, communities and audiences that exist solely on the Internet using online channels. That includes search engines, blogs, news search, forums, discussion threads, social networks and other online communication tools. Brand reputation monitoring and management is also a focus area for online PR.

Opt-in

Opt-in email lists are lists where Internet users have voluntarily signed up to receive commercial e-mail about topics of interest.

Outbound marketing

Or push marketing; marketing methods where a message is pushed to the target audience. Think of trade shows, seminar series, email blasts to purchased lists, internal cold calling, outsourced telemarketing, and advertising. “Outbound marketing” is marketing where a marketer pushes his message out far and wide hoping that it resonates with that needle in the haystack.

Page Views

Number of times a user requests a Web page. Indicative of the number of times an ad was potentially seen, or “gross impressions.” May overstate ad impressions if users choose to turn off graphics.

Pay-per-Click (PPC)

Pay Per Click. A type of campaign or service which applies a CPC price to relevant keyword phrases to easily and accurately calculate positioning, online marketing costs and ROI for your website. As opposed to a Maintenance or Optimization SEO campaign, the client only pays for the traffic that is provided, based on the agreed CPC.

Pay-per-Click Management (PPC Management)

The process of managing PPC accounts, campaigns, ad groups, and keywords.

Pay-per-Impression (PPI)

An advertising pricing model in which advertisers pay agencies based on how many consumers see their promotions.

Pay-per-Sale (PPS)

An advertising pricing model in which advertisers pay agencies based on how many consumers actually buy something as a direct result of the promotion. Despised by agencies for the wretched accountability it brings to their lives.

Peer to Peer (P2P) Marketing

Technique of encouraging customers to promote a product person-to-person (peer-to-peer) on the Internet. See also “Word of Mouth”.

Persona Marketing

Persona marketing refers to human centered marketing to create better and more effective content. In building a persona of your typical target buyer/customer you describe age, gender, behavior, family details etc. It enables marketers to visualize their target audience, which results in more focused marketing.

Personalization

The process of including personal references in marketing efforts, such as a Website or a letter.

Podcast

A method of publishing audio files to the Internet for playback on mobile devices and personal computers.

Portal

A website or service that offers a broad array of resources and services, such as email, forums, search engines, and on-line shopping malls. The first Web portals were online services, such as AOL, that provided access to the Web, but by now most of the traditional search engines have transformed themselves into Web portals to attract and keep a larger audience. Also known as a “gateway to the Internet”.

Positioning

Marketing efforts aimed at defining a product or company in the customer’s mind.

Product Life Cycle

The five stages of a product’s life include:
1. Introduction, during which costs typically exceed revenue.
2. Growth, during which sales rapidly increase.
3. Maturity, during which there is more competition, pricing tends to decline, and product loyalty is emphasized in advertising.
4. Saturation, during which sales slow and advertising strategy shifts to reinforcement.
5. Decline, at which point the market has shrunk and advertising and distribution costs are cut drastically to reduce losses

Product Placement

Use of a product or service within a television show or film.

Promotional Mix

Components of a promotional campaign, including advertising, public relations, direct marketing, packaging, and sales promotion.

Prospect

A potential customer who you have targeted.

Pull Marketing

Marketing that addresses the customer directly, intended to get them to demand the product, and “pull” through the distribution chain. Also referred to as inbound marketing

Push Marketing

Marketing relies on the next link in the channel – e.g. a wholesaler or retailer – to “push” products to the customer. Also referred to outbound marketing.

Quality Score

A score assigned by search engines that is calculated by measuring an ad’s clickthrough rate, analyzing the relevance of the landing page, and considering other factors used to determine the quality of a site and reward those of higher quality with top placement and lower bid requirements. Some factors that make up a quality score are historical keyword performance, the quality of an ad’s landing page, and other undisclosed attributes. All of the major search engines now use some form of quality score in their search ad algorithm.

Rank

An ad’s standing in comparison to other ads, based on the graphical click-through rate. Rank provides advertisers with information on an ad’s performance across sites.

Reach

Total number of individual prospects exposed to your message.

Relationship Marketing

Strategy of establishing a relationship with a customer that lasts beyond the initial purchase.

Referral marketing

Referral marketing is a structured and systematic process that maximizes word of mouth potential. Referral marketing does this by encouraging, informing, promoting and rewarding customers and contacts to think and talk as much as possible about their supplier, their company, product and service and the value and benefit the supplier brings to them and people they know.

Referral marketing takes word of mouth from the spontaneous situation to a proactive and highly productive solution, where maximum referrals are generated due to professional customer-focused strategies.

Referrer

The URL or webpage that the user clicked on to arrive at your web page. This is often recorded in the log files via the web server software.

Reputation Management

Reputation management is the process of controlling, managing, and tracking an entity’s online reputation for its brand name, or for an individual name, or keyword.

Response Rate

The percentage of people who responded to your offer. A typical direct mail response rate to prospects is 2%.

Reseller Marketing

Marketing which focuses on getting the right message and enthusiasm across to reseller and offering the right tools, so that reseller can go-to-market with your product or service.

Retention

The tendency to keep customers buying. Success is measured by retention of customers.

Rich Media

Rich media is a term for advanced technology used in Internet ads, such as streaming video, applets that allow user interaction, and special effects.

ROI

Return on investment = (Revenue – Cost)/ Cost, expressed as a percentage. A term describing the calculation of the financial return on an Internet marketing or advertising initiative that incurs some cost. Determining ROI and the actual ROI in Internet marketing and advertising has been much more accurate than television, radio, and traditional media.

RSS

Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication. RSS is an acronym for Rich Site Summary, an XML format for distributing news headlines on the Web, also known as syndication.

Search Advertising

An advertiser pays for the chance to have their ad display when a user searches for a given keyword. These are usually text ads, which are displayed above or to the right of the algorithmic (organic) search results. Most search ads are sold by the PPC model, where the advertiser pays only when the user clicks on the ad or text link.

Search Engine

A program that searches documents for specified keywords and returns a list of the documents where the keywords were found.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

The process of building and marketing a site with the goal of improving its position in search engine results. SEM includes both search engine optimization (SEO) and pay per click advertising (PPC), as well as using all other areas and services offered by Search Engines.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search Engine Optimization is the ongoing process of making a site and its content highly relevant for both search engines and searchers. SEO includes technical tasks to make it easier for search engines to find and index a site for the appropriate keywords, as well as marketing-focused tasks to make a site more appealing to users. Successful search marketing helps a site gain top positioning for relevant words and phrases.

Segmentation

The process of dividing a market into groups that display similar behaviour and characteristics.

SEO Services

SEO Services are designed to get your website a top ranking in the results of search engines for any given keyword.

Search Terms

Text that is typed into a search engine to gain results leading to related content.

Server

Servers are the Backbone of the Internet, the computers that are linked by communication lines and “serve up” information in the form of text, graphics and multimedia to online computers that request data – that’s you. (When a server “goes down” it loses its online link and the information it holds can not be accessed.)

Session

A series of transactions or hits made by a single user. If there has been no activity for a period of time, followed by the resumption of activity by the same user, a new session is considered started. Thirty minutes is the most common time period used to measure a session length.

SERP

Search Engine Results Page. The page searchers see after they’ve entered their query into the search box. This page lists several Web pages related to the searcher’s query, sorted by relevance. Increasingly, search engines are returning blended search results, which include images, videos, and results from specialty databases on their SERP’s.

Social Media

A category of sites that is based on user participation and user-generated content. They include social networking sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, or My Space, social bookmarking sites like Del.icio.us, social news sites like Digg or Simpy, and other sites that are centered on user interaction.

Social Media Marketing

Using social networks, online communities, blogs, wikis or any other collaborative Internet form of media for marketing, sales, public relations and customer service.

Social Media Optimization (SMO)

Social Media Optimization is a set of methods for generating publicity through social media online communities and community websites. Methods of SMO include adding RSS feeds, buttons, blogging and incorporating third-party community functionalities like images and video.

Social media optimization is related to search engine marketing but differs in several ways, primarily the focus on driving traffic from sources other than search engines, though improved search ranking is also a benefit of successful SMO.

Spam

The use of mailing lists to blanket usenets or private email boxes with indiscriminate advertising messages. Very bad netiquette. Even worse, it’s bad business. The future of marketing online is about customizing products and information for individual users. Anyone who tries to use old mass market techniques in the new media environment is bound to fail.

Spider

A term used to describe search engines such as Yahoo and Alta Vista, because of the way they cruise all over the world wide web to find information. It is a software program which combs the web for new sites and updated information on old ones, like a spider looking for a fly.

Spin

The attempt to manipulate the depiction of news or events in the media through artful public relations – often used with derogatory connotations.

Splash Page

Also known as a “jump page”, a Web page set up for visitors who clicked on a link in an advertisement. Can be used to promote special offers or to measure the response to an advertisement.

Stickiness

A measure used to gauge the effectiveness of a site in retaining individual users. The term is typically used in promotional material when traffic numbers are too low to be effective in lauding a site’s performance. Never mind the quantity, feel the stick.

SWOT Analysis

Analysis method which examines Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. Often used as part of a marketing plan.

Tags

Individual keywords or phrases for organizing content

Targeted Marketing

Banners or other promotions aimed, on the basis of demographic analysis, at one specific subsection of the market.

Telemarketing

Talking on the telephone to prospects or customers. Inbound telemarketing is usually customers or prospects calling your toll free number. Outbound telemarketing is when you place the call to a prospect or customer. Telemarketing can be done by your in-house staff or by an external telemarketing company.

Throughput

The amount of data transmitted through Internet connectors in response to a given request. Neat term. The more “throughput” you deliver to your customers, the better (if you’re charging enough).

Tracking Domain

A domain specifically created to measure traffic delivered to a website.

Traffic

Generally measured by the amount of visitors to a website. Hitwise Search Marketing measures search generated traffic separately by recording referrals from known search engines and directories.

Unique Selling Proposition (USP)

Product features or benefits that cannot be claimed by the competition.

Unique Users

The total number of different users, or different computer terminals which have visited a website. This is measured using advanced tracking technology or user registration.

Universal Search

Also known as blended, or federated search results, universal search pulls data from multiple databases to display on the same page. Results can include images, videos, and results from specialty databases like maps and local information, product information, or news stories.

Up-Sell

Prompting customers to buy upgraded products when they had intended to buy something of lower value.

Valid Hits

A further refinement of hits, valid hits are hits that deliver all information to a user. Excludes hits such as redirects, error messages and computer-generated hits.

Value Proposition

The functional, emotional, and self-expressive benefits delivered by product, service, or brand, that provide value to the customer, and the rationale for making one brand choice over another.

Viewer

Another name for a help application.

Video marketing

Using video and or multimedia in marketing mix to reach target audience.

Viral Marketing

Any advertising that propagates itself. When Hotmail users send email, they unwittingly infect the recipient with the tag line at the bottom of the message.

Vlog

A vlog is a video blog.

Visits

A sequence of requests made by one user at one site. If a visitor does not request any new information for a period of time, known as the “time-out” period, then the next request by the visitor is considered a new visit.

Web 2.0

A term that refers to a second generation of Internet-based services. These usually include tools that let people collaborate and share information online, such as social networking sites, wikis and communication tools.

Whitepaper

A whitepaper is a written document about a relevant industry for your target market. Advertising-free, it contains mostly information which the targeted audience can use. A very effective marketing tool.

Widget

A widget is a live update on a website, webpage, or desktop. Widgets contain personalized neatly organized content or applications selected by its user.

Wikipedia

A multilingual, web-based, free content encyclopedia project. Wikipedia is written collaboratively by volunteers from all around the world. With rare exceptions, its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the Internet, simply by clicking the edit this page link.

Wiki

A web application that allows users to add content, as on an Internet forum, but also allows anyone to edit the content. Wiki also refers to the collaborative software used to create such a website

Word of Mouth

Spread of information through human interaction alone.

WYSIWYG

What you see is what you get. A type of editor used for creating web pages.

Zine

Magazines that are published digitally, rather than on paper. Some are mainstream, others are oddball and cover almost every topic imaginable.