Your must-know digital marketing acronyms finally explained

30 digital marketing acronyms & definitions

Below, you can see 30 popular digital marketing acronyms and their definitions.

1. ALTV – Average Lifetime Value – The lifetime value of a customer to an organisation.
2. CMS – Content Management System – A system used to manage the content of a Website.
3. CPA – Cost Per Action – An online advertising pricing model where the advertiser pays for each specified action – for example, an impression, click, form submit (e.g., contact request, newsletter sign up, registration, etc.), double opt-in or sale.
4. CPL – Cost Per Lead – An online advertising pricing model where the advertiser pays for an explicit sign-up from a consumer interested in the advertiser’s offer. It is also commonly called online lead generation.
5. CPM – Cost per Mille – The price of 1,000 advertisement impressions on one webpage. If a website publisher charges $2 CPM, an advertiser must pay $2 for every 1,000 impressions of its ad.
6. CPV – Cost Per View – The default way to set the price you’ll pay for your AdWords video ads.
7. CRO – Conversion Rate Optimisation – The method of creating an experience for a website or landing page visitor to increase the percentage of visitors that convert into customers.
8. CTA – Call To Action – An instruction to the audience to provoke an immediate response, usually using an imperative verb such as “call now”, “find out more,” or “visit a store today”.
9. CTR – Click Through Rate – A way of measuring the success of an online advertising campaign for a particular website and the effectiveness of an email campaign by the number of users that clicked on a specific link.
10. GA – Google Analytics – A service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about a website’s traffic and traffic sources and measures conversions and sales.
11. GDN – Google Display Network – The largest contextual advertising network available today.
12. GTM – Google Tag Manager – A free tool for managing marketing and tracking tags on your site.
13. GWT – Google Webmaster Tools – A no-charge web service by Google for webmasters. It allows webmasters to check the indexing status and optimise the visibility of their websites. It has tools that let the webmasters Submit and check a sitemap.
14. KPI – Key Performance Indicator – A measurable value demonstrating how effectively a company achieves key business objectives.
15. MCC – My Client Centre – Used as an “umbrella account”, and provides a high-level overview and management opportunities for individual Google AdWords accounts within.
16. PPC or CPC – Pay per Click – Also called cost per click, is an internet advertising model used to direct website traffic, in which advertisers pay the publisher (typically a website owner) when the ad is clicked. It is “the amount spent to get an advertisement clicked.”
17. PR – Page Rank – A link analysis algorithm used by Google to help determine the relative importance of a website. Every website is given a Google PageRank score between 0 and 10 on an exponential scale.
18. QS – Quality Score – A variable used by Google, Yahoo! (called Quality Index), and Bing which can influence both the rank and cost per click (CPC) of ads.
19. ROAS – Return on Advertising Spend – Calculating the ROAS allows online marketers to see whether their advertising budget generates sufficient revenue. To calculate ROAS, take the revenue generated by a campaign or ad source and divide it by its media expenses.
20. ROI – Return on Investment – A performance measure used to evaluate the efficiency of a media investment. To calculate ROI, the benefit (return) of an investment is divided by the cost of the investment; the result is expressed as a percentage or a ratio.
21. RON – Run of Network – A form of internet marketing where an online advertising campaign is applied to a wide collection of websites without the ability to choose specific sites.
22. ROS – Run of Site – Run-of-site is similar to run to network, except the ads appear on an individual site instead of many sites.
23. RSS – Really Simple Syndication – Uses standard web feed formats to publish frequently updated information: blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video.
24. RTB – Real Time Bidding – Refers to how ad inventory is bought and sold per impression via programmatic instantaneous auction, similar to financial markets.
25. SEM – Search Engine Marketing – A form of Internet marketing that involves the promotion of websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs) through optimization and advertising.
26. SEO – Search Engine Optimisation – The process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine’s “natural” or un-paid (“organic”) search results.
27. SERP – Search Engine Results Page – The listing of results returned by a search engine in response to a keyword query. The results usually include a list of items with titles, a reference to the full version, and a short description showing where the keywords have matched content within the page.
28. SMO – Social Media Optimisation – The use of several social media outlets and communities to generate publicity to increase the awareness of a product, brand or event.
29. TLD – Top Level Domain – A top-level domain (TLD) is the last segment of the domain name. The TLD is the letters immediately following the final dot in an Internet address.
30. USP – Unique Selling Proposition – The term refers to any aspect of an object or service that differentiates it from similar things or services.