Glossary
Digital Marketing Glossary, in Plain English
53 terms agencies use, defined without using more jargon to explain the jargon.
Strategy and funnel
- Top of funnel (ToFu)
- The stage where someone has a problem but has not started looking for a solution. Marketing here creates awareness and urgency rather than capturing enquiries. It is measured in reach, recall, and branded search rather than in leads.
- Bottom of funnel (BoFu)
- The stage where someone has decided to buy and is choosing a supplier. Marketing here captures existing demand through search ads, landing pages, and offers. It is the most measurable and usually the fastest paying part of a marketing budget.
- Lead generation
- Marketing that captures demand which already exists, usually through search advertising, local search, and landing pages. It is limited by how many people in your market are looking for what you sell, and judged on cost per lead.
- Demand generation
- Marketing that creates demand among people who are not yet looking, usually through paid social, video, and content. Slower and harder to attribute than lead generation, and the only approach that raises the total demand in a market.
- Customer acquisition cost (CAC)
- The total marketing and sales cost of winning one customer, including agency fees and media spend. The single most useful number in marketing, because it can be compared directly against what a customer is worth to you.
- Lifetime value (LTV)
- The total profit a customer generates across the whole relationship, not just the first sale. Businesses with repeat custom can afford a much higher acquisition cost than the first transaction alone would justify.
- Attribution
- Deciding which marketing touchpoint gets credit for a sale. Difficult because buyers see many things before acting. Last-click attribution credits whatever came last, which systematically over-values search and under-values anything that created the demand.
- Market exclusivity
- An agreement where an agency works with only one business per industry and geographic market. It prevents the same strategy, research, and creative being sold to your direct competitor in the same city.
Search and organic
- SEO (search engine optimization)
- The work of earning visibility in unpaid search results. It covers content, technical site health, and authority signals from other websites. Slower than advertising, cheaper per enquiry over time, and it compounds rather than stopping when you stop paying.
- Local SEO
- SEO aimed at searches with local intent, including map results. Driven by proximity, relevance, reviews, and consistent business information across the web. For service businesses serving one metro, it is usually the highest-value organic work available.
- Technical SEO
- The site-level work that lets search engines crawl, understand, and index your pages: site speed, mobile rendering, structured data, canonical tags, and internal linking. Invisible to visitors, and capable of capping everything else when it is wrong.
- SERP (search engine results page)
- The page returned after a search. Modern results pages contain far more than links: answer boxes, map packs, shopping units, AI summaries, and ads, all of which push standard listings further down the page.
- Featured snippet
- An answer extracted from one page and displayed above the standard results. Frequently taken from a page ranking well below the top, because it answered the question more clearly. Winning one often matters more than winning position one.
- Backlink
- A link from another website to yours. Search engines treat them as votes of confidence, so links from credible, relevant sites carry meaningful weight. Bought or manipulated links carry risk rather than benefit.
- Search intent
- What a searcher actually wants, as opposed to the words they typed. Someone searching a price is comparing; someone searching "near me" is ready to call. Serving both intents with one page usually converts neither well.
- Schema markup
- Structured code added to a page that describes its content to machines: a business, a service, a review, a set of questions. It makes content eligible for richer results and easier for AI systems to parse accurately.
- Core Web Vitals
- Google metrics for loading speed, responsiveness, and visual stability on real visits. They influence rankings modestly and conversion rate substantially, because pages that load slowly or shift under a thumb lose people before content matters.
- E-E-A-T
- Experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Google guidance describing the qualities that make a source worth surfacing. It matters most in categories where wrong information could cause real harm, such as health, legal, and financial topics.
- Keyword cannibalization
- When several pages on one site compete for the same search term, splitting authority and confusing search engines about which to rank. Usually fixed by consolidating pages or deliberately differentiating what each one targets.
AI and answer engines
- AEO (answer engine optimization)
- Optimising to be the direct answer shown above search results, including featured snippets, People Also Ask, and voice answers. It rewards clear question-shaped headings, self-contained answers of about fifty words, and accurate structured markup.
- GEO (generative engine optimization)
- Getting a business named and cited inside answers that AI systems generate, such as AI Overviews or Perplexity. It depends on being retrievable, being worth quoting, and being corroborated by independent sources rather than only by your own site.
- LLMO (large language model optimization)
- Shaping what AI models say about a business when someone asks about it by name. You cannot edit a model, so the work is correcting the sources it reads: your site, directories, listings, reviews, and coverage.
- SXO (search experience optimization)
- The work joining ranking to revenue. It covers what happens after the click: whether the page matches the search intent, loads quickly, and gives one obvious next step. Judged on conversions rather than positions.
- AI Overview
- A summary generated by AI at the top of a search results page, assembled from multiple sources with citations. It answers many queries without a click, which reduces traffic while making the cited sources more visible.
- Zero-click search
- A search resolved without visiting any website, because the answer appeared in the results. Common for simple factual queries. It reduces traffic but can still build trust and shortlist position for the business quoted.
- Entity
- A thing a search or AI system recognises as a distinct object: a business, person, place, or concept. Consistent facts across the web help systems treat your business as one clear entity rather than several ambiguous ones.
- Retrieval
- The step where an AI system fetches source material before writing an answer. Most generative search retrieves from live search results, which is why ordinary search visibility remains a prerequisite for being cited by AI.
Paid advertising
- PPC (pay per click)
- Advertising where you pay each time someone clicks rather than each time an ad is shown. The dominant model in search advertising, and the reason poorly targeted campaigns can spend heavily while producing nothing.
- CPC (cost per click)
- The average price paid for one click. Useful as a diagnostic and misleading as a goal: a rising cost per click is fine if cost per customer is falling, and cheap clicks that never convert are the most expensive kind.
- CPM (cost per mille)
- The cost of one thousand ad impressions. The standard pricing model for awareness and social advertising, where the aim is being seen repeatedly rather than paying for immediate clicks.
- CPA (cost per acquisition)
- What it costs in media spend to produce one conversion, whether that is a lead or a sale. Closer to a business number than cost per click, though it still excludes agency fees, which customer acquisition cost includes.
- ROAS (return on ad spend)
- Revenue generated for every unit of ad spend, usually written as a ratio such as 4:1. Common in ecommerce where revenue is tracked automatically, and less reliable for service businesses whose sales close offline.
- Quality Score
- A Google Ads rating of how relevant your keywords, ads, and landing pages are to each other and to the search. Higher relevance lowers what you pay per click, so message match has a direct effect on cost.
- Negative keyword
- A term you tell an ad platform never to show your ads for. The main tool for stopping spend on searches that cannot convert, such as job seekers, students, and people looking for the do-it-yourself version.
- Match type
- The rule deciding how closely a search must resemble your keyword before your ad appears. Broader matching finds more volume and more waste; tighter matching finds less of both. The balance decides most of an account’s efficiency.
- Remarketing
- Advertising to people who already visited your site or engaged with your content. Usually the cheapest conversions in any account, because the audience has shown intent and needs reminding rather than convincing.
- Performance Max
- A Google campaign type that hands targeting and placement to automation across every Google surface. Effective when conversion data is accurate and plentiful, and an efficient way to waste budget when it is not.
- Creative fatigue
- The performance decay that happens when the same audience sees the same ad too many times. Most pronounced on social platforms with small local audiences, where results can fall noticeably within a few weeks.
- Conversions API
- A server-side method of sending conversion data to an ad platform, rather than relying on the browser. It recovers a meaningful share of conversions lost to privacy settings and ad blockers, which improves both reporting and optimisation.
Conversion and measurement
- Conversion
- A visitor action you count as valuable: a form submission, phone call, booking, or purchase. Defining this loosely is a common and expensive error, because ad platforms optimise toward whatever you tell them to count.
- CRO (conversion rate optimization)
- Improving the percentage of visitors who take the action you want, through better pages, offers, and forms. Doubling conversion rate has the same effect as doubling traffic, and is usually cheaper and permanent.
- Landing page
- A page built for one campaign and one action, usually where advertising sends its traffic. Sending ads to a homepage instead is among the most common and most costly mistakes in paid advertising.
- Bounce
- A visit where someone leaves without meaningful interaction. High bounce on advertised pages usually signals a mismatch between what the ad promised and what the page delivered, rather than a problem with the traffic itself.
- Call tracking
- Using dedicated phone numbers to attribute calls to the campaign, keyword, or page that produced them. Essential for service businesses, where phone enquiries frequently outnumber form submissions and are otherwise invisible in reporting.
- A/B test
- Showing two versions of a page or ad to comparable audiences to see which performs better. Only meaningful with enough conversions to distinguish a real difference from random variation, which small sites often lack.
- UTM parameter
- A tag added to a link so analytics can record where a visitor came from. The basic mechanism behind campaign reporting, and easily broken by inconsistent naming across channels and team members.
- Speed to lead
- How quickly a business contacts a new enquiry. One of the largest factors in whether a lead becomes a customer, and entirely within the client’s control rather than the agency’s. Minutes convert dramatically better than hours.
- Lead quality
- How likely enquiries are to become paying customers. Volume without quality is a trap, because ad platforms will happily find people who submit forms and never buy unless close-rate data is fed back to them.
Commercial terms
- Percentage of ad spend
- An agency pricing model charging a share of your media budget. It pays the agency more when you spend more, regardless of results, which makes recommending a bigger budget the easiest advice in the room.
- Flat fee
- A fixed management price agreed in advance, independent of media spend. It removes the incentive to inflate budgets and lets an agency recommend spending less without losing revenue by doing so.
- Retainer
- A recurring fee for ongoing marketing work. Reasonable in itself, and worth examining for what it includes, what happens if you leave, and whether the commitment length protects you or the agency.
- Account ownership
- Who legally holds your ad accounts, website, analytics, and data. If the agency owns them, leaving means losing years of conversion history that makes campaigns efficient. Ownership should sit with the client from day one.
- Fractional CMO
- A senior marketing leader working part time across strategy, budget, and team, without the cost of a full-time executive. Suited to businesses that need marketing decisions made well more than they need more execution.
Go deeper
Where to Go Next
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Digital marketing, in order
What the pieces are and which ones to buy first.
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All services
Every discipline defined above, and what we do with it.
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Pricing
What it costs, published rather than quoted on request.
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Marketing blog
Longer reads on the ideas behind these terms.
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Case studies
What this work has produced for named clients.
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About ROI Vault
Who you would be working with, and how we price.
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