Big data is big business. Understanding analytics can steer your business to success, but getting bogged down in industry jargon can slow down progress. Rather than nodding along confused, or having to constantly interrupt a meeting to understand acronyms, we've put together a handy glossary of key terms to learn.
Testing variables is important. With A / B testing, two versions of a creative are compared with one single variation, such as a different font, message, or image. When running both versions simultaneously as ads, you'll gain insight as to which element is more likely to resonate with your target audience.
It is important to note that this will work most effectively if you only change one variable. Once you have selected a winner from your A / B test, you can then use it as the starting point for the next round of testing and change another variable—to isolate and identify your ideal creative.
Typically, this is common practice for testing Landing Pages and Google or Facebook Ads.
Originally used in traditional print advertising, for digital advertising this term describes the area of a website that is visible when initially loaded. (I.e. Everything visible without the user having to scroll down).
Due to the wide variety of screen sizes, resolutions, and devices, there is no single 'Above the Fold' size.
An auction is conducted (in real-time) to provide instantaneous bidding on available ad space. This marketplace can be automated, and provides a fresh alternative to the traditional method of simply buying particular advert slots.
I.e. This technology-facilitated marketplace paves the way for advertisers and publishers to buy and sell advertising spaces in real-time auctions.
To determine how adverts rank in comparison to one another, an Ad Rank displays the position of PPC ads on SERPs. It helps illustrate which adverts show most, and partly why. It may be that a competitor is more likely to appear above your advert (or in place of your advert) due to a higher ranking caused by better quality adverts and higher budgets.
Ultimately, quality outranks budget—but be aware big spenders can muscle their way in.
This is an agreement between an advertiser and a publisher whereby the publisher will receive a fee for every successful referral to the advertiser's product or service. This may be as simple as payment for a certain amount of referral traffic to a website, or it may require a purchase to be made through the publisher's lead.
Sometimes, businesses will collaborate to share audiences with no commission added. The benefit of sharing traffic is heightened by also gaining instant credibility from the affiliate brand or website that is redirecting a particular audience.
Attention. Interest. Desire. Action.
This is one of the oldest marketing frameworks, yet it has stood the test of time. It implies that consumers will move through a series of stages when making any purchase decisions.
Firstly, the Attention stage is when the consumer gains awareness of your brand or product. Then, Interest is gained as they begin to learn about the various benefits of your brand/product and how it will fit in with their 'culture' or lifestyle. Thirdly, the focus switches to when the consumer now Desires you're product/brand and actively wants to make a purchase or connection with it. Finally, the Action stage is when the consumer makes a purchase, trials a product or service, or showcases some form of intent towards purchasing.
Note: Often this is expanded to the AIDAR model, whereby 'Retention' is added as a key consideration.
Business to Business.
This term focuses on any product or service that targets businesses rather than general consumers.
Business to Customer.
In contrast with the previous term, this business model is focused on selling to general consumers rather than businesses.
Note: Your business can operate both as B2B and B2C, however it is always worth considering how your messaging and approach will change depending on your target market.
The Before-After-Bridge Framework, is a copywriting technique based on comparing a current problem state to a guided solution. It places your product/service as the answer to the readers' issues and encourages them to take action.
I.e. Before, they're in a bad scenario.
To get them to the ideal 'after' situation, you provide the 'bridge', that is your product or service.
If a user lands on a website and simply leaves the site without interacting with it, this is known as a 'bounce'. The bounce rate displays the percentage of users that 'bounce' in relation to overall website visitors. For example, if 100 people view your website on a single day, but 30 of the visitors are recorded as bounces, then the bounce rate will be 30%.
Bounce rates can indicate multiple issues. A high bounce rate might indicate that your website does not meet user expectations, or perhaps it loaded too slowly for their patience. You may need to consider redesigning your landing page(s), or perhaps readjusting your SEO, Affiliates, and SEM to reach a more suitable audience.
Simply, how identifiable and memorable your brand is. Brand Awareness campaigns focus on getting your brand as known as possible. The key target is to reach as many defined users as possible with quality messaging that will ensure they take notice of you—and ideally remember you!
Text in an ad or text written to be delivered audibly. Best practice with ad copy is to stay away from advertising jargon.
In Marketing, Copy (and Copywriting) refers to your messaging, both text or audio. Copy should be strategic and written with purpose. The best practice is to clearly identify your target audience, and create content that resonates with them—often using simple language that is easy to understand yet powerfully paints a picture or prompts some form of action.
Cost-Per-Acquisition is the cost of gaining a customer. If you were to spend $100 on advertising, and gain two customers then the CPA would be $50, if you got 20 customers it would only be $5. You can calculate your CPA by simply dividing your total spend by the amount of customers acquired.
Cost-Per-Click is simply how much each 'click' costs you. For example if you run a Google Search Ad, you won't be charged for how many times it is displayed—but rather how many times it is clicked. Each click will have a cost, if the cost is $1.22 per click, then every time someone clicks your advert you will pay $1.22. Simple, right?
A 'Call-To-Action' is a term for any design that prompts the user to take a particular response. This may be a 'learn more' button, or simply the use of phrases or words incorporated into messaging to compel your audience to act in a specific way.
Cost-Per-'Mile' (Cost per Thousand Impressions).
'Mile' may sound misleading, but if you know your Roman Numerals...M stands for 1000—which is a handy way to remember this metric.
Note: An impression occurs when your ad successfully loads and it’s seen by an internet user.
Cost-Per-View is a metric purely for video advertising. A view is typically defined when a viewer watches at least 30 seconds of your video... or the entire duration of your advert if it's shorter than 30 seconds. Note that views can also be counted if the user interacts with your advert before the 30 second mark, such as clicking a CTA button.
The Click-Through Rate is the percentage of users that click your advert, compared to the number of people that see it (impressions).
If 1000 people see your advert but only five click your advert, your CTR would be 0.5%.
The Customer Journey is the full experience that customers go through when interacting with your brand, from initial discovery through to completing purchases and developing lasting impressions. The journey considers all potential brand 'touching points' and helps to optimize the experience to meet customer expectations, and brand aims.
Coming up with the ideal creative can be difficult, and although A/B testing is useful...it can be time consuming. Dynamic Creatives exist as an option on many advertising channels. It gives you the option to provide multiple content (copy, images, videos) and the platform will automatically test all the various combinations to assess which will be your most effective pairing—it will also intelligently determine which creative assets will be most effective on particular users depending on their previous interactions.
This is powerful as those most likely to engage with video content will be shown video, those that engage with bright imagery will get the bright image assets, and those that prefer longer copy will see your most in depth messaging.
Any publicity or exposure gained from methods other than paid advertising is known as 'Earned Media'. Unlike Owned Media, this is purely concerned with external media coverage and sources. Some examples of Earned Media include bloggers recommending or covering your brand of their own accord, any free news coverage, or even being quoted in publications.
General Data Protection Regulation is an important data privacy consideration for any businesses operating within (or to) Europe. Effective as of May 25th, 2018, it is the toughest privacy and security law in the world.
The 'Help A Reporter Out' platform is a useful PR tool to be aware of. Individuals and businesses can sign up to this platform to either request quotes and information from experts—or be the experts themselves and answer various enquiries related to their industry/craft.
For marketing purposes, being featured elsewhere as an expert will help you become a thought leader, increase backlinks to your website, and expose you to a wider audience.
This is the number of times that an ad (or piece of content ) has been seen. It is worth noting that impressions can include multiple views from the same users, and that impressions do not denote any type of interaction with the advert/content.
Note: Unique Impressions are referred to as 'Reach'. I.e. the number of different people your content reached.
Key Performance Indicators are measurable values that determine how effectively a company—or project—is performing. For example, if a brand launches an App, then they may determine that success to them will look like this:
KVI's should be assigned numerical values to remove vague interpretations of success, and solidify the goals you want to achieve. In the above example this may mean a 90% retention rate and 5000 downloads, depending on your product and market/audience.
Value propositions are the statements that define your why. Not why you exist, but why someone should do business with you. The key value propositions are your main selling points that should convince your audience that you offer more value than similar offerings (if any exist). Clarity and conciseness helps with communicating KVPs.
This is a highly useful term to explore. Once you've established a high converting audience that are highly advantageous to your business, you have opportunities to leverage your success at speed. A 'Lookalike Audience' is automatically generated from your defined audience, to target people that are similar to your existing audience—which means they're likely to react to your content in a similar way.
Long Term Goal, an aim your company has for an extended (and defined) period of time. The product launch may aim for 5000 new customers, but the LTG might be to be the number one product on the market, be the most influential brand, surpass 500'000 customers, or even eradicate a problem.
Defining LTGs helps a business map out their future, and align the team with working towards making lofty goals a reality... step by step.
Long-Term Values, this is simply what predicted value your company or product will have over an extended (and defined) period of time. It can be useful to analyse the LTV of particular customers, to help with long term financial planning.
For example, gaining a new client might cost you $1'200 in advertising, staffing, and resources... but the client may generate $10'000 over time and open up new avenues for even more leads, which justifies the initial up front cost tenfold.
Here's the cliche,
You gotta spend money to make money.
But there's the missing information... you gotta spend money wisely.
Any media output you pay for is classed as 'paid media', this might include advertising in a local newspaper, or a sponsored article, or any type of advertising or paid endorsements.
Paid Media helps promote your brand at speed, and is a great solution for aggressive growth.
Problem. Agitate. Solution.
Another marketing framework to create valuable content. First, you identify a customer pain point (problem) and then agitate it by expanding on why their issue is so troublesome, before finally offering a solution to ease their irritation or worries.
For example, you could ask a direct question before expanding on why the reader should be concerned:
Lonely? It's common to feel lonely, but did you know loneliness can decrease your life span by up to 25 years, by speeding up ageing and lowering your cognitive abilities? That's why our dating application also has a friend finding solution, so that you can meet likeminded friends while looking for your life partner.
Pay-Per-Click...as mentioned in CPC (Cost per Click), not all adverts cost money to be viewed. The beauty of PPC adverts, is that those clicking are doing so because they have an interest in your advert–ergo, they likelihood of a conversion should be higher.
Public Relations, or Press Release.
The former, Public Relations, is the craft of deliberate communications to affect public perceptions in a desirable manner.
A Press Release, is a structured document designed for members of the media. Its purpose is to provide information, make an announcement, or to make an official statement. Typically, the structure has seven to nine elements, the most common being:
This is an automated way to buy media. It helps advertisers reach the right people in the right place—at the right time. Ads are purchased based on pre-defined parameters set by the advertiser. By using data to make real-time decisions, the Ad efficiency and effectiveness is likely to increase.
This refers to any digital property that you control (own) that is unique to your brand. Examples of owned media include Websites, social media accounts, and digital resources like podcasts and eBooks.
Whilst pop-ups are self explanatory, and commonly known, pop-unders are rarely discussed. These work in a similar fashion but instead of loading on top of your webpage, they load underneath—it's less intrusive and users are likely to only see them after they've closed their current browser session.
Adverts are ranked by the advertising platforms to help guide advertisers to crafting better content. The score is typically marked out of 100, but some platforms will describe the quality verbally—such as Facebook noting whether the content is 'above average' or 'below average'.
Quality is judged on multiple aspects, and is often communicated on a per aspect basis. Some of the considerations will include audience interactions, quality of creative, and community engagement. Usually platforms will compare your content to similar competitors to allow you to understand how your work differs to those operating in the same space as you.
In contrast to 'impressions' (all views), Reach can be thought of as 'unique impressions'. I.e. The Reach is the total number of different people to see your content.
To illustrate this, imagine you see the same 'Food Panda' advert 10 times in a day. You would provide 10 impressions to their campaign, but only 1 additional reach statistic. If you only bothered to click their advert once, the click-through rate would be 10% (for you uniquely).
Once you've got someone interested in your brand, what is the next step? To reel them in and convert them to a customer or brand supporter. To do this, Remarketing is ideal.
Remarketing refers to any marketing efforts targeted towards someone that has already indicated some form of interest in your brand—such as clicking on one of your adverts or even simply visiting your website. If you run a campaign that targets folk that are already aware of you and considering your products or services... half the battle has already been won!
The Remarketing list is a (sometimes automated) audience list to be used in your advertising and marketing campaigns. This is often also referred to often as 'retargeting'.
Search Engine Optimisation.
This refers to the art of refining content so that your website appears higher on search engine result pages (SERPs).
There are many ways to do this, from including particular keywords and phrases, to changing image names and alt text. It can be a full time job, and many businesses employ SEO specialists to keep their organic rankings impactful.
Search Engine Results Page(s).
Search Engine Results Pages (also known as “SERPs” or “SERP”) are Google's response to a user's search query. SERPs tend to include organic search results, paid Google Ads results, Featured Snippets, Knowledge Graphs and video results.
Search Engine Marketing, this often involves SEO strategies and Advertising. Any marketing activities geared towards Search Engines can be put under the umbrella term of SEM.
Social Media Marketing, this simply refers to all marketing activities through social media.
Not all users will perform a desired action after clicking your advert, however that does not mean the advert failed. By defining a 'View-Through' period, you acknowledge that people need time to think, save, compare, and decide... you essentially say that if an advert viewer performs a desired action within a set amount of days since seeing the advert—then the advert was a success.
You can set this up for partial or full attribution. For example, if a user saw an advert for Mäd UX services and clicked it, but then returned to our website 30 days later to contact us for this service, we could include this as a conversion with a view-through rate of over 30 days set.
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