Genie jargon buster
Below you’ll find short descriptions of the kind of terms we use all day in the office – but that may not be familiar to you if you’re new to the worlds of digital marketing and publishing.
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- AdWords:
- This is the name of Google’s advertising platform. It’s the main tool you use when creating those adverts you see on Google results pages, and also the place you set your budgets for those ad campaigns.
- Digital marketing:
- This is an umbrella term for all the various forms of online marketing, on the internet, mobile and any digital platform (so including social media too). So if you’re promoting a product or brand on any form of electronic media, you’re a digital marketer! This includes the likes of PPC advertising and email marketing, as well as display adverts on websites and even digital television or radio platforms.
- Digital publishing:
- This an umbrella term for creating and distributing content online – which can be anything from news to help guides, books to adverts, catalogues to databases. And it can be written, audio or video too. You can even include social media: it’s a very broad term!
- Email marketing:
- It’s funny how, with social media, email already feels a little old fashioned! But don’t be fooled: email marketing is still a great tool to drive sales to a business. ‘Email marketing’ describes the process of building up your email list base, and maintaining it by creating great email campaigns that make the reader want to click on items in your messages and buy them – rather than clicking ‘unsubscribe’!
- Google Shopping:
- This service allows retailers to put their product catalogue (in the form of a digital feed) online so that their products feature in Google’s search results. It is essentially Google’s own comparison tool built into its search engine – but you’ll be bidding for placement. The keys to running great campaigns within it are creating the perfect feed of data, setting the bidding levels right, and then monitoring and optimising the results.
- Paid search (or PPC):
- Paid search, or ‘pay per click’ (PPC) advertising, are the common names given to the business of creating online adverts – more specifically here, the ones you see on the Google and Bing search page results. Adverts are built around ‘keywords’ (so a specific search criteria) and you pay on ‘per click’ basis, hence the name. So each time someone clicks your advert on a results page, you pay whatever price you set. Which adverts are displayed depends on how much you were willing to bid for the particular keyword or phrase – so the key to success is paying less for your ads than you make from the customers who click through and buy your products.
- Much like ‘paid search’ (above), paid social is all about creating adverts on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter that link through to the products you’re trying to sell.
- Performance marketing:
- This is a subset of digital marketing referring specifically to marketing formats where marketers are paid when a customer either clicks an advert, creates a lead to follow up, or buys a product. Essentially it means there’s a solid basis on which to track performance, compared to say a TV advert where it is impossible to accurately measure success.
- SEO:
- Short for ‘search engine optimisation’, SEO is all about creating content for your website that gives it the best possible opportunity to rank highly on ‘natural’ (as in, not paid adverts) search engine results. This covers everything from making sure each individual page on your website has content that is most likely to be liked by Google’s search algorithm, to trying to get relevant links to those pages from other great websites. So it’s a bit stat-crunching, a bit of content creation and a bit of reaching out to potential partners.