Very often, web and internet marketing terminology is foreign to business owners, in order to alleviate this issue, I would like to share with you a few key terms, that you should become familiar with, because it is paramount to the success of your internet marketing initiatives. I hope you find them useful.
1. What is an Online Marketing Funnel?
An online marketing funnel is a typically shaped like a cone. Think Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs. It’s a series of step a business takes towards their target audience to get them from a prospect to a customer. It typical starts in this order
• You market to your prospects
• Prospects visits your website
• Visitors now become leads who has opt in to your mailing list, or requested additional info via an online form
• You market to them using a drip campaign, usually in the form of emails
• Then you close the sale
2. What is a Website Impression?
A website impression is the number of times you website showed up during a search. You can have a high number of website impressions but not necessarily clicks. Your clicks will be determined by how relevant your website is to the search or how high in the ranks you appear during the search.
3. What does Click Through Rate (CTR) Mean?
Click Through Rate is the number of times an ad is clicked divided the number of impressions it received. For example, you may be running ads on Google or other search engines, someone searches for a keyword, your ad shows up 100 times, but it was only clicked on 10 times. Your click through rate will be 10%.
4. What does Conversion Rate Mean?
Your website conversion rate is determined by the number of website visitors that completed the desired goal or outcome that you have set. For example a visitor filled out a request for a quote, made a purchase, signed up for a webinar, subscribed to your newsletter. On the other hand, if someone came to your website and they did not take action, then you have failed to convert that visitor into a lead or sale.
5. What is Conversion Tracking?
Conversion tracking is identifying the number of visitors that came to your website and then determining how many took action or completed the goal that you have set.
6. What does Bounce Rate Mean?
Very important! Your website bounce rate is often and indicator of how effective your website is or how relevant the page that a visitor entered into is to that visitor. It’s when a visitor never views more than one page on your website. This can be avoided, by ensuring that the ads that are driving traffic to your website is directed to a page that is relevant to that ad or by making sure that your website content is relevant to your target market.
7. What is Lead Generation?
Lead generation is when a prospective customer shows interest into your business products or services and submits and inquiry. The inquiry is a lead. Lead generation is paramount for any business, because very often a prospective customer is not ready to buy right away, but if you generate an inquiry and you continue to stay in front of that lead you can eventually close the sale.
8. What is Website Analytics?
Website analytics provides you with data on the behavior of a website user. For e.g. How many visitors your website gets? Where your visitors are coming from? What keywords are driving your visitors? What keywords are converting better for you? The most popular analytics tool is Google Analytics and I find it to be the best. Most of all it’s free.
9. What are Unique Users?
Unique users are the number of different individuals who visit a website within a specific period of time.
10. What does abandon mean?
When a user does not complete a transaction and leaves the website.
11. What is an Auto responder?
Auto responders are a computer program, often used as an email marketing tool, to either automatically respond to an inquiry via a form with a targeted message or it can be set up to be sent out at certain intervals as a follow up to prospective customers.
12. What are Back links?
Back links is a term that refers existing hyperlinks from other websites to your own. Back links are also known as: Inbound links, in links and incoming links.
13. What are Meta Tags Descriptions?
Meta Tag Descriptions are a brief description of each individual web page. It identifies the content of a web page for the search engines as well as users. It is the text that is shown when a search is conducted and your site appears.
14. What are Organic Search Results?
The ‘organic or natural’ search results that appear on the right side of a search, below the paid listings. The results listed here have not been paid for and are ranked by the search engine (using spiders or algorithms) according to relevancy to the term searched upon. See also spider, algorithm, SEO.
15. What are SERPs?
The page generated by a search engine when a search query is completed, listing relevant websites.