Glossary of Common Terms in Marketing

Click Fraud

Occurs when someone clicks on paid graphic or text ads to increase the number of payable clicks for the advertiser. This can be done by using a live person or an automated software (bot). Click fraud is performed to either increase banner ads revenue or to hurt competition. Click fraud is an illegal practice.

Conversion Rate

Measures the percentage of Web site visitors who took the intended action: bought a product, ordered a catalog, subscribed to a newsletter, etc.

Crawler

See "Spider."

Hits

Any request for a file from a Web server is a hit. When an image or an HTML file is requested, it's a hit. A given Web page can require any number of hits to your server to be displayed fully in a browser window. Hits don't measure anything except for page loading times.

Incoming Links

Also called "inbound links" or "backlinks." Links coming from other Web sites to a particular Web site. In search engine optimization, quality incoming links are more important than their overall number.

Interstitial Ads

Ads that are displayed before the next Web page loads or before that page's content can be fully visible. Interstitial ads interrupt user's navigation and act more like TV commercials. Pop-ups and rich media ads that cover part of the page content until you take some sort of action are forms of interstitial ads.

Keyword Phrases

Two or more keywords that form a search query when using a search engine. Unlike single keywords, keyword phrases bring more accurate results. Web pages optimized for keyword phrases have better chances to rank highly in search engine result pages (SERP).

Link Popularity

Number of incoming links to a particular Web site. Link popularity is used by some search engines as a factor in their ranking algorithms.

Page Views

A Web page viewed by one visitor. Page views show popularity of Web pages and of a Web site as a whole. They also correlate with how many Web ads are displayed on page.

Pay Per Click

A model of on-line advertising where payment is based on how many times the ad was clicked on, not on how many times it was shown on a Web page.

Query

A word or a phrase that a searcher enters into a search engine's search box.

Referrer

A URL from which a visitor came to your Web site is a referrer. Tracking referrers is especially important when analyzing your search engine optimization campaign. Referrers from search engines show you which keywords and Web pages drive more traffic to your Web site.

Return of Investments (ROI)

Measure of profitability of a marketing campaign.

Robot

See "Spider."

Search Engine Result Page (SEPR)

Lists Web pages in the order of their relevance to the query entered into a search engine's search box. Search engines use complicated ranking algorithms to determine a Web page's relevance and rank it accordingly.

Search Engine Spam

Any tactic that is used to trick search engines into displaying low quality, misguiding, or inappropriate links that are of no benefit to the target audience. Invisible text, doorway pages, and link farms are examples of search engine spam.

Spider

Component of a search engine that finds links by automatically spidering, or crawling the Web. A spider goes from one Web site to another following links. Spiders are also called crawlers or robots.

Traffic

The number of visitors who come to your Web site. Only qualified visitors who are already looking for products or services similar to yours are worth your marketing efforts.

Unique Visitors

A unique visitor is one who has come to a Web site within a certain time frame. Unique visitors can be tracked with a cookie or their IP address. Cookies provide a much more accurate method though.

Visit

Duration of a single user visiting your entire Web site. If a visit is tracked with an IP address from which the user arrived, the numbers in your Web site statistics may be incorrect. Many visitors can share the same IP address or use a different IP addresses every time they connect to the Internet (with AOL and some other ISPs). But you can see how the number of visits change over time which can be useful for determining periods of maximum activity for your Web site, for example. A more reliable method is tracking visits with cookies, however you cannot use it for users who disabled cookies in their browsers.