Digital Web Glossary

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Digital Marketing

Any marketing that uses electronic devices and can be used by marketing specialists to convey promotional messaging and measure its impact through your customer journey. In practice, digital marketing typically refers to online marketing campaigns that appear on a computer, phone, tablet, or other device. It can take many forms, including online video, display ads, search engine marketing, paid social ads and social media posts. Digital marketing is often compared to “traditional marketing” such as magazine ads, billboards, and direct mail.  

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Digital Advertising

Digital advertising refers to marketing through online channels, such as websites, streaming content, and more. Digital ads span media formats, including text, image, audio, and video. They can help you achieve a variety of business goals across the marketing funnel, ranging from brand awareness to customer engagement, to launching new products and driving repeat sales.

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Advertising

the activity or profession of producing advertisements for commercial products or services.

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SEO

SEO stands for search engine optimization. SEO practitioners optimize websites, web pages and content for the purposes of ranking higher in search engines, like Google. SEO is a set of practices designed to improve the appearance, positioning, and usefulness of multiple types of content in the organic search results. This content can include web pages, video media, images, local business listings, and other assets. Because organic search is the top method via which people discover and access online content, utilizing SEO best practices is essential for ensuring that the digital content you publish can be found and chosen by the public, increasing your website’s organic traffic.

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Back End Development

Back-end development means working on server-side software, which focuses on everything you can't see on a website. Back-end developers ensure the website performs correctly, focusing on databases, back-end logic, application programming interface (APIs), architecture, and servers.

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Front End Development

A front-end developer is a type of software developer who specializes in creating and designing the user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) of websites and web applications. The primary responsibility of a front-end developer is to ensure that the visual and interactive aspects of a website or application are user-friendly, aesthetically pleasing, and functionally efficient.

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HTML

(HyperText Markup Language): The standard markup language used to create the structure and layout of web pages.

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CSS

(Cascading Style Sheets): A stylesheet language used to control the presentation, formatting, and appearance of web pages, such as colors, fonts, and layout.

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JavaScript

​A programming language that allows developers to add interactivity, animations, and other dynamic elements to websites and web applications.

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Website Design

also known as web design is the process of planning, conceptualizing, and implementing the plan for designing a website in a way that is functional and offers a good user experience. User experience is central to the web designing process. Websites have an array of elements presented in ways that make them easy to navigate. Web designing essentially involves working on every attribute of the website that people interact with, so that the website is simple and efficient, allows users to quickly find the information they need, and looks visually pleasing. All these factors, when combined, decide how well the website is designed.

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Website Development

​also known as web development, refers to the tasks associated with creating, building, and maintaining websites and web applications that run online on a browser. It may, however, also include web design, web programming, and database management.

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Social Media Marketing

(SMM) is marketing that targets social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok for brand promotion, target audience growth, driving website traffic, and increasing sales.

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Social Media Advertising

Also, Social media Ads, is an offshoot of digital marketing where paid ad campaigns are run on social media platforms to reach target audiences. Marketers and advertisers can promote their brands and inspire sales through the social channels that users frequently use.

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Facebook Ads

are digital ads targeted to users based on their location, demographic, and profile information. Many of these options are only available on Facebook. After creating an ad, you set a budget and bid for each click or thousand impressions that your ad will receive.

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Instagram Ads

​are posts that promote a business's products or services. The posts can appear in multiple ways, such as an Instagram feed, stories, or both. They can include images or video along with copy and a link to the web page of the company's choice.

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Pay Per Click

or PPC stands for pay-per-click, a model of digital advertising where the advertiser pays a fee each time one of their ads is clicked. Essentially, you’re paying for targeted visits to your website (or landing page or app). When PPC is working correctly, the fee is trivial because the click is worth more than what you pay for it. For example, if you pay $3 for a click, but the click results in a $300 sale, then you’ve made a hefty profit.

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Social Media Management

is a process that involves creating content, scheduling its publishment, developing a strategy, interacting with users, growing reach, and monitoring the performance of a company's accounts on social media. It enables you to build relationships with subscribers, and publish relevant posts.

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SERP

A search engine results page, or SERP, is the page you see after entering a query into Google, Yahoo, or any other search engine.

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SEM

Search engine marketing (SEM) is a digital marketing strategy used to increase the visibility of a website in search engine results pages (SERPs).

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Impressions

How often your ad is shown. An impression is counted each time your ad is shown on a search result page or other site on the Google Network

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Conversion

​A conversion occurs when an ad click or other interaction with your ad leads directly to a behavior that's valuable to you, such as a purchase, newsletter sign-up, phone call, or download.

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Cost Per Conversion

Cost per conversion (CPC) measures converting a lead or prospect into a customer. It is calculated by dividing the total cost of a marketing campaign by the number of conversions. For example, if a campaign costs $1000 and generates 100 conversions, the CPC would be $10.

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CTR

(Click through rate) the percentage of people visiting a web page who access a hypertext link to a particular advertisement.

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CPM

(in online advertising) cost per mille (the amount an advertiser pays a website per one thousand visitors who see its advertisements).

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Metrics

is a quantifiable measure businesses use to track, monitor and assess the success or failure of various business processes. The main point of using business metrics is to communicate an organization's progress toward certain long- and short-term objectives.

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KPI

Marketing key performance indicators (KPIs) are specific, numerical marketing metrics that measure progress toward a defined goal within marketing channels.

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Digital Identity

The entire visual representation of your brand, can include logo, color, typography, imagery, voice, etc. Not just a logo.

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Lettermark, Wordmark, Logomark

A type of logo made with stylized letters (IBM) or words (Coca-Cola)

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Brandmark

A type of Logo made with a graphical representation (Apple, Target)

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Icon

​A simplified rendering of an object or concept. A logo and an icon are not the same thing.

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Web Design System

A repository of reusable digital components that combine to form a website.

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Brand Guide

A visual and philosophical reference for a brand’s color, personality and voice.

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Persona

Fictional character that represents a primary user of your site/product. Usually, personas are very well-developed because they should represent real people with real motivations.

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Wireframe

Low-fidelity layout of a site, representation of general block-level content and interactive elements.

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Mockup

High-fidelity layout of a site, representation of final color, typography, imagery, etc.

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Prototype

Interactive version of a site, may not be built with final code.

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CTA

Call to action, usually paired with a button.

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Landing Page

Single page optimized for a specific audience or search engine result.

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Usability

How real users actually interact with your site, usually tested by observing a series of guided tasks.

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Breadcrumb

Hierarchical content links.

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Site Menu

Primary navigation area, sometimes with a dropdown or flyout of sub-menu items.

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Filter

Pre-defined elements that allow narrowing down of visible content by various taxonomies (taxonomies are a fancy way of saying categories).

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Search

​Open-ended input that queries content and returns a list of results.

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Slider

A trendy, animated way of displaying information that you probably shouldn’t use.

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CMS

​Content management system (like WordPress or Wix).

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Target Audience

​is a group of people defined by certain demographics and behavior. Often, businesses use what they know about their target audience to create user personas. These personas guide their decisions on marketing campaigns.

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Target Market

​a group of customers with shared demographics who have been identified as the most likely buyers of a company's product or service. Identifying the target market is important in the development and implementation of a successful marketing plan for any new product.

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Facebook Pixel

is a piece of code for your website that lets you measure, optimize and build audiences for your ad campaigns. You can think of this as an analytics tool that allows you to measure the effectiveness of your advertising by understanding the actions people take on your website.

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Geofencing

Geofencing is a location-based service in which an app or other software uses GPS, RFID, Wi-Fi or cellular data to trigger a pre-programmed action when a mobile device or RFID tag enters or exits a virtual boundary set up around a geographical location, known as a geofence.