Glossary of Terms

This is the gathering of data and other information about your website and your customers. This includes the online actions of people who visit your website, what they click on, how long they stay on your site if they order anything and what they order. Once that information is gathered, it can be used to provide insight into consumer responses to marketing efforts, and what’s working and not working, marketing-wise. This feedback helps sellers and marketers better target audiences that will be most receptive to their particular products and helps them make educated decisions about how best to market products to those audiences efficiently and effectively. The more analytics a seller receives, the more fine-tuned their marketing efforts can become. Using analytics takes the guessing out of decision-making. Once a clear trend emerges, successful business owners steer their businesses accordingly. 

An impression in digital marketing refers to any time your digital content, whether ads, emails, social media marketing, or a blog on your website shows up on a user screen. So the number of impressions can be described as the number of people who actually see your content online. 

Another bit of data marketers uses to fine-tune their marketing. This measures the reaction of a user to an ad, namely whether they click on it or not. This data is used to determine the performance of a particular site, letting the owner of the site know exactly what the users of the site are clicking on. 

This is related only to email marketing campaigns. We measure their success by the number of people who open the email, hence the term open rate. 

The number of people who click on a link inside that email, or in an ad. This is the percentage of people who click on your link or ad after seeing it, compared to the number of total users who view that page, email, or advertisement whether they click or not. 

This is taking the total number of visitors to your website and comparing that number to the number of sales, leads or other desired outcomes generated on your website. It’s tracking how many of the total visitors to your site, convert to actual sales or into very interested potential customers. For example, if you have 100 people visit your website, and three purchase your product, your conversion rate is 3%. 

This is calculated by taking the total earnings you’ve generated over a period of time and dividing that by the number of clicks your site has generated during that same time period. This information gives you an estimate of the number of earnings each individual click will bring you.  

The purchase funnel is really focused on consumers. Think of a regular funnel, an item enters the funnel at its widest part. As gravity pulls it downward, farther and farther toward the narrow end of the funnel, it nears its final destination, the exit point, where the item finally takes its ultimate action and completes its funnel experience. 

Refers to all the different advertising pathways and platforms marketers use to promote products and sell to consumers. Examples include Facebook ads, Instagram marketing, email blasts, and google search ads.

This stands for pay-per-click marketing. This refers to product marketers bidding for the best position in sponsored search engine rankings. The higher the amount of the seller's bid, the better their chances of getting a higher rating in consumer search engine results. That means more consumers could be directed to their site. There are other factors that come into play though, so spending a large bundle of cash doesn’t guarantee a great return. 

One way that sellers can try to ensure their website will get as high a search engine ranking as possible, is without paying for it. When a consumer enters a word or phrase into a search engine, the results that pop up from that search are what sellers are interested in. They want to be at the top of that list of results because those are the ones consumers are more likely to click on. If your website ranks within the top three in the search results, consumers are more likely to find you. There are ways you can achieve this without pay-per-click. 

A video that pitches viewers on a particular product or service. A VSL looks a lot like an online sales letter, but because it contains a video pitch, it offers a richer media experience to the consumer. Some VSLs offering products or services sometimes contain just a video with no text for the consumer to read through.