50 Digital Marketing Acronyms Defined

…so that you can understand what your colleagues are talking about!

There are a lot of digital marketing acronyms. I’ve been working in digital marketing for the best part of 20 years. When surrounded by like-minded specialists, I don’t really realise that I’m speaking in a language that others might not understand. When I’m talking to clients, I try to talk in plain English. But if you hear me slip into the awful trap of speaking in digital marketing acronyms, call me out. Ask me what I’m on about.

Digital Marketing Acronyms

Here I’ve gathered 50 of the most common digital marketing acronyms and given you a definition for each. So for anyone who is new to digital marketing, or working with a digital marketing specialist, I hope this list defining some of the most common digital marketing acronyms, helps you to better understand what your colleagues are talking about.

Website Acronyms

1. URL – Universe Resource Locator
This is just the web address.

2. IP – Internet Protocol

This is a unique code that is sent to an internet server.

3. UI – User Interface

This is the part of the website or app that you (as the user) can see and interact with.

4. UX – User Experience

This refers to the experience that your customer has with your business online.

5. CMS – Content Management System

This is a system that sits behind your website designed to make the process of creating, editing and managing a website easy for non-technical users. Most organisations use a CMS to update the content on their website.

6. RSS – Rich Site Summary

An RSS feed shares up-to-date information from one website to another (or many others).

7. CTA – Call To Action

Call To Action refers to the words, phrases and design used to prompt a response, or encourage an action on your web page (or on any other marketing material such as your social media posts or your ads).

SEO Acronyms

8. SEO – Search Engine Optimisation

A series of practices designed to influence the position and appearance of your web pages in organic search results on a search engine (such as Google search results).

9. SERPs – Search Engine Results Pages

When you conduct a search on the internet, the search engine results pages are the pages that the search engine you are using (such as Google) shows you.

10. SER – Search Engine Ranking

The position that a search engine ranks a web page for a particular search term (calculated by the search engine using a quality score).

11. QS – Quality Score

The score given by a search engine to rank the quality and relevance of your web page to a search term.

PPC Acronyms

12. PPC – Pay Per Click

PPC is an advertising model. As the advertiser, you only pay when your ad is clicked. Both search engines (such as Google) and social networks (such as Facebook) offer PPC advertising, but the term is more commonly associated with search.

13. SEM – Search Engine Marketing

An online marketing strategy that aims to increase the visibility of your website in search engine results pages (SERPs). It usually refers to paid search strategies, but can also intersect with SEO.

14. CPC – Cost Per Click

This is the amount it costs you as an advertiser each time your PPC ad is clicked.

15. CTR – Click Through Rate

A ratio showing how often people who see your ad, actually click on it. (It’s the number of clicks your ad receives, divided by the number of times (impressions) your ad is shown. Click-through rate helps you to understand whether an ad is working for you or whether it needs to be improved.

16. RLSA – Remarketing Lists for Search Ads

This is a technique that allows you to target your search ads to people who have previously visited your site.

17. SQR – Search Query Report

This report allows you as an advertiser to see exactly which search terms triggered your PPC ads. It can help you to identify new keyword ideas.

18. ECPC – Enhanced Cost Per Click

This is an automatic bid management feature provided by Google Adwords. You can use it to improve your return on investment by automatically raising or lowering your bids for the keywords that the system predicts are more or less likely to convert.

19. BMM – Broad Match Modifier

This is a feature in Google Adwords that allows you to modify your broad match keywords if you’d like your ads to show for close variants of your broad match keywords (such as misspellings, acronyms, or plurals). It’s useful if you want to increase relevancy, but will likely mean you get less traffic than broad match.

20. DKI – Dynamic Keyword Insertion

This is another feature in Google Adwords. It’s when your ad text is dynamically updated to include a keyword from your ad group, that the user has used in their search. It helps to improve the relevancy of your ad to the users search.

21. PLA – Product Listing Ads

Search ads for products that include rich information such as image, brand name, and price (without requiring additional keywords). These appear under Google Shopping results.

Digital Advertising Acronyms

22. CPA – Cost Per Acquisition (or Cost Per Action)

This is the amount you pay (as an advertiser) when your ad converts into your desired action (a sale or a registration or a download etc.)

23. CPM – Cost Per Thousand (also known as Cost Per Mille)

This is the amount you pay as an advertiser for every thousand impressions of your ad.

24. CPL – Cost Per Lead

This is the amount it costs you as an advertiser to generate a lead.

25. CPV – Cost Per View

This is the amount that you pay as an advertiser, each time your video (in your ad) is played. You can use it with TrueView video campaigns.

26. CPP – Cost Per Phone Call

This is the amount you pay as an advertiser each time the phone number in your ad is called. This is only relevant to ads that use call extensions to display a Google forwarding phone number.

27. CR – Conversion Rate

The rate at which a click on your ad resulted in a conversion. To calculate conversion rate you need to divide the number of conversions in a given timeframe by the number of ad interactions that can be tracked to a conversion during the same time period.

28. CRO – Conversion Rate Optimisation

This is the practice of improving your conversion rate.

29. DMP – Data Management Platform

Data Management Platforms are used by digital advertisers and digital advertising publishers to store audience data from multiple sources.

30. DSP – Demand Side Platform

Demand Side Platforms are software platforms used by digital advertising buyers to bid in automated auctions as efficiently as possible when buying programmatic advertising.

31. SSP – Supply Side Platform

Supply Side Platforms are software platforms used by digital advertising publishers to manage the sale of their digital advertising inventory on ad exchanges. They are designed to help publishers sell as much inventory at as a high a price as possible.

Measurement acronyms

32. KPIs – Key Performance Indicators

These are goals that help you to measure the performance and progress of your digital marketing activities.

33. ROI – Return on Investment

This is the percentage of profitability from your marketing activity. It compares the gain or loss of profit from an activity relative to its cost. It’s calculated by dividing the net return of the activity by the cost of the activity, then multiplying by 100.

34. GA – Google Analytics

This is a tool provided by Google for tracking and reporting your website traffic.

35. BR – Bounce Rate

Bounce is when a visitor lands on your website and then leaves without clicking on anything or navigating to another page. Bounce rate is bounce expressed as a percentage of total website visitors within a given timeframe.

36. PV – Page view

This is the measurement of visits to a specific page on your website.

37. UV – Unique visitor

This metric represents how many of those page visits are by the same person. For example if one person visits the same web page ten times in a given time period, it is represented as 10 page views but only 1 unique visitor.

Email Marketing Acronyms

38. ESP – Email Services Provider

AN ESP is the technology a business employs to manage and deliver email marketing.

39. MVT – Multivariate Testing

A method of testing multiple variables on an email (or on a web page) to find what works best. You can measure success by click through rate.

Social Media Acronyms

40. SMM – Social Media Marketing

The use of social media platforms to promote a product or service.

41. FB – Facebook

42. IG – Instagram

43. LI – LinkedIn

44. YT – YouTube

45. TW – Twitter

46. FYP – For You Page

The ‘For You Page’ is a user’s individual landing page on Tik Tok. It shows all the videos that Tik Tok has curated for the user based on their previous interactions.

47. RT – Retweet

A retweet is when you share someone else’s tweet to your own Twitter feed.

48. MT – Modified Tweet

A modified tweet is when you update the text of a tweet before resharing it.

49. DM – Direct Message

This refers to a message sent privately between two social media users.

50. UGC – User Generated Content

Content created by the users of a social network.

That’s a wrap

Phew. There you have it. 50 digital marketing acronyms that I hope will help you to understand what on Earth your colleagues are talking about.