Digital Marketing Glossary

103 digital marketing terms in plain English — SEO, CTR, ROAS, GA4, UTM, funnels and more — with formulas, examples and beginner tips for students.

• SEO — Search Engine Optimisation — improving a site to rank higher in unpaid search results.
• SERP — Search Engine Results Page — the page Google shows after you search.
• Keyword — The word or phrase people type into a search engine.
• Search intent — The reason behind a search: to learn, compare, buy or find a specific site.
• Backlink — A link from another website to yours — a signal of trust for search engines.
• Organic vs Paid — Organic = free traffic from search/social. Paid = traffic you buy with ads.
• CTR — Click-Through Rate — clicks ÷ impressions. How often people click when they see you.
• Conversion — When a visitor does what you want: buys, signs up, calls or fills a form.
• Conversion rate — Conversions ÷ visitors. The % of people who take the action.
• CTA — Call To Action — the button or line telling people what to do next ("Enroll now").
• Landing page — A focused page built for one campaign and one action.
• Funnel — The stages a customer goes through, from awareness to purchase.
• CPC — Cost Per Click — what you pay each time someone clicks your ad.
• CPM — Cost Per Mille — what you pay for 1,000 ad impressions.
• CPL / CPA — Cost Per Lead / Acquisition — what it costs to get one lead or customer.
• ROAS — Return On Ad Spend — revenue earned for every ₹1 spent on ads.
• ROI — Return On Investment — overall profit compared with what you spent.
• KPI — Key Performance Indicator — the main number that shows if you hit your goal.
• Impressions — How many times your content or ad was shown.
• Engagement rate — How much people interact (likes, comments, shares, time on page).
• UTM — Tags added to a link so analytics can tell exactly which campaign brought the visitor.
• A/B test — Showing two versions to different people to see which performs better.
• Persona — A research-based profile of your ideal customer.
• Retargeting — Showing ads to people who already visited your site or app.
• Title tag — The clickable headline of a page shown in search results and browser tabs.
• Meta description — The short summary under your title in search results that persuades people to click.
• Alt text — A written description of an image for screen readers and search engines.
• Crawling & indexing — How search engines discover your pages (crawling) and store them to show in results (indexing).
• Local SEO — Helping a business show up for nearby searches like "café near me" and on Google Maps.
• Core Web Vitals — Google's measures of page experience: loading speed, responsiveness and visual stability.
• Content marketing — Attracting customers by publishing genuinely useful content instead of only ads.
• Copywriting — Writing words that persuade people to take action — ads, headlines, product pages.
• Content calendar — A schedule that plans what content goes out, where and when.
• Evergreen content — Content that stays useful and relevant for a long time, not just for a trend.
• Lead magnet — A free, valuable resource offered in exchange for someone's contact details.
• UGC — Content created by customers — reviews, photos, videos — rather than by the brand.
• Reach — The number of unique people who saw your content or ad.
• Social media algorithm — The system a platform uses to decide which posts each person sees, and in what order.
• Hashtag — A word or phrase with # that groups posts on the same topic so people can discover them.
• Influencer marketing — Partnering with creators who have a trusted audience to promote a brand.
• Community management — Building and looking after the relationship with your audience through replies, conversations and care.
• Social listening — Tracking what people say online about your brand, competitors and industry — and acting on it.
• PPC — Pay-Per-Click — an ad model where you pay only when someone clicks your ad.
• Quality Score — Google Ads' 1–10 rating of how relevant your ads, keywords and landing pages are.
• Bidding strategy — How you tell an ad platform to spend your budget — manual bids or automated goals like conversions.
• Lookalike audience — A new audience of people similar to your existing customers, built by the ad platform.
• Ad creative — The visual, video and text that make up the ad people actually see.
• Ad fatigue — When people see the same ad too often and stop responding to it.
• GA4 — Google Analytics 4 — Google's free tool for measuring website and app visitors and what they do.
• Session — A group of interactions one visitor has with your website within a period of time.
• Bounce rate — In GA4, the % of sessions that were not engaged — people who left quickly without interacting.
• Attribution — Deciding which marketing touchpoints get credit for a conversion.
• Conversion tracking — Setting up tools to record when a visitor completes a valuable action.
• Tracking pixel — A small piece of code on your site that tells ad platforms what visitors do (for example, the Meta Pixel).
• Lead generation — Attracting potential customers and collecting their details so you can follow up.
• CRM — Customer Relationship Management — software to organise contacts, leads and every conversation with them.
• Customer lifetime value — The total revenue a customer brings over the whole relationship with your business.
• USP — Unique Selling Proposition — the one clear reason a customer should choose you over others.
• Email marketing — Sending planned emails to subscribers to build relationships and drive sales.
• Responsive design — Building websites that automatically adapt to any screen size — phone, tablet or desktop.
• Google Search Console — Google's free tool that shows how your site appears in Google Search — queries, clicks and indexing issues.
• Google Tag Manager — A free tool for adding and managing tracking codes on your website without editing the code every time.
• Google Ads — Google's platform for running paid ads on Search, YouTube, Maps and partner websites.
• Google Business Profile — Your free business listing on Google Search and Maps, with reviews, photos, hours and contact details.
• Looker Studio — Google's free tool for turning data from GA4, Search Console, Sheets and more into shareable dashboards.
• Google Merchant Center — Where online stores upload their product details so they can appear in Google Shopping results and ads.
• YouTube — The world's biggest video platform — a search engine, a social channel and an ad network in one.
• Anchor text — The visible, clickable words of a link, which tell people and search engines what the linked page is about.
• Canonical tag — A tag that tells search engines which version of a page is the main one when similar copies exist.
• Schema markup — Code that describes your page's content to search engines, which can make it eligible for rich results.
• Internal linking — Linking from one page of your site to another, helping visitors and search engines find related content.
• XML sitemap — A file that lists the important pages on your site so search engines can discover them.
• E-E-A-T — Google's way of describing high-quality content: experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness.
• Pillar page — A comprehensive guide on a broad topic that links to shorter, related articles (a topic cluster).
• Brand voice — The consistent personality and tone a brand uses in everything it writes and says.
• Storytelling — Using stories — characters, a problem and a change — to make marketing messages memorable.
• Headline — The title of an ad, post, email or page — often the deciding factor in whether people read on.
• Content repurposing — Turning one piece of content into several formats for different platforms.
• Newsletter — A regular email that shares useful updates, ideas or offers with people who signed up to receive it.
• Short-form video — Short vertical videos, like Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts, made to grab attention in seconds.
• Carousel post — A single social post with multiple images or slides that people swipe through.
• Social commerce — Selling products directly through social media and messaging apps, from discovery to purchase.
• Micro-influencer — A creator with a smaller but highly engaged, niche audience.
• WhatsApp marketing — Using WhatsApp Business to share updates, answer questions and sell to customers who have opted in.
• Meta Business Suite — Meta's free tool for managing a business's Facebook and Instagram posts, messages and insights in one place.
• Negative keywords — Words or phrases you add to a campaign so your ads don't show for irrelevant searches.
• Keyword match types — Settings that control how closely a search must match your keyword for your ad to show.
• Ad Rank — The value Google Ads uses to decide whether your ad shows and in what position.
• Performance Max — A goal-based Google Ads campaign type that runs your ads across all of Google's channels from one campaign.
• Display advertising — Visual ads — images, banners and responsive ads — shown on websites, apps and YouTube.
• Frequency capping — Limiting how many times the same person sees your ad in a given period.
• Vanity metrics — Numbers that look impressive, like likes or followers, but don't show whether the business is growing.
• Cohort analysis — Comparing groups of customers who started at the same time to see how their behaviour changes.
• Heatmap — A visual map showing where visitors click, move and scroll on a web page.
• Churn rate — The percentage of customers or subscribers who stop buying or cancel in a given period.
• Average order value — The average amount a customer spends each time they place an order.
• First-party data — Information a business collects directly from its own customers and website, with their permission.
• Marketing mix — The key decisions behind any offer: Product, Price, Place and Promotion.
• Positioning — How you want customers to see your brand compared with the alternatives.
• B2B vs B2C — B2B sells to other businesses; B2C sells directly to individual consumers.
• D2C — Brands that sell directly to customers through their own website, apps or social channels, without middlemen.
• Omnichannel marketing — Giving customers one connected, consistent experience across every channel — online and offline.
• SWOT analysis — A simple planning tool that lists a business's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.