Top 50 Digital Marketing Terms that every Marketer must know in 2024

Don’t you think it’s daunting to keep up with all the digital marketing terms and jargons? If you’re a student or a fresher or an experienced professional – these digital marketing terms and concepts can help you keep up with conversations.

A digital marketer must know what each digital marketing terminology means. The what and why are important here. The what is to do with what each basic digital marketing term means and the why is to do with why they are important for business. By understanding the why you will be able to understand the terms better and use them better for all your marketing efforts.

You’re in the right place for the most important digital marketing terms in 2024. Here’s a list of the A-Z of digital marketing terminologies.

Bonus Read – Digital Marketing Scope in 2023

Top 50 Digital Marketing Terms & Jargons You Must Know in 2024

 

A

1. A/B Testing

A/B Testing is very instrumental when it comes to web pages/apps. It is all about testing two versions of digital content with a target audience.
Marketers analyze results based on changes in CTRs and conversion rates.
After analyzing the user’s responses in both sets, you can come to a conclusion about which version works best for you.

2. Ad Extensions

Ad extensions are a part of Google Ads. Ad extensions are additional information given by the advertisers for their businesses when they run Google Ads. These extensions help them add more context to their ads and persuade user engagement.

Using ad extensions makes your ad go beyond the general headline, and description format, making it more informative and compelling for the viewers for clicks and conversions.

• Ad extensions are of different types:
• Sitelink extension
• Callout extension
• Location extension
• Call extension
• Structured snippet extension
• Price extension
• Promotion extension
• App extension
• Lead form extension
• Message extension
• Affiliate location extension

 

3. Alt Text

Abbreviation of Alternative Text, Alt text is the text information for images. It is an attribute added to the HTML image tags to give a textual description of the image content.
Adding alt text helps in SEO, enhances user experience, and helps visually challenged individuals understand the image content with ease.

 

4. Anchor Text

One of the widely used digital marketing terms, anchor texts are the clickable texts you see when you’re surfing a website or reading a blog. It is generally used for SEO purposes and audience engagement to keep them hooked to a certain website. These texts are usually underlined and are different in color to mark them out of the clutter.

 

5. Agile Marketing

Agile marketing is when one uses agile methodologies to manage and improve the practices of a marketing team to increase speed, proficiency, and transparency. It requires both long-term and short planning, strategic vision, and adaptability.

It is different from traditional marketing as it focuses on engagement and transparency.

B

1. Backlinking

One of the most common digital marketing terms used by SEO professionals is backlinking. A link on a particular website that takes you to another website is known as Backlinking. Backlinking is an effective way for off-page optimization.

2. Black Hat SEO

Black hat SEO refers to unethical SEO tactics used to rank a website higher on SERPs. Black hat SEO violates search engine guidelines and gives short-term benefits to the websites which highly affects its quality score. Some common black hat SEO practices are: cloaking, keyword stuffing, spammy content, etc.

3. Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is the metric of how many users left or bounced immediately after visiting your website. A bounce means that a user landed on your page and left without taking any action. A few reasons could be that they didn’t find what they were looking for or did not like the content on your page. A low bounce rate is ideal.

4. Brand Equity

Brand equity is the intangible asset of any business. Brand equity is the perception or value that a brand holds in the minds of its users. It is built with multiple interactions of the users with any business. Brand equity shows the strength, reputation, recognition, and customer loyalty of the business.

5. Buyer’s Persona

Buyer persona is a fictional representation of an ideal customer for any business or service. A buyer persona is developed on market research and it covers basic information like demographics, interests, psychographic information, buying preferences, etc.

Building a buyer’s persona helps businesses understand their users better and build marketing efforts or bring improvements to existing offerings.

6. Broken Link

Links that open up to web pages that cannot be found or accessed by a user are known as Broken Links. This could be because a webpage moved to a new URL.

 

C

1. Call To Action (CTA)

Call To Action or CTA one of the crucial digital marketing terms. CTA is designed by marketers to persuade users to make a desired action. CTAs are buttons present in websites or blogs to let viewers take a specific action. A clear CTA button helps in increasing conversions.

2. Chat Bot

Chat BOt is an AI technology widely used by marketers and webmasters to initiate conversation with the website visitors. Chatbots act as an online customer representative available to solve or guide visitors with their queries. The aim of any chatbot is to provide immediate customer support whenever needed.

Chatbots are cost-effective and delivers personalized experiences to users across various digital channels thus, increases the conversion rate.

3. Canonical Element

Cannonical elements are SEO-specific and is used by webmasters and marketers to let Goggle know about the duplicate content.
Doing this hels marketers to eradicate duplicates, keeping the SEO score high and optimized for marketing purposes.

4. CPC – Cost Per Click

In a paid search campaign, cost per click means the cost of each click that a user actions. You pay based on the total number of clicks instead of impressions. Google’s pay-per-click ad campaigns (PPC ads) are the most popular platform for CPC ads.

5. CRM – Customer Relationship Management

For any business to sustain itself, a rapport and good relationship with its customers are very important. Customer relationship management (CRM) is the process of building, maintaining, and enhancing a company’s relationships with its customers.

CRM has many tools and software available for servicing, customer segmentation, sales analytics, etc.

Recommended course – Online Reputation Management

6. CTR – Click-Through Rate

Click-Through Rate is the metric of people who clicked on a particular link. It could be the CTA (call-to-action) for an ad, email, social media ad, or website page. For example, if an article had 900 visitors but only 45 people clicked on the CTA of ‘know more’, then the click-through rate is 45%.

Here’s how marketers calculate CTR:
CTR= Number of Clicks / Number of Impressions X 100

7. Content Marketing 

Content Marketing is a way to improve your on-page optimization and social media marketing. By creating interesting and engaging content through blogs, articles, videos, podcasts, newsletters, etc.

8. Copywriting 

Copywriting and Content Writing sound similar but they are different in terms of content and CTA. Content Writing is long-form of content and the aim is to create brand awareness. Copywriting is a shorter form of content along with a CTA and the aim is to generate sales.

9. Content Management System (CMS)

A software that allows users to create, manage and modify digital content is known as Content Management System. WordPress is the greatest CMS globally.

10. Cost Per Lead

Cost Per Lead is more of an internal marketing term used when the marketing team of a brand is analyzing its campaign’s performance. The average cost to a company for acquiring one lead is known as CPL.

11. Caching

After Indexing, Caching is a process where Google bots take screenshots of your web pages as a backup. For better ranking, Crawling, Indexing, and Caching are very important aspects of SEO.

12. Crawling

Google sends bots to web pages/posts and ‘reads’ the page to understand the quality of content and whether it is genuine or not. This process is known as Crawling. Google bots crawl a website from a 3-days to 4-weeks time period.

13. Customer Experience Management

Customer experience management, also known as CEM is the methodology of understanding customers and developing a very customer-centric approach by overseeing and tracking every interaction that the organization has with each customer through the customer life cycle. The aim is to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.

14. CRO- Conversion Rate Optimization

CRO is an abbreviation for Conversion Rate Optimization. It is a process of increasing the rate of website visitors to make the desired conversion. The conversion can be anything ranging from making a purchase, filling out a form, or submitting personal information.

15. CLV – Customer Lifetime Value

Customer lifetime value is the amount of revenue or business a customer would generate for your company in his or her lifetime. It is also called lifetime customer value (LVC).

16. CAC – Customer Acquisition Cost

The cost attached to converting one user into a customer is called customer acquisition cost. It is focused on marketing costs. It helps companies predict how much they will need to spend to generate a certain number of customers.

17. Conversion Rate

A conversion rate is when any user takes a desired action on your website or social media ads. It is not limited to only sales or converting non-customers into customers. It also includes converting a visiting visitor into a lead, submitting some type of form, filling in personal information, clicking on an ad, etc. These are divided into marketing-qualified leads (MQL) and sales-qualified leads (SQL).

18. Content Marketing

Content marketing is about strategically creting and distributing relatable and relevant content around your business to target and retain customers.
The agenda of content marketing is to deliver the brand message and persuade customers to make a purchase without directly promoting the brand.

19. CPM – Cost Per Thousand Impression

Cost Per Thousand is a pricing model used by marketers to calculate the amount of money marketers need to spend to get 1000 impressions.

Here’s how marketers calculate CPM:

CPM= Cost of Advertising / Number of Impressions X 100

20. Customer Pain Point

It refers to the problem, challenge, or an unmeet need a person is facing. Pain points are diverse and can vary from one customer to another. Marketers need to identify such pain points and strategically promote how their business is solving it by subtly offering a solution.

D

1. Direct Traffic

Simply put, direct traffic refers to the number of people landing directly to your website or landing page. These users will type in your webpage or just open the bookmark with your website on it without interacting with any online ads or getting exposed to your marketing tactics.

One can see direct traffic in their Google Analytics account.

Bonus: Check out this Google Analytics Course

2. Display Network

Display networks are websites out of the Google network that allow advertisement on their sites.
Display networks play a critical role in digital marketing by enabling advertisers to pivot brand awareness, drive website traffic, generate leads, and promote products or services to a targeted audience outside the Google network by tapping into other traffic sources.

3. DoFollow backlinks

One of the popular digital marketing terms among SEO enthusiasts, Dofollow backlinks are backlinks that allow search engines to follow them and pass authority or “link juice” from the linking webpage to the linked webpage.

When a website contains a do follow backlink, it indicates to Google that the link is trustworthy, resulting in high-ranking on SERPs.

4. Domain Authority

Domain Authority is a search engine ranking score that was developed by Moz. DA or Domain Authority determines the chances of a website ranking in SERPs.

E

1. Engagement Rate

The engagement rate is a very crucial social media-related metric. It indicates the amount of people’s interest in your page or content. It is the clearest sign of interest. Some common indicators of interactions include likes, comments, and shares.

2. Email Marketing

Promoting a product, service, or campaign through a commercial and unique message to your target audience is known as email marketing. The subject line and CTA are very important elements of Email Marketing.

3. Exit Rate

Exit rate refers to the number of people leaving a website after viewing some pages, without interacting further or navigating to other pages within the same website.

This metric is used by marketers widely to analyze the final point of users before leaving the website.

F

1. Feature Snippet

One of the common digital marketing terms, feature snippets are small pieces of websites that appear on SERPs.
They aim to provide quick and brief information to the users. They also have a link attached so that users can navigate to the website for more information.

 

G

1. Growth Hacking

Growth hacking is focused on the rapid growth of a company. Creative and low-budget strategies are used by growth hackers to help businesses grow and also, retain customers. It is ‘hacking’ in the most basic sense to achieve high results.

H

1. Hashtags

Hashtags is one of the popular digital marketing terms used for categorizing content in social media. It starts with ‘#’ and contains any random word related to the content.

2. Heatmap

A heatmap is a visual representation of how users are interacting with the website. It is a tool that helps marketers and website builders to understand where people are clicking on the website, how much time are they taking to scroll something or simply put, how they are navigating.

It helps marketers to understand what interests the users and helps in developing and executing different strategies.

 

I

1. Impressions

You might have come across impressions when you talk about digital marketing. Impressions is referred to the no. fo times an ad is displayed to the user.

2. Indexing

Indexing is the process followed by Crawling. Once Google bots crawl your website and web pages, they store the information in the Google database.

 

K

1. Keyword

A keyword is a term or phrase that people use when searching for something in particular on a search engine. Keywords are leveraged for targeting online content. It helps with SEO. For example, blog articles of a minimum of 2,000 words that are SEO-rich with keywords have a higher tendency to rank.

Bonus read: How to do keyword research

2. Keyword Density

Keyword density is the number of times a particular keyword appears on a webpage to the total page’s word count.

 

L

1. Link Building

Link building is the process of acquiring relevant links from external sources. Simply put, it is the process of getting other websites to link back to yours. This drives relevant referral traffic and also helps with higher rankings on search engine result pages (SERPs).

2. Landing Page

The page that a link takes you to is known as a Landing Page. It is a standalone page created for a particular link and can be optimized for a better CRO.

3. Mobile Marketing

Digital marketing techniques to promote and optimize content for mobile devices/smartphones are known as Mobile Marketing. App Store Optimisation is also a part of Mobile Marketing.

4. Media Planning

Creating a plan, selecting media platforms, and setting up a cost-effective budget for a time period such as a year is known as Media Planning.

To learn Media Planning in just 6 hours, check out IIDE’s online certificate course on Media Planning

5. Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is the use of software automation for any marketing efforts. It helps a company streamline, measure, and automate marketing tasks efficiently. The aim of marketing automation is to improve efficiency and generate increased revenue.

O

1. Open Rate

The open rate indicates the percentage of emails opened from the total number of emails that were sent out. Your email subject line plays a crucial role here as customers are bombarded with emails. Hence, it needs to be unique.

2. On-page optimization

This includes optimizing your website and its elements in order to improve rankings on a search engine. Organic search engine rankings can be improved through meta tags and content improvisation.

3. Off-page Optimization

Off-page optimization includes all your efforts to improve your page rankings that do not include your website but backlinks, link building, classified ads, and other such off-page marketing efforts.

P

1. Page Performance

Page performance is a combined metric that takes into consideration the on-page SEO, website traffic, CTA, and different types of conversions.

2. Page Ranking

Your page ranking has a lot to do with credibility and also relevance. It is determined by the Google algorithm. Each site is given a ranking on a scale of 0 to 10. 0 means a poor ranking and means you are not eligible to rank in their search engine. 10 being good – it is awarded to less than 150 sites.

3. Performance Marketing

Marketing campaigns where advertisers or affiliates are paid once the desired action is completed are called Performance Marketing. The desired action could be generating leads, followers, conversions, sales, downloads, etc.

4. Pay Per Click

Pay Per Click is a part of Performance Marketing where a brand pays the search engine and third-party websites whenever someone clicks on a link.

5. Push Marketing

When the brand takes the product to the audience, it is known as Push Marketing. In Push Marketing, the brand pushes the product through various channels/strategies to be seen by the target audience. Ad marketing is a technique under Push Marketing.

6. Pull Marketing

When organically a user is drawn to a particular product/brand, it is known as Pull Marketing. Through SEO and other organic efforts, key techniques of Pull Marketing, you can generate sales.

Q

1. Quality Score

One of the most common digital marketing terms, quality score is a Google ad metric that defines the relevance and quality for the campaign. Marketers need high quality score to rank on top of the SERP with low ad spends.

2. Queries

Queries or keyword are the search term used by a person to seek answers from the search engine. Marketers run and optimize queries related to their business to generate traffic and revenue.

R

1. Ranking

Ranking is nothing but the position on SERPs where your website is present. Rankings are dependent on quality score, SEO efforts, feedbacks and reviews, and the relevance to the search term.

2. ROI – Return On Investment 

ROI means the percentage of returns on any given investment. It refers to the sales after any paid marketing campaigns. The end goal of any marketing effort is a sale or purchase. There are many tools available to measure sales and call-to-actions for specific marketing campaigns.

3. Remarketing

Remarketing, as the name suggests, is a strategy that targets users who have already visited your website. You can target them again through ads, emails, and social media.

S

1. SEM – Search engine marketing

Search engine marketing includes paid efforts on a search engine. This includes paid ads on any search engine result page.

2. SMM – Social Media Marketing 

SMM or social media marketing is a very common digital marketing term. It includes marketing on various social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.

3. SERP – Search Engine Result Page

A search engine result page is the display page that appears on any search engine after feeding in a search query. The higher your page ranking or visibility, the more likely a user will click on your webpage.

4. SEO – Search Engine Optimization

SEO or search engine optimization is one of the most common digital marketing terms that a marketer can come across. It means on-page and off-page optimization to increase traffic on the website and improve page rankings on any search engine result page (SERP). We recommend this short online course on search engine optimization for a better understanding.

T

1. Targeting

Targeting is defined by who your audience is – who is it that you’re marketing to? Many social media platforms offer built-in targeting tools. Your demographic preferences can be very specific. For example, single women over the age of 40 who like to go on trips.

2. Technology Disruption

Technology disruption is any kind of technology that causes disruption and affects the normal operation of an industry. Technology disruption uses experimental tactics and test methods that have not been tried earlier. It leads to innovation and adaptation.

3. Target Audience

Target audience or target group is a group of people with similar characteristics, psychographic and demographic profile that fits a marketer’s buyer persona. Ads and other marketing efforts are stressed on a specific group to generate revenue.

4. Tracking Code

Tracking codes are small scripts used by different tools for data gathering. It is placed in the header or the footer section of the website.

We have a 4-month comprehensive online digital marketing course that’ll make you familiar with all the top digital marketing terms and the applications of each.

And if you’re interested in learning some particular digital marketing skills, do check out IIDE’s 13+ short-term certificate courses in digital marketing.

FAQs

Q. What are the 5 Ds of digital marketing?

The 5 D’s of digital marketing are as follows –

• Digital devices
• Digital platforms
• Digital media
• Digital data
• Digital technology

Q. What are the 7 types of digital marketing?

The 7 types of digital marketing are as follows – 

• SEO (search engine optimization)
• Pay-per-click advertising (PPC ads)
• Social media marketing
• Content marketing
• Email marketing
• Mobile Marketing
• Marketing Analytics

Q. What are the key terms in marketing?

Some digital marketing terms you should know include –

• Bounce rate
• Landing page
• Key performance indicator (KPI)
• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Cost per Lead
• Inbound Marketing
• Real-time bidding
• Conversion
• Engagement Rate
• Call-to-action

 

Conclusion

We hope you enjoyed reading Guide 101 of digital marketing terms & jargon and it helped you comprehend and register all the digital marketing terms. If you have any digital terms you’d like to know more about, let us know in the comments below!

If you’re a professional looking to upskill, check out this 11-month MBA-level postgraduate digital marketing course.