25 Important Terms for Digital Marketers

Are you a digital marketer trying to find out what common terms you will expect in the market?

Or are you a business owner trying to get up to speed with commonly used digital marketing terms?

You got yourself in the right place!

Before we start, it is also important to understand the types of digital marketing and how it works.

As you venture into digital marketing, it becomes important to understand some commonly used digital marketing terms. This will also help you to demonstrate your competence and professionalism to your client eliminating any doubts. In fact, some of these terms are important in determining the right digital marketing strategy as you set up digital marketing campaigns or ads.

In this topic, we will discuss 25 Important terms for Digital Marketers that you should know to help you start advertising your business.

These terms are not only important but also prepare you as you start using digital marketing platforms like Facebook ads, Google ads, and Microsoft ads among others.

• Brand Awareness
• Brand Consideration
• Sales
• Leads
• Key Performance Indicator (KPI)
• Sales Funnel
• Return On Investment (ROI)
• Organic Marketing
• Paid Marketing
• Advertising Network
• Keywords
• Targeting
• Marketing Campaign
• Impressions
• Conversion
• Call To Action (CTA)
• Ad Format
• Cost Per Action (CPA)
• Ad Spend
• Return On Ad Spend (ROAS)
• Cost Per Click (CPC)
• Click Through Rate(CTR)
• Ad Quality
• A/B Testing
• Website Tag

Brand Awareness also known as Brand Recognition is a marketing approach that aims at making customers familiarize themselves with a brand, product, or service. A brand awareness campaign will focus on increasing the brand’s reach to as many customers as possible while creating awareness or recognition of the brand. Simply, a brand awareness campaign aims to make consumers see that your business, product, or service exists.

Brand awareness helps to build consumers’ trust in your brand and gives them a reason to consider purchasing your product or service. A business that wants to increase its brand recognition and visibility will consider running a brand awareness campaign.

Brand Consideration is the extent to which customers have shown interest in your brand and are willing to purchase your product or service. Brand consideration helps a business convert the brand awareness of its products or services into sales. Brand consideration is measured once the customer becomes aware of the brand, and then shows interest and intent to purchase your product or service.  

In addition to the customer showing interest and intent to purchase your brand or service, brand consideration can also be associated with the customer associating with your brand, liking your brand, and favoring your brand over other brands. A business that wants to increase its brand consideration will consider running a brand consideration campaign.

Sales refers to the amount of products or services sold. It is important to set marketing goals that align with business objectives. The business’s main aim is to convince the customer to purchase its products or services. The end goal of a customer purchasing journey is to generate revenue through sales. A business that wants to increase its revenue will consider running a sales campaign.

A marketing lead refers to individuals or businesses who have shown interest and interacted with your products or services. The actions taken by these customers that demonstrate interest or knowledge of your brand may include contacting your business, repurchasing your products or services, making customer referrals of your brand to other potential customers, visiting your physical store or website, subscribing to your newsletters, following your brand in social media, etc. A business that wants to increase its leads will consider running a campaign to generate leads.

A Key performance indicator is a measurable value that is used to monitor the performance of a specific goal or objective. An objective can have several KPIs monitoring various performance conditions.

For example, if your business goal is to increase newsletter subscriptions by 5% over the next 12 months, your KPI to measure your progress toward this goal may include the percentage of customer sign-ups.

A sales funnel also known as a purchase funnel is a marketing representation or model that illustrates a customer’s purchasing journey, portraying the sales process of a customer from awareness to driving a purchase action.

A sales funnel helps you understand what customers are performing at each stage of a purchase journey. The purchase journey traditionally follows four stages (as discussed above) awareness, consideration, sales, and leads. However, some businesses might have different interpretations of their customer journeys.

Return on Investment is a calculation used to calculate the rate of return for a particular investment over a specific time. The ROI is used to denote how much profit has been generated from an investment or a project.

A digital marketer should know the goals of a business before setting up a campaign. If the business goal is based on ROI, the digital marketer should set a campaign strategy that will have a good return for each dollar spent. You may calculate the ROI to determine if the campaign is leading the business to a loss or profit and adjust the campaign strategy appropriately.

Organic Marketing is a non-paid digital marketing strategy that focuses on generating traffic to your website over a long period. It involves optimizing your website’s content to improve your ranking position on search engine results.

Organic marketing leverages digital marketing tactics such as search engine optimization (SEO), content marketing, social media marketing, and email marketing.

Paid Marketing also known as Inorganic Marketing is a digital marketing strategy where a business promotes its brand through advertisements or promotional content to customers based on their preferences or interests.

An example of paid marketing is promoting your brand through companies like Facebook ads, Google ads, and Microsoft ads among others.

An Advertising Network or an Ad Network is a technology platform hosted by a company that connects your advertisements to other businesses’ or individuals’ websites or apps who want to show them.

For example, when you start running your campaign using Google Ads, your ads get displayed on other businesses’ websites or apps. The partner companies that help display these ads to websites or apps are called Ad Networks. Examples of Advertising networks include Google AdSense, Google AdMob, Unity Ads, Amazon Publisher Services, etc.

Keywords also known as Keyphrases or Search Queries are words and phrases that user types into search engines to find information about particular ideas or topics. Keywords are used in websites or content marketing to improve search engine optimization (SEO) and make your website rank at the top of search results when a user searches for similar keywords in the search engines.

The phrase “keywords” is mostly used in search engine optimization (SEO), however, in current times, keyword integration in digital advertisement has broadened into social media platforms like YouTube and app store integrations. Since these platforms involve users entering Keyphrases in searches, it is important to use keyword integration in your website content, YouTube videos, app store listings, or advertisement content.

Targeting involves dividing and selecting a specific group of people from a broad audience to show your advertisement or promotional message. This specific group of people is called a Target Audience. Targeting helps marketers advertise products or services to specific audiences who have interests and preferences for products or services similar to the ones the business offers.

With the internet covering a very broad audience, targeting prevents a business from advertising its products or services to the wrong audience. A business can select a target audience based on their demographics, geographic location, interests, or behavior to display its advertisement or promotional message.

A Marketing Campaign is a set of several advertisements or promotional messages set up under a common theme that share a similar budget and marketing strategy aimed at achieving a particular goal.

Google Ads defines a campaign as a set of ad groups (ads, keywords, and bids) that share a budget, location targeting, and other settings.

An impression occurs when a user views your advertisement or promotional message. When an impression occurs to a user, it does not mean that the user has interacted or clicked your advertisement but means that the user viewed your advertisement.

For example, when you are navigating a website, or while using an app, or while watching a YouTube video, the advertisement that pops up and you end up viewing is called an impression. 

A conversion occurs when a user performs a certain action after clicking on your advertisement which you consider as an important goal in your marketing strategy. For example, a conversion may be a user purchasing a product or service, a user signing up for a newsletter, a user purchasing a subscription or lifetime license of your software, a user calling your business, a user visiting your physical store, a user visiting a website for an educational institution and ends up enrolling for a course, etc.

A call-to-action is an interactive button or text link, that is usually integrated in advertisements, that sends a user to a particular web page or an app download page when clicked. Examples of call-to-action may include buttons with phrases like “Download Now”, “Install Now”, “Buy Now”, “Learn More”, “Apply Now”, “Shop Now”, “Visit Page”, “Get Offer”, “Sign Up”, “Follow”, etc.

The advertising platforms usually place the call to action button on your advertisement once it is set up and running. Some may require you to choose which CTA your ad requires.  

Ad Formats are different formats or layouts in which an advertisement will appear when displayed. These formats are in different sizes of different lengths and widths for pictures and aspect ratio for videos.

Each advertising platform recommends their own ad formats. It is for the digital marketer to check the ad formats and their guidelines and create ads to meet those guidelines. For example, below are ad formats used by Google and Facebook.

Examples of Google Ads Ad Formats include Text, Responsive, Image, App promotion Ads, Video, Shopping Ads, and Call-only Ads.

Examples of Facebook Ad Formats include Photo Ads, Video, Stories, Messenger Ads, Carousel Ads, Slideshow Ads, Collection Ads, and Playable Ads.

Cost Per Action also referred to as Cost Per Acquisition is a bidding strategy that enables you to pay for an action that a customer takes on your advertisement. This actions are usually your conversions.  Each time a user performs a conversion, you pay for it.

To use a CPA, the digital marketer needs to have already setup the business’ website or app for conversions. To collect data on important events that form your conversion, you need to have implemented site tags in your website or used a platform like Firebase for your app and integrated the conversions to get measured by the advertising platform.

Ad spend refers to the total amount of money a business spends on advertising campaigns. When using advertising platforms like Google Ads or Facebook Ads, you set an average daily budget to determine how much you want to spend per day. The total monthly ad spend will be equal to the average daily ad spend multiplied by the total number of days for that month.

The Return On Ad Spend is a metric or value that measures the amount of revenue your business earns for each dollar it spends on the marketing campaign.

ROAS = Revenue Earned from advertisement / Budget Spent for advertisement

If a company’s goal is to increase revenue or profit, a ROAS bidding strategy can be used to measure how much the business earns for each dollar it spends on ads.

Cost Per Click also known as Pay Per Click is a bidding strategy where an advertiser pays a cost each time a user clicks on their advertisement.

CTR is a ratio that measures the number of people who clicked your advertisement to the total number of people who viewed (impressions) your advertisement.

CTR = (Clicks / Impressions) x 100

A high CTR indicates a good performance of your ads. It also indicates that users find your ads informative and relevant to what they are searching for.

Ad Quality refers to the experience users have while viewing your ads which may lead them to interact with your ads.

A good ad quality will help your ad rank higher in search engines or social media platforms compared to other ads.

A/B testing refers to an experiment done in marketing by splitting the audience to test how different versions of your ad in a campaign perform, and determine the best performing ad.

Assuming that you are already running a marketing campaign with an ad (version A) already set-up and displaying to your audience. You can run an A/B test by creating another version of this ad (version B), under the same campaign, then split your audience into two equal portions, and show version A of your ad to one audience and version B of your ad to another audience (usually over a long period of time). After running this ads, you will then analyze and determine which one performs better and choose to adopt this best performing ad and display it to you whole audience.   

A website tag is a small piece of code integrated in websites to collect data. An important point on why a digital marketer need to implement site tags in a business’s website is to track and collect data on customer journeys which will help in analyzing, decision-making, and implementing marketing strategies.

An example is the Google tag which after implementation, enables you to use Google products such as Google Analytics, Google Ads, etc. Google Analytics can then help you to analyze and make informed decisions through generated reports including funnels, user events on your website, conversions, and channels used among others.