You probably hear these terms quite often in conversations with marketers, here are 15 useful digital marketing terms and what they mean. 

Backlink
A backlink is an external website link that is redirected back to your website. This could be from an online blog, an online directory, or even a partner’s website. Having a strategy to build backlinks is called ‘link building’ and an important factor for ranking highly on search engines. 

Buyer Journey 
Or Customer Journey. This is the path that your customer will take from the first time they see your brand to the time they decide to purchase. This journey goes through awareness of the brand, to consideration, to decision. 

Bounce rate
The percentage of website visitors who open one page on your platform before they leave. The higher your bounce rate is, the less your audience is engaged with your website.

Conversion Goal
A goal that you want your visitors to take e.g. signing up to a newsletter, submitting a contact form, booking a call, or an e-commerce purchase.

Conversion Rate
The percentage of visitors that take a specific action that you class as a goal e.g. submitted the form, booking a call, e-commerce booking.

Cost per click (CPC)
The price that is paid per click on a paid digital advert (social media ad, search engine ad, etc.). This is important to monitor so you know how much you’re spending vs. how much you’re getting in return with your sales.

Customer Relationship Management Software (CRM)
A platform/software that manages prospect and customer data and interactions including sales lead information, customer details, customer interactions, digital activities on your online platforms and, their purchases.

Dark Post
Sponsored social media content that does not appear on your profile or your feed, but appears on the feed of those you are targeting.

Email Automation
A series of emails that are sent out on a marketing platform based on defined triggers and rules e.g. if a user clicks on email 1, they receive email 1 a week later.

Heatmap
A visual representation of where on a webpage visitors are interacting most with. This shows where people are clicking on, how far they scroll, what they ignore, and more. The brighter the colour on a particular area, the stronger the action.

Impression
An impression is when a viewer sees an advert. No action needs to be taken, the user just needs to see the ad for it to be calculated as an impression.

Meta Description
Short description (usually 160 characters) of a webpage that shows on search engine results.

Organic
A source of traffic to your website that is not paid for e.g. from someone searches relevant keywords on Google and decides to click on your website, this is called organic traffic.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)­
A process to optimise your website (copy, imagery, speed, and more) that helps you to be more relevant and rank higher on search engines for relevant keywords.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)­
A type of advertising that is bid-based and is shown on search engine result pages when people type related keywords. SEM helps businesses to show their website at the top of search engine result pages.