A 5-minute guideline to all the must-know terms of Digital Marketing

If you are a fresh graduate who is currently job hunting or maybe even on your way to a Digital Marketing job interview; or you are an old-school marketing staff, and now wish to get a recap of all the technical terms and specialized abbreviations of Digital Marketing so that you will be able to communicate better with the new employees of the marketing team, then you are in luck! All we need is a brief moment of your time.

SEM/Paid Search

Search Engine Marketing, marketing via search engine, otherwise known as Paid Search. It means that you pay for your pages to be ranked higher on the search engine result page (SERP), hence securing more traffic. In Mandarin, it’s known as keyword ads or search ads etc.

SEO

Search Engine Optimization, by gradually improving the content and structure of the website, it improves the ranking of your web-page in the search engine result page and obtains higher traffic without spending a dime.

Paid Social

It usually refers to the regularly seen promotion of FB pages, posts or even websites on their respective advertising platform of social media. The more commonly used social media in Hong Kong are Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn etc. It’s more widely known as “Common ads” or “Boost post” among the public.

Display Ads

This particular ad refers to banners that appear on websites and mobile apps, and most of the banners we see originate from Google Display Network. Most people call this the “Banner ads”.

Youtube Ads

There are two main types of advertisements that will appear on YouTube. The first one is TrueView In Stream Ads, which primarily appears at the beginning of the video that forces you to watch it for at least 5 seconds. The other one is TrueView Video Discovery Ads which will give suggested videos when you search for videos on YouTube.

Digital Marketing Automation

First of all, please do not get scared by its fancy name. Simply put it as the automation of marketing which aims to reduce manual human work. Allow me to exemplify, if you visit my site or even leave an email address, I will automatically synchronize your cookie email to different platforms. Next, Display Ads will be targeted to you, followed by Facebook ads aiming at you plus emails will be programmed to be sent to you weekly as well, until the sixth time we will send you an email to invite you to purchase. After the purchase, we will leave a 10-day gap before issuing you a promotion code to encourage you to buy again. If I know about the client’s birthday as well, I can arrange so that the system sends you a voucher on your birthday month. Marketers only need to understand the flow of the automation process to be able to utilize it. Basically, the entire process is automated after the clients visit our site and leave their email and there is really nothing to be done.

Content Marketing

Content marketing uses various forms to attract customers who are interested or even sympathetic to content, and truly convey the information they want to know. After obtaining the information they need, they will gradually develop a certain sense of trust or intimacy with the brand as the content provided by the brand really eases the problems that some customers want to solve or gives them a certain sense of belonging. From this, companies are more able to reach target audiences who are really interested or in need. Compared with ordinary traditional advertising, it is easier to impress customers and stand out from many competitors.

Inbound marketing

Inbound marketing is an online marketing method that uses “high-quality content” to attract customers. It helps potential customers solve their questions through knowledge-based “content sharing” and ultimately achieve sales goals. Similar, some people even think that content marketing is actually a kind of inbound marketing, and some people think that it is actually the same thing, but the perspective is different.

Impression

Numbers of the ads displayed

Traffic

Traffic, or more widely known as clicks. Clicks bring traffic to the website.

Conversion

Conversion, meaning any goal that you set, can be the successful sell-off of products, member registration, subscription or obtaining contact information.

Reach

Reach, meaning how many people your ad manages to reach or touch. The difference between Impression and Reach is that Impression measures the amount of people while Impression measures the amount of times.

Engagement

Social media platforms emphasize on calculating engagement, which includes clicking into the ad, like, comment and share etc.

Landing Page

The shown website page, which is the particular page you are directed to after you click on the website link.

Placement

It usually refers to websites that banner ads used to appear on. These websites belong to Google Display Network (GDN) in Google Ads.

Ad Rank

Ad ranking is constructed based on CPC Bid and the Quality Score.

CTR (Click Through Rate)

Click Through Rate is calculated by dividing click by impression, Clicks/Impressions to determine whether the ad is attractive. We usually hope for a higher Click Through Rate.

CVR (Conversion Rate)

Conversion Rate is determined by dividing conversions by clicks, Conversion/Clicks to determine the attractiveness of website/product. Ideally, we aim for a higher Conversion Rate.

Bounce Rate

It means the visitor left after surfing only one page of the website without interacting with the site. We commonly seek for a lower Bounce Rate.

SOV (Share or Voice) / Search Impression Share

The percentage of your ad surfacing. For SEM we usually use Impression Share to measure the ad’s SOV, and a 100% Impression Share indicates that if someone were to search your keywords, your ad will 100% appear in front of him.

There are 2 advanced numbers under Impression Share

Search Top Impression Share

– Measure the percentage of your ads at the top of the homepage

Absolute Top Impression Share

– Measure the percentage of your ad ranking first

CPC (Cost Per Click)

The cost for every click, and obviously we would prefer a lower Cost per click.

CPM (Cost-per-thousand-impression)

The cost for every 1000 impressions, and we typically aim for a lower Cost-per-thousand-impression.

CPE (Cost per engagement)

The cost for every engagement, and it would be better for us to strive for a lower Cost per engagement.

CPA (Cost per acquisition)

The cost for every conversion, and we usually aim for a lower Cost per acquisition.

ROI (Return On Investment )

Return On Investment is usually measured through the relationship between revenue and cost, which is revenue minus cost divided by cost. We generally strive for a positive and higher Return On Investment.