Digital Lingo Dictionary

Updated 6/9/2020

Digital marketing, web analytics, web development…if you’ve ever been exposed to these microcosms, you may have noticed there’s a lot of hyper-specific vocabulary. I reference this lingo from time to time as well, so I created this handy guide to demystify some of the jargon. Enjoy!

Digital Marketing

• Affiliate – Referral traffic that is sponsored, as opposed to programmatic paid media from paid search or paid social
• Attribution – Attributing credit for a conversion to a source, campaign, etc.
• Campaign – An initiative to drive traffic to a website (and ultimately drive conversions) via paid media, email, etc.
• Channel – Subsets of a website’s traffic describing how users came to the website
• Conversion – The action/s you want a user to take that fulfill the purpose of the website
• Conversion rate – Total conversions divided by total visits to a website
• CTA, Call To Action – Usually buttons or other prominent links that lead a user to a conversion opportunity
• Display – A type of paid media ad, display ads are typically banner ads you see on websites where the website has sold space to the display network and ads are populated dynamically
• Exit page – The last page of a user’s session/visit
• Funnel – Typically a “path” to conversion where there is anticipated drop off, particularly in ecommerce checkout
• KPI, Key Performance Indicator – The most important measurements of your website’s overall effectiveness, KPIs should directly tie to business objectives
• Landing page – The first page of a user’s session/visit
• Medium – How the user came to site
• Organic – Short for Organic Search, refers to search engines like Google, Bing, etc.
• Paid media – Digital advertising that refers traffic to the site
• Paid search – Digital advertising on a search engine where ads are served according to the keywords a user searches for
• Paid social – Digital advertising on a social media network like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.
• Referral – Traffic from other websites i.e. when your site is linked to from another website
• Referrer – The website that linked to your site, when used in the context of HTTP referer it means the the prior page URL
• Social – Social media traffic sources like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram, etc.
• Source – Where the user came from to get to site
• Traffic – Visits to a website or page of website (metrics may differ, i.e. in Google Analytics traffic to website = sessions, traffic to page = pageviews)
• User –  Equates to an anonymous browser cookie, one user can have multiple visits/sessions and users are anonymous with only a randomly assigned ID

Web Analytics

• A/B testing – Testing two versions of one variable to see if there is a statistically significant user preference for one option over another, ex: CTA button color
• Anonymous – Pretty much all web analytics data is anonymous, and in fact there are penalties for collecting PII even if on accident
• Cookie – Text snippet saved in a browser with a specified expiration date
• CMS – Content management system, ex: WordPress, Squarespace, Wix
• CSS – Specifies the appearance of elements on a web page (cascading style sheets)
• CSS Selectors – Labels within the HTML telling the CSS where to apply styling, also useful for JavaScript to latch onto
• Condition – Specifies when a tag/script should fire
• Fire – When a script runs
• HTML – Defines the structure/layout of the content in a web page (hypertext markup language)
• Multivariate testing (MVT) – Like A/B testing, but testing multiple variables at once to see if there are any interactions between variables, ex: test different combinations of CTA color and CTA text at the same time to see which combination users prefer
• OOTB, Out Of The Box – Tracking that is automatically set up once a tool is installed on your site
• Page Path – The part of a URL after the .com/.org/etc. but before a query string
• PII, Personally Identifiable Information – A big no-no, web analytics platforms are not allowed to collect PII such as user’s name, phone number, address, email, etc. Pronounced “P-I-I” or “pie”
• Pixel – Sends data (typically related to conversions) to a third-party like an advertising platform, rather than to the website’s analytics platform
• QA, quality assurance – Checking a new change to confirm it’s working correctly and testing for errors
• Query parameter – Essentially a parameter name with a value appended to a URL in the query string and does not change the actual page the URL links to, Ex: www.liznic.com?queryparam1=hello
• Query string – The section of the URL after .com/.org/etc. that begins with a ‘?’
• RegEx – Regular Expressions, syntax for matching characters, most web analytics platforms support RegEx for defining filters or segments, RegEx is supported in JavaScript
• Rule – Adobe Launch/DTM terminology for Tag
• Script – A chunk of code. In web analytics, this will almost exclusively refer to JavaScript scripts/snippets but sometimes refers to HTML scripts
• Segment – A subsection of data grouped by specified criteria, i.e. a segment for only mobile users
• SEO, Search Engine Optimization – Ensuring your website is optimized for search engines to suggest your content in users searches
• Snippet – A smaller, cuter script
• Tag – JavaScript that tracks user behavior and sends data to an analytics platform
• Trigger – The condition to be met for a tag/rule/script to fire
• UTM parameters – A set of five different query parameters specific to Google’s ecosystem for campaign and referral tracking (utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, utm_content, utm_term), UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Module

~Buzzwords~

• Best practice – The industry standard, recommended approach
  • Ex: The best practice for setting up event tracking in Google Analytics is to utilize Google Tag Manager.
• CRO, Conversion Rate Optimization – The basic tenet of web strategy holding that a website should be optimized to maximize conversion rate
  • Ex: How does your company execute its CRO strategy?
• Granularity – Seeing very detailed data
  • Ex: I think we are getting too granular in this report broken out by hour of day.
• MarTech – ‘Marketing technology,’ often these are software solutions touting even more buzzwords like AI, ML, NLP, and more!
  • Ex: Our VC-funded product is disrupting the MarTech space by offering a proprietary ‘AI/ML’ solution that revolutionizes your sales process. All for the low price of $200k per license!
• Measure against – Fancy way to say ‘compare’
  • Ex: Let’s build a dashboard to measure against prior year performance.
• Seasonality – Trends in data by season, i.e. web traffic patterns change during the holidays
  • Ex: We tend to see some seasonality in the data starting mid-December as people start going on vacation.
• Thought leadership – Creating content to demonstrate expertise
  • Ex: What you’re reading right now 😉
• Use Case – Example or application of something
  • Ex: Here’s a use case for my fancy-shmancy MarTech product that definitely shows great results and why you should buy it.

I’ll keep this list updated as I think of more concepts to include. Comment any suggestions below!