Online Marketing – What’s This Lingo?!

[frame align=”left”][/frame]So you’ve purchased hosting, built and got your website up and running, and now you have started looking into online marketing methods and ways to increase the exposure your site gets. Adwords, Adsense, Analytics, Buying Cycle, Contextual Advertising, Monetize, Long Tails, Squeeze Pages – what does this all mean?!

I agree jumping into online marketing can be a bit daunting at first. I’ve got a few online marketing terms to run by you which I hope will help you either with your own online marketing campaigns, or when speaking to a marketing consultant.

above the fold – This term is a throwback to newspaper terminology. In internet marketing, this term is typically used to reference the area of a web page that is visible to a user without having to scroll. It is a good practice to get imporant parts of a design above the fold.

adsense – Google text and image ads that are targeted based on page content or the user’s browsing history. Site owners who place these ads on their site get a 68% share of the revenue from clicks on these ads.

adwords – Google’s paid advertising network. Most ads served from AdWords use a pay per click model but have also included affiliate ads, video ads, radio ads, and print ads.

analytics – Analytics allows you to view data that results from activities of users on your website. This data includes, but is not limited to, number of visitors, page views, conversions, visitor locations, how long visitors are on your site, how many times specific pages are viewed, and where your traffic comes from. Unfortunately, analytics data is not 100% correct no matter what platform you use for analyzing your traffic, so keep that in mind.

autoresponder – An autoresponder is the vehicle by which you send your emails. You don’t have to set up time-consuming individual emails and put in each email address. The autoresponder does it all.

bounce rate – The rate at which users enter a specific page of your site and then exit the site without viewing any other pages. A high bounce rate can be a sign of a low quality site but could also mean that the user’s query was answered and they did not need to navigate any further.

canonical tag – Code used by webmaster to tell search engines what the original URL is for content on the current page. This can prevent duplicate content from being indexed and having the wrong page showing up in search results.

contextual advertising – Advertising that is served based on the content of the page or a user’s query.

email marketing – This is what you do to actively market your products online; it’s in addition to just showing your website to the world. Collecting email addresses from people means you can send them periodic emails on new products, sales, etc. to bring them back to your site and purchase from you or into your physical place of business.

long tail – A term used to describe keyword phrases typically 4-5+ words long that SEOs target to make themselves look good when they can’t compete for higher volume terms. A well structured site should naturally gain traffic from these types of terms without having to specifically target each one.

monetize – Is your website laid out to make you money?  Chances are, you haven’t monetized it properly or you’re lacking in the different ways to make money (monetize) your site.

SEO – This stands for search engine optimization.  Optimizing your website for the search engines, like Google, means the difference between a trickle of traffic or a lot of traffic.

shopping carts – If you’re selling product, you need shopping cart software on your site. Not all are the same so pick one that has all the features you need and it will make your life easier.

squeeze pages – A landing page created specifically for the purpose of getting users to fill out their name and/or email address and subscribe to some kind of offer.

It’s a whole different world, isn’t it?  There’s hundreds of other online marketing terms out there – and if you need any help with this all feel free to contact me. Online consulting and taking care of your online needs is what I do.