Just like in every other dealings, there are words or phrases you might be familiar with but when discussing digital marketing they mean different thing.

When I first got started with digital marketing, I struggled with understanding some digital marketing terms, in fact, digital marketing terminologies made digital marketing look like a difficult skill to learn.

Learning digital marketing became much easier for me when I made it a priority to first understanding some basic digital marketing terms and phrases.

Understanding some digital marketing terms or phrase, not only help me sound like an expert when talking to people about the subject, it also makes it easier for me to understand digital marketing especially when I’m reading  about or learning more about it from other sources.

This idea of first understand terms and phrases is not only applicable to digital marketing, it’s also applicable to acquiring knowledge or skills in any other subjects. When you want to acquire knowledge or skills in a new subject or field, first try to learn about terminologies associated with your subject before going deep into advance studies, this approach will make learning process easier.

In this post, we will look at 45 most common digital marketing terms, I believe understanding these terms will help you understand the scope of digital marketing.

digital marketing jargons

45  common digital marketing terms or phrases in digital marketing

1. Digital Marketing

Starting with the topic itself, Digital Marketing is used to identify various marketing activities that are done using digital tools and channels like phone, computers, internet, social media, and other digital enhanced channels.

It’s simply a phrase used to identify marketing functions carried out on or through digital tools or channels.

2. Content

Content is used to identify Information, knowledge or experience created in a form of text, images, audio, audio-visual, etc.

3. Content Marketing

Content marketing is a digital marketing component, it’s the process of creating and promoting contents to reach a defined marketing objectives.

Mostly, it involves activities like creating valuable, educative, informative and entertaining content, promoting it in other to gain attention, attract people in form of traffic or visitors to a platform, platform visitors can be converted into leads and hopefully into action taking customers.

4. Inbound marketing

Inbound marketing is used to identify the process of attracting traffics/visitors from other platforms to a platform before selling to them.

5. Web Traffic

Web traffic, also known as web visitors, is used to identify individuals who visit a webpage on the internet.

6. Advertising

Advertising always abbreviated as Ads. Is used to identify a paid form of marketing  that can be performed on various platforms online or offline.

7. Campaign/Marketing Campaign

Campaigns or marketing campaigns are used to identify a series of organized and strategic actions that are performed in promoting a specific marketing goal.

Digital marketing campaigns can be towards any marketing goal and can be carried out through various digital marketing channels.

8. Email Marketing

Email marketing is used to identify the process of using electronic email to promote and achieve marketing goals, It involves performing marketing activities through email channels.

9. Digital-marketing Channels

This is used to identify various digital tools or platforms that can be used to carry out marketing activities.

10. Facebook Business Page

A Facebook business page is used to identify a tool in the popular social media platform, Facebook, that allow users to run their business on Facebook.

The Facebook business page enables users to have access to Facebook Ads Manager and other tools and features, which they can use to create a paid advertising campaign on the platform or sister platform like Instagram and run other business activities on Facebook.

11. Facebook Ads Manager

Facebook Ads manager is used to identify an advertising tool on Facebook that is used for creating, managing and tracking paid advertising.

12. Link

Link is used to identify a hypertext, image or object, that when clicked on will lead you to another section in a web platform or different web platform.

13. Website

Website is a term used to identify a static kind of webpage that displays relevant information about a company or brand on the web.

14. Blog

A blog is another form of a webpage, unlike a website, blog displays contents in chronological order and is frequently updated with contents.

15. Blogger

Blogger is used to identifying someone who manages and runs a blog site.

16. Blogging

Blogging is used to identify the process of running a blog, it includes blog management, marketing, monetizing, optimizing and so on.

17. E-commerce (electronic commerce)

E-commerce is used to identify the process of selling products and services online, it’s like running a retail store online.

18. Analytics

Analytics is used to identify a digital marketing tools that are used to obtain and analyse the behaviour of web visitors around a web platform.

With analytics, you can study the behaviour of your traffic to know what they are viewing, where they are coming from, how they are viewing your site and many more other things.

19. CPC (cost-per-click)

Cost per click (CPC) is used to identify the amount an advertiser pays for a click that is performed on their advertisement.

For example, when ads are placed on a platform and you click on it to go to the source that placed the Ads, the amount the platform charges the advertiser is know as cost per click (CPC.)

20. CTR (Click Through Rate)

Click-Through Rate (CTR) is a term used to identify the process of measuring the rate of people that click on your link from another platform to the number of people that saw the link.

For example, if a link is published on social media and the link is shown to 1000 people and among the 1000 people that saw the link 100 people click on the link, the CPC will be 1000/100 = 10%

21. CPM (cost per thousand impressions)

CPM “Cost Per Thousand impressions” (the M is the Roman numeral for 1,000) This is the amount an advertiser pays when their ads are shown to 1,000 people.

For example, if a publisher charges #10 CPM and your ads are shown 2000 times to people you will pay N20 for the campaign (e.g. 10 x (1000 impressions x 2).

CPM promotional method is mostly used in awareness campaigns, where impressions are more important than conversions or clicks.

22. Algorithm

Algorithm is a process or set of rules that search engines like Google uses to index web pages and file, making them available for search results, search male use of crawler known as spider to make sure contents published online are in accordance with their algorithms.

23. Keyword/keyphrase

Keyword/keyphrase is used to identify the most relevant word or phrases in content, web visitors also use keyword/phrase to search for information on search engines, on the other hand, digital marketers use it to optimise their webpage for search results.

For example, if you want to know more about shoes, you can use the keyword “shoes” or keyphrase “what is shoes” to get more info about shoes from the search engine.

Any site that has also optimised its webpage with the keyword or phrase related to the one you search for on search engines  will stand a chance to be listed on your search results.

24. Conversion rate

Conversion rate is used to identify the rate of the action visitors took based on your intent.

For example, you may politely ask web visitors to take action at the end of a post in your platform, the number of people who viewed the post and the amount that took action regards to your intent are the factors  used to calculate the conversion rate.

25. Landing page

A landing page is used to identify the first page your visitors see when they click on a link from a source to your site or platform.

It can be a sales page, your homepage or your blog page

26. Impression

An impression is used to identify the number of time content is seen. It can be through organic ( not paid for) or ads ( paid for) marketing activities.

27. Organic or Natural listing:

Organic or Natural listing is used to identify listing on any search results on search engines that are not paid for.

28. Paid listing:

Paid listing is used to identify search results on search engines that are paid for.

Someone can pay (SEM) for his or her content to be listed at the top of search results page on search engines.

30. Social Media:

Social Network, can be used to identify the community of individual that create and share information within themselves. Eg Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc.

31. Search Engine:

A search engine is used to identify a tool online that is used to find information online.

32. Index

An index is used to identify the process through which search engine sort, file and make web content ready for listing search results page.

33. AdWords

Adwords is used to identify Google advertisement tools, that is used to create ads on different types of platform, like YouTube, Google, search engine, etc.

34. Session:

A session is used to identify a certain amount of time a web visitor spent on a platform

35. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is used to identify the process of making a webpage suitable and favourable to rank at the top of search results in search engines.

36. Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Search engine marketing(SEM) is used to identify the act of using a search engine to implement marketing activities.

37. Social Media Marketing (SMM)

Social media marketing is used to identify the process of using social media channels to carry out marketing activities.

38. Leads

Leads is used to identify a set of people who have shown interest in a business, its products or services. It can be by interacting with a platform, submitting forms or signing up for newsletter.

39. Nurturing

Nurturing is used to identify the process of providing useful and relevant content to people who have shown interest in your business, its products or services.

40. Sales funnel

Sales funnel is used to identify a set of the process a prospective customer passes through to become a customer. It involves different kinds of action in different stages.

41. Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is used to identify the process of making your campaign more effective to induce people to take favourable actions.

42. Search Engine Result Page (SERP)

Search engine result page is used to identify the page that contains a list of the answer for the keyword you search through search engines.

43. Rank

Rank is used to identify the display and positioning of web content in the search engine results page.

44. Automation

Automation is used to identify the act of setting up digital marketing activities to perform on their own.

45. Return On Investment (ROI)

Return on investment (ROI) is used to identify the profits obtained after investing a certain amount of money in marketing campaigns.

Digital marketing terms

There are more of these terms or phrase, but i believe the list above can get you started on learning more about digital marketing.

Do you know any other digital marketing terms? What other terms do you want to learn about? share in the comment section below.

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Emmanuel Onyewuchi

Emmanuel Onyewuchi aka Digitalchuksemma is an Ex Computer Engr/Instructor turned Digital Mentor, a minimalist, Wished to be a father to 3 Kids from a loving wife. He founded the Digital Optimizers Hub in 2021 to fix the problem of an outdated educational system and lack of ICT and digital adaptability by young Africans. He has thought hundreds and Thousands of students ICT and digital skills in the classroom and online. Currently, he is the CEO and Lead Trainer at Learnvale,com, the new school online for the next breed of digital optimizers and is on the mission to help 100,000 people optimize digital tools and resources to build a thriving business that enables a freedom lifestyle.