Digital Marketing Glossary

An alert is a notification of the prevalence of certain phrases online. Alerts monitor the number of mentions that a keyword or phrase receives.

In Mention, an alert is a keyword or group of keywords that exist on an ongoing basis. Users can track these alerts over time, and receive daily reports about their alerts' performance.

Backlinks are links from one site to another. Quality backlinks help a site to rank highly in search engines (see SEO). "A page has a high pagerank if the sum of the ranks of its backlinks is high" (Page 3).

Benefit-cost analysis is one method of determining whether a strategy is worth the investment. It is typically expressed as a ratio: Program Benefits ÷ Program Costs. "A benefit-cost ratio of 2:1 means that for every $1 invested, you get $2 back" (Phillips and Phillips 1).

Benefit-cost analysis is similar to ROI, but first emerged out of welfare economics (Ibid).

Boolean logic is a mathematical concept used for online searches. It allows users to create accurate search queries using the connectors "and," "or," and "not" (Lincove 6). Users can also limit searches to certain sources, and by geographical location. Mention offers Boolean queries to users on Company plans.

Brand affinity is a measurement of an audience's attraction toward and interest in a brand (Aaker & Lee 37). Advertisers view audiences with naturally high brand affinity - not induced by advertising - as being good audiences for advertising (Provost et al 4). Thus, advertisers seek to measure brand affinity among audiences, in order to target them with advertising.

At the low end, brand awareness is "recognition of the brand name," but can include a "highly developed cognitive structure" using detailed information (Hoyer and Brown 141).

Building brand awareness is a common goal for brand marketing, especially on social media. Key performance indicators include web traffic, web traffic referrals, search volume trends, volume of followers, social mentions, and share of voice (Castronovo and Huang 124).

Also known as: Brand tracking

Brand monitoring is the process of tracking information and public sentiment related to a particular brand or company. This includes monitoring websites, social media, blogs, forums, news, and reviews.

Goals of brand monitoring include seeing how a brand is viewed by customers, and reacting quickly to negative comments (Muschalle et al. 10).

Business-to-business companies sell products and services to other businesses, instead of traditional consumers. B2B marketing typically focuses on a few, larger customers, "using more technically-oriented sales processes" (Oliva 2).

Business-to-consumer companies sell products and services directly to consumers. Thanks to the internet, there has been "a drastic increase in the number of organizations that are using the web for marketing, promoting, and transacting products and services with consumers" (Ranganathan and Ganapathy 457).

Click-through rate is the "the percentage of users who clicked on [a link] after seeing it" (Anupam et al. 13). This includes banner advertisements, calls to action, and organic links in content pieces.

Also known as: Competitive analysis, Competitive intelligence.

Competitor analysis is where a company or brand assesses the strategy of one or more competitors. This could be one a one-off basis, or recurring periodically. The goal is for the brand to think like their competitors, in order to anticipate future actions and responses (Czepiel and Kerin 1).

Companies track competitors' practices across various fields: "general business activity, business development, strategy, and tactics in different sectors or new activities, market penetration, patent registration, research activity, and so on" (Rouach et al. 552).

Companies use this information to amend their own marketing strategy, in light of what their rivals do.

A crisis is a "low-probability, high-impact situation" which threatens a brand, either financially in or reputation (Pearson and Clair 3). Crisis management involves anticipating these events, and responding quickly to minimize harm.

"Companies today are racing to re-establish their connections to new as well as existing customers to boost long-term customer loyalty" (Chen and Popovich 672). A CRM strategy is an attempt to use existing customer information to prolong the relationship between customer and business.

A CRM is also the shorthand for tools companies use to achieve these customer relationship management goals. "Using technology to optimize interactions with customers, companies can create a 360 degree view of customers to learn from past interactions to optimize future ones" (Chen and Popovich 677). Specialized tools enable to companies to automate the collection of detailed customer information.

Engagement is a measure of the "specific interactive experiences between consumers and the brand, and/or other members of the community" (Brodie et al. 3). The more a consumer interacts with a brand and its products, the more "engaged" that person is. This includes interactions between that consumer and other members of a community.

According to Brian Haven, engagement has four elements: involvement, interaction, intimacy, and influence (Haven 5). Involvement includes many obvious digital KPIs such as site visits, page views, and keyword searches. Interaction includes comments, discussions and reviews. Measuring intimacy involves tracking sentiment of both customers and prospects. Influence is the level to which an individual spreads the word about a brand.

Google is a group of technologies that help users find and use all kinds of information (Miller 2008). It's best known for Google.com, the search engine with the largest market share in the world (Clemons 5).

Google alerts are a monitoring service provided by Google. These are email updates of the latest relevant Google results based on a topic of choice (Sfakianakis et al 4). They screen the web, blogs, and news sources for user-selected topics (Phillippi and Buxton 473).

Users provide Google with a set of queries to monitor, and responds periodically with updates related to those queries.

Also known as: Pull marketing

Inbound marketing is the production of "engaging and valuable content relevant to [a client's] needs," in order to pull prospects towards a brand (Holliman & Rowley 2).

Influencermarketing tools make it easier to find and engage influencers. These include influencer databases and media monitoring tools.

Influencers have desirable attributes - credibility, expertise, or enthusiasm, or network attributes such as connectivity or centrality - that make them persuasive to a disproportionately large number of others (Bakshy et al. 1).

For digital marketing, influencers include bloggers and social media users with large and devoted fan bases.

Key performnance indicators are measurements of performance in areas that "are the most critical for the current and future success of the organization" (Parmenter 3). These can be short- or long-term, and will be different for each job description within a company.

KPIs are "essential," in order to "perform comparisons and develop strategies for improvements" (Lavy et al. 442).

Market research is the process of systematically gathering information about individuals and organizations to support decision making (Sarstedt and Mooi 3). It looks at uncontrollable phenomena such as demographic and social composition, and controllable phenomena such as consumption, competition, and distribution (Brondoni 2-3).

This is distinct from "marketing research," which is the collection of information about different marketing processes.

Marketing research is the collection of information about, and planning for, specific marketing situations that a company might face (Brondoni 3). Marketing research identifies the information required to solve these issues, and the method of collecting this information (Sarstedt and Mooi 3).

It is often confused with "market research," which is more concerned with markets themselves. Marketing research focuses on marketing processes.

A mention is "an instance of citing or calling attention to someone or something" (Merriam-Webster). On social media, mentions have come to mean specific utterances of a user's social profile.

Pay-per-click is a form of advertising in which one website agrees to publish advertisements for another. The advertiser pays the host a fixed rate for every web user who clicks through to their site from the first (Anupam et al. 13).

The classic definition of return on investment is "earnings divided by investment" (Phillips 44). Expressed mathematically, it is "(Net Program Benefits ÷ Program Costs) x 100," with the result expressed as a percentage (Phillips and Phillips 1). Companies use this measure to determine whether a strategy is worth investing in.

ROI is similar to benefit-cost analysis, but was found traditionally in private business and industry (Phillips and Phillips 1).

The classic definition of return on investment is "earnings divided by investment" (Phillips 44). Expressed mathematically, it is "(Net Program Benefits ÷ Program Costs) x 100," with the result expressed as a percentage (Phillips and Phillips 1). Companies use this measure to determine whether a strategy is worth investing in. ROI is similar to benefit-cost analysis, but was found traditionally in private business and industry (Phillips and Phillips 1).

"SEO is the process of trying to rank highly a given web page or domain for specific keywords" (Evans 22). A higher search engine rank makes a page easier to find. Websites employ optimzation tactics to achieve a higher search engine rank, which in turn leads to increased traffic. "There are over 200 different factors (or signals) used by Google to calculate a page’s rank" (Evans 23). These include the quality and number of backlinks, the page traffic, the amount of social shares, and how well-known the website is.

SERP is an acronym for search engine results pages. These pages show the results of a search on a search engine, such as Google.

They have become an important space for advertising. "Placing ads on Google SERPs has been a major source of revenue for Google and the companies placing ads" (Djamasbi et al. 2)

Also known as: Social tracking

Social listening is an active and focused process to understand what's being said on social media platforms. This is different from "hearing," which is passive (Fensel et al. 3).

Social listenings tools are devices used to automate the process of social listening.

The sheer volume of social media content makes it impossible for humans to analyze manually. Tools let their users automatically filter content relevant to them (Johansson et al. 189).

Social media consists of "the tools and channels to relay content mainly generated by the consumers themselves" (Laine et al. 194). This is clearest when compared with traditional media - press, television, radio, and film - which relies on publishers to release content through formal channels.

Social media includes "blogs, microblogs, social networks, media-sharing sites, social bookmarking and selection sites, analysis sites, forum and effective worlds" (Saravanakumar and SuganthaLakshmi 4444).

Social media optimization is the process of using "reporting and insight to evaluate the social program performance against KPIs" (Murdough 98). Companies assess the effectiveness of their social marketing strategies in order to improve performance.

Also known as: Social platforms The phrase "social networks" is a synonym for "social platforms." As such, a social network is a "computer network that connects people or organizations" (Garton et al. 0). These networks are "dynamic objects that are tweaked in response to their users' needs...but also in reaction to competing platforms and the larger technological and economic infrastructure" (Van Dijck 7).

Social networks may also mean "people and the ties between them," as they arise on social media platforms (Laine et al. 194).

Often known as subscription software, "the SaaS delivery model essentially separates software ownership from the user" (Laplante et al. 46). This model allows a user to use a software online, which the owner has made possible through client-side architecture.

User experience is employed in website and technology design to describe an individual's encounter with a product. Product designers focus on the "momentary, primarily evaluative feeling (good-bad) while interacting with a product or service" to help improve the product (Hassenzahl 2).