Below is a list of common terms, jargon and acronyms that are frequently used in our crazy little industry. We’ve done our best to define each term for you. If you would like to suggest a new word to add to this glossary, please contact us here.
A
Anchor Text: The text (or characters) inside a website hyperlink.
B
Bandit Testing: A term used to describe test methods or algorithms that continuously shift traffic in reaction to the real-time performance of the test.
Banner Blindness: A term used in online advertising to describe the ineffectiveness of banner advertisements due to their oversaturation and lack of intent-based messaging.
Bounce Rate: The bounce rate is the percentage of people who landed on your website, but instead of browsing further, they exited your website.
C
Call to Action: A call to action (abbreviated “CTA”) is the desired action a user or visitor is supposed to take at a certain stage of the conversion funnel.
Confidence Interval: A range of values calculated such that there is a known probability that the true mean of a parameter lies within it.
Confidence Level: The percentage of time that a statistical result would be correct if you took numerous random samples.
Correlation: The existence of a relationship between two or more variables or factors where dependence between them occurs in a way that cannot be attributed to chance alone.
D
Domain Authority: A 1-100 score predicting how well a site will rank in major search engines.
E
Earned Media: Earned media (often regarded as free media) attributes the publicity of your brand to the recognition of its efforts and results.
G
Guerilla Marketing: Guerrilla marketing is a form of marketing that utilizes unconventional tactics to get maximum results when promoting a business or service.
H
Hypothesis Testing: A systematic way to select samples from a group or population with the intent of making a determination about the expected behavior of the entire group.
I
Influencer Marketing: Influencer marketing is the activity of engaging with influential people in order to obtain press and/or get content disseminated to large audiences.
K
Keyword Cannibalization: Keyword cannibalization is what happens when you have multiple pages on your website that all target the same keyword.
Knowledge Commerce: The monetization of the process you use to share your knowledge.
L
Link Juice: Link juice is a non-technical SEO term used to reference the SEO value of a hyperlink to a particular website or webpage.
M
Margin of Error: An expression for the maximum expected difference between the true population parameter and a sample estimate of that parameter.
Marketing Automation: Marketing Automation is a tool, or a suite of tools, that enables the automation of repetitive tasks across several channels.
Multivariate Testing: A type of hypothesis testing where multiple variables are tested simultaneously to determine how the variables and combinations of variables influence the output.
S
Sample Size: The number (n) of observations taken from a population through which statistical inferences for the whole population are made.
T
The Fold: The fold is a term used by web designers and Internet marketers to describe a web browser window’s bottom border.
U
Unique Selling Proposition (USP): A unique characteristic of a product or brand identified by the marketer as the one on which to base a promotional campaign; often used in a product differentiation approach to promotion.
V
Value Proposition: A value proposition is what you guarantee or promise to deliver to your consumers in exchange for their money.
Vanity Metric: A metric that makes you feel good without telling you anything about your business.
W
Web Spam: Intentional attempts to manipulate search engine rankings for specific keywords or keyword phrase queries.
