101 Digital Marketing Terms You Need To Know In 2022

Every year, without exception, the number of digital marketing terms you are expected to know continues to grow. Our industry’s lexicon simply refuses to stop expanding  – and it can be hard to keep up.

So here is our yearly round-up of the most important 101 digital marketing terms of the year. As well as learning something new, you’ll also find terms you are familiar with but which are being used more and more for one reason or another.

Some of the below are new words for new ideas, while some are old words for old ideas that have come to prominence once more (I’m looking at you DAGMAR).

And then there are new names for old things (*cough* Google Business Profile *cough*) or people reinventing things that already exist (*cough cough* nCPA *cough cough*).

Don’t get bamboozled by new jargon. Read the below (and consider bookmarking our online advertising glossary) to keep ahead of the curve.

[Check out our lists of top terms from previous years: 2019 | 2020 | 2021]

1) A2A: An acronym for Ask to Answer. On Quora users can request answers to questions from specific users (or categories of people). Responses which have been requested are often (manually) marked with A2A at the start of the answer.

Most useful for: Organic Social

2) ACCA: ACCA stands for Awareness, Comprehension, Conviction and Action and is a type of marketing strategy used in DAGMAR. The idea is that you:

1. Create Awareness of a brand
2. Increase Comprehension of the product
3. Convince them that they need it
4. Persuade people to make a purchase (or take an Action).

Most useful for: Digital Marketing, eCommerce

3) Active View: Active View is how Google AdSense measures Viewable Impressions. An Active View Viewable Impression is one that appeared at least 50% on screen for at least one second.
Most useful for: Online Advertising, Website Publishing

4) Ad Rank: Ad Rank is a metric used by Google to decide the positioning of an ad for different keywords on its search results pages. Using a combination of:

• The relevance of the ad to the keyword
• The amount being paid
• The quality of the landing page.

The Ad Rank of an ad will pretty much determine that ad’s level of success.
Most useful for: Paid Search

5) AdChoices: An advertising industry initiative to ensure that behavioural advertising isn’t rejected by the general public by staying within the law.

Ads which are working on a behavioural targeting basis should always have an Ad Choice logo on them, which allows a user to opt-out of the targeting when clicked on.

Most useful for: Display Advertising

6) Addressable: The ability to target specific individuals or segments of an audience rather than large anonymous groups.
Most useful for: Digital Marketing

7) ads.txt: A file that websites can upload which publicly declares which ad companies are authorised to sell inventory on that website. ‘Ads’ is an acronym standing for Authorised Digital Sellers and .txt is the file type.
Most useful for: Display Advertising, Website Publishing

8) Advanced Matching: A feature on Facebook Ads which allows the Facebook Pixel to scan webpages it is on to glean more information about the user of the website (such as information filled in on forms on the website).

Facebook Ads will then add this information to the profile they hold about that person so they can more effectively target ads at them. This feature is part of Facebook’s Power5 and was called Auto Advanced Matching in there.

[Note: I would not recommend websites turn it on as it feels incredibly invasive]

Most useful for: Paid Social

9) AI Content: Content that is generated by a machine ‘reading’ other content. While AI Content is comparatively cheap and time-saving, Google has said it is against its guidelines for search, and there are also issues around originality.
Most useful for: Content Marketing, Website Publishing

10) AIDA: A type of sales or marketing funnel where you drive potential customers through four phases: Attention > Interest > Desire > Action.
Most useful for: Digital Marketing, eCommerce

11) Amplification Rate: The rate at which an individual post is shared on social media. This is calculated by taking the number of shares of a post and dividing it by the number of followers an account has. The equation is:

Amplification Rate = Shares per post ÷ Followers

Most useful for: Organic Social, Paid Social

12) AOV: Average Order Value. The average (mean) amount earned per order (in revenue). This is a helpful metric to make topline calculations and forecasts for any eCommerce site. The equation is:

AOV = Total Revenue ÷ Number of Orders

Most useful for: eCommerce, Analytics

13) Applause rate: The rate at which an individual post is liked on social media. This is calculated by taking the number of likes/favourites/bookmarks of a post and dividing it by the number of followers an account has. The equation is:

Applause Rate = Likes per post ÷ Followers

Most useful for: Organic Social, Paid Social

14) Arbitrage: The tactic of buying something at one price and then selling it at a higher price. In online advertising, this typically refers to buying cheap ad inventory and reselling it or using ad space on your own website (which is free) to place affiliate ads.
Most useful for: Display Advertising

15) ATC: A metric called Add-to-Cart (or Add to Basket in Google Analytics). This is where a user adds something to a cart on an eCommerce site. It is an important metric as it tells you how many people were intending to buy. If there is a big difference between your ATCs and purchases, there may be a problem with your checkout pages.
Most useful for: eCommerce, Analytics

16) Attribution: The process of deciding which action caused a result. Each attribution model changes how success is measured and therefore how budget is allocated.

For example – you see (but don’t click) 10 ads then click an email and make a purchase. Did the ads help cause the sale?
Most useful for: Analytics, Online Advertising

17) AVOC: AKA Audible and Visible on Complete. A metric measuring the number of video views where the video was on screen and the sound was turned on upon completion.

It’s an improvement on the metric view-through as it shows how many videos were completely engaging (and not just left to run).
Most useful for: Video Advertising, Analytics, Display Advertising

18) AVOC Rate: The percentage of video ads that are audible and visible on complete (they have the sound on and are on screen). This is an improvement on the metric ‘view-through rate’ as it not only measures if an ad was watched to the end, but by including sound to it measures whether the ad was focussed on by the user.

The equation is:

AVOC Rate = AVOCs ÷ Impressions

Most useful for: Video Advertising, Analytics, Display Advertising

19) Better Ads: A display advertising standard which publishers and ad networks sign up to in order to make display ads on sites less annoying. The idea is to reduce the usage of ad blockers by irritating people less.
Most useful for: Display Advertising

20) Broad: A way of running social media ads where little (if any) targeting is added by the advertiser. The idea is that social media algorithms can deliver conversions more efficiently when fewer restrictions are placed on them.

In Facebook’s Power5, this is referred to as Account Simplification.
Most useful for: Paid Social

21) Budget Flighting: Splitting your advertising budget into flights (or periods of time) in order to maximise its effectiveness.

For example, if you sold lots of cheese during the day but not at night, you might set your ads to only run during daily hours.
Most useful for: Online Advertising

22) Bulletin: Facebook/Meta’s email newsletter product.
Most useful for: Email Marketing, Organic Social

23) Bullish: An attitude of aggressive confidence. Used in digital marketing to describe someone focussing excessively on a channel because they feel very confident of success.

For example, someone might say “I’m bullish on TikTok ads right now”.

Most useful for: Digital Marketing

24) C2C: Customer-to-Customer. A business model where your customers buy and sell with each other. For example eBay or Facebook Marketplace.
Most useful for: eCommerce

25) Campaign Budget Optimization: AKA CBO. A feature on Facebook Ads where you set the budget at the campaign level rather than by Ad Set. Your campaign will then deliver the budget where it is most effectively hitting the goals you set.

Most useful for: Paid Social

26) Charm Pricing: Pricing items at $4.99 or $9.99 etc for example. Charm pricing is a way of subconsciously making people believe something is cheaper than it really is.
Most useful for: eCommerce

27) Content Management System: CMS stands for Content Management System. It refers to any program that is used to manage a website (such as WordPress for example).
Most useful for: Website Publishing

28) Core Audience: On Facebook Ads, a Core Audience is one that is defined by using Facebook’s data on their demographics, geographic location, and interests (and more).
Most useful for: Paid Social

29) CoTweets: A way for two accounts on Twitter to tweet together (the Tweet will say it’s from both of them). Useful for co-branding exercises or partnerships.

Most useful for: Organic Social, Influencer Marketing

30) Creator Mode: A way to manage posts and assets on LinkedIn for creators.
Most useful for: Organic Social

31) CRM: Customer Relationship Management. A tool or platform that helps manages a company’s relationship with customers by keeping all relevant data in one place (eg every time they have made a purchase, and every time you have contacted them etc).
Most useful for: Website Publishing

32) Customer Acquisition Cost: AKA CAC. The amount it costs to gain a new customer (the total sales & marketing costs per customer gained). CAC is an important metric to ensure profitability (ie customers must earn you more than they cost). The equation is:

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) = Number of new customers ÷ Amount spent on acquiring customers

Most useful for: Analytics, eCommerce

33) DAGMAR: DAGMAR stands for:

Defining Advertising Goals for Measured Advertising Results

While it was a method that was created in 1961, it still has incredible relevance to online advertising, especially with less targeted (and measurable) advertising options becoming more popular.
Most useful for: Online Advertising

34) Dark Posts: A post on social media that is not published to your feed or timeline, but is used as an ad. This means it is not searchable (outside of ad libraries).
Most useful for: Paid Social, Organic Social

35) Dark Social: Traffic from social media platforms that doesn’t contain any referral information so it cannot be categorised by analytics programs.
Most useful for: Analytics, Organic Social

36) Delisted Ad Unit: A display ad unit that is no longer commonly in use to the point where the IAB no longer lists details about it.
Most useful for: Display Advertising

37) Discovery Ads: Native ads from Google Ads that appear on YouTube, Gmail, the Google App, and the homepage of Google.com (on mobile).

Most useful for: Display Advertising, Content Marketing

38) Dropshipping: A type of business that doesn’t manage any stock directly, but instead manages sales while outsourcing the manufacture and distribution to customers.
Most useful for: eCommerce

39) DTC: AKA Direct-to-Consumer. A type of business that markets & sells directly to its customers (as opposed to going through a middleman such as a physical retail store). eCommerce businesses often use this model.
Most useful for: eCommerce

40) EOW: EOW stands for End of Week. It is a common ad hoc deadline set in many types of business (Can I have that by the end of the week?). However, with more people working from home and working flexible hours, the typical meaning of this phrase (5 pm on a Friday at the latest) is less steady.
Most useful for: Website Publishing

41) Facebook Boost: A system where you pay Facebook to show organic posts to more people, with no way of defining who it will be shown to. This tool is commonly used by organic social marketers, but shunned by paid media marketers due to the lack of options and tracking.
Most useful for: Organic Social, Paid Social

42) Facebook Total Value: Facebook Ads version of Quality Score for Google Ads. This is Facebook’s way to rank bids in an ad auction. The formula is:

Total Value = (Advertiser Bid x Estimated Action Rates) + (User Value)

In this case, User Value means how much the ad will add to user experience (through relevance, and likely CTR).
Most useful for: Paid Social

43) Featured Snippets: A small portion of the text of a webpage that Google displays at the top of search results in order to answer a question quickly.

(Note: I personally consider them theft. Google is a great search engine, but a poor answer engine in my opinion)

Most useful for: SEO, Website Publishing

44) First Price Auction: When the winner of an auction pays the amount they bid. This earns the most for ad platforms (and publishers) and encourages advertisers to optimise their bids.

Google moved its online advertising to this system in 2021.
Most useful for: Online Advertising

45) Golden Questions: A set of questions that tell you more than just the answers. These are used in marketing to help segment audiences. This means interviewing people and finding answers that are common to your target market.

For example, if you found out that people who are likely to buy expensive TVs generally say they like marmalade, you could ask people about marmalade in order to quickly find customers for your TVs.
Most useful for: Lead Gen

46) Golden Triangle: A concept in Google Ads where you rely on it to optimise your campaigns. The core of this concept is using Broad Match Keywords + Responsive Search Ads (RSAs) + Smart Bidding (eg ‘Maximise Conversion Value’).
Most useful for: Paid Search

47) Google Business Profile: The new name for Google My Business. Google Business Profile is a way of managing how your business appears on Google Maps.
Most useful for: SEO

48) Google Discover: A feed on Google.com (on mobile) and the Google App which surfaces content based on your browsing history. A kind of search engine without the search.
Most useful for: SEO, Website Publishing, Content Marketing

49) GPT-3: An AI writing tool that creates human-like text.
Most useful for: Content Marketing, Website Publishing

50) Incremental: A common way of referring to things that only happened because of marketing activity. While difficult to prove, incremental sales (for example) means sales that wouldn’t have occurred without the related marketing.
Most useful for: Online Advertising

51) Invalid traffic: Traffic that ad networks will not pay for, regardless of whether they delivered ads on it or not. This can be due to detected spam or fraud.

Most useful for: Display Advertising

52) Lead Magnet: A lead magnet is an incentive offered to users, often in exchange for their data or their subscription to a marketing list. It is usually (but not always) digital content that is given immediately and for free in order to increase consumer interaction.
Most useful for: Lead Gen

53) Link Exchange: When two or more websites put each other’s links on their pages in order to artificially improve their SEO. This is against Google’s guidelines, and sites which do this will have their ranking penalised when caught.
Most useful for: SEO

54) LinkedIn Newsletters: LinkedIn’s built-in email marketing platform. There are a lot of surprisingly good ones on there (but also even more terrible ones of course).

Most useful for: Email Marketing, Organic Social

55) Lookalike Audience: Often referred to as LALs, a lookalike audience is a targetable audience that Facebook generates of people who have similar qualities to a chosen group (eg people who made a purchase in the past 60 days).
Most useful for: Paid Social

56) Loyalty Rate: The percentage of users that visited a website or app, that also visited in the previous month. The equation is:

Loyalty Rate = Returning Users (Month 2) ÷ Total Users (Month 2)

Most useful for: Analytics

57) LSI Keywords: Possibly the most controversial topic in SEO. LSI stands for Latent Semantic Intent keywords, and the concept is that if you put keywords related to the one you are targeting in your content then that will give a boost to your SEO efforts.

While there is no evidence that this is how Google works, many people still claim that it is a good strategy (and many other people get mad at them for it).
Most useful for: SEO

58) LTV: LTV (often called Customer Lifetime Value – CLTV or CLV) is an attempt at predicting the amount of profit that can be expected over the entire relationship with a user. The lifetime in this metric does not refer to the lifespan of a human, but rather the full length of time that a person interacts with a business.

For example, if people were only expected to visit a website twice, then their LTV would only be calculated based on what people spend on the site during two visits.

Most useful for: Analytics, eCommerce

59) Magento: An open-source eCommerce platform.
Most useful for: eCommerce, Website Publishers

60) MER: Media Efficient Ratio. MER is a metric that shows you how much you get back from each dollar (or pound etc) that you spend on ads. It’s like ROAS, except combining results from all of your ad spend. An eROAS if you will (or a Blended ROAS or ecosystem ROAS). The equation is

MER = Total Revenue ÷ Total Ad Spend

Most useful for: Analytics, eCommerce, Online Advertising

61) Metaverse: A unified AR and VR project where people can go into an entirely simulated reality, or use a device to see things superimposed onto reality. It’s like Lawnmower Man except driven by Facebook and with a scary amount of ad tracking built in. I hate it.
Most useful for: Digital Marketing

62) MFA Sites: Made for Advertising Sites. Low-quality websites that focus typically focus on a niche, and which only exists in order to gain ad revenue. These low-quality sites make the internet worse.
Most useful for: Display Advertising, Website Publishing

63) MRR: Monthly Recurring Revenue. The predictable amount of revenue a business receives each month (via subscriptions etc). The equation for MRR is:

MRR = Average recurring revenue per user x Number of users that month

Most useful for: Analytics

64) Multivariant Testing: Testing multiple changes at once to work out which combination is better. This can be used in marketing to run tests on different creates faster – however, it is hard to get enough results for each variation to make the test results valid.
Most useful for: Digital Marketing

65) nCPA: New Cost Per Acquisition. The amount it costs for sales (or actions) from new customers. A useful metric to understand whether your marketing is effective on people who haven’t purchased from you before. The equation is:

nCPA = Amount spent on new customers ÷ Number of new customers

(Note: The eagle-eyed among you may notice that nCPA is the same as CAC. Marketers love new acronyms though, and this one is on the rise)

Most useful for: eCommerce, Analytics

66) Online Advertising: Any activity where a person or business pays to promote something online. The main three pillars of online advertising are:

• Display Advertising
• Paid Search
• Paid Social

Most useful for: Online Advertising

67) Opera Ad Manager: A way to run ads in Opera Apps, including Opera News, and the news feed in the Opera Mini browser app.
Most useful for: Online Advertising

68) Optimised Pricing: Google Ad Manager’s way of algorithmically increasing the floor price of ad inventory that it deems as underpriced (based on historical bids).
Most useful for: Display Advertising

69) Pangle Ads: TikTok Ads that run on TikTok’s Audience Network (websites that partner with TikTok and run their ad code).

Most useful for: Paid Social

70) Performance Max: Commonly referred to as PMax. A type of Google Ads campaign where everything is automatically optimised – inc. targeting (across all Google properties), creative type (mixing assets you set), and delivery.

Most useful for: Online Advertising

71) Pin: The word for a post on Pinterest. You can post up to 25 pins per day and each account is allowed up to 200,000 (!) pins.
Most useful for: Organic Social

72) Pinner: Someone who posts on Pinterest. While people have been focussing on TikTok’s massive growth, Pinterest has been doing very well in recent years.
Most useful for: Organic Social

73) Pinterest Ads: The ad platform on Pinterest. It’s pretty good, and revenue for Pinterest is growing faster than both Facebook and Twitter.
Most useful for: Paid Social

74) Power5: A set of features on Facebook Ads focussed on automation. The idea is that by using all of these 5 features for your Facebook Ads, you would maximise results (by allowing Facebook’s algorithms to do their work) while minimising effort.

The tools are:

• Dynamic Ads
• Auto Advance Matching
• Account Simplification
• Campaign Budget Optimisation
• Automatic Placement.

Most useful for: Paid Social

75) Quality Raters: People hired by Google to rate the quality of search results. The purpose of this is to check if Google’s many algorithms are surfacing the best content. They do not directly change any search results.
Most useful for: SEO

76) Quality Raters Guide: The Quality Raters Guide is a document that provides guidelines for human evaluators who are tasked with rating the quality of search results. The guide covers a wide range of topics, including:

• how to assess the quality of websites
• what factors to consider when rating results
• how to provide feedback to the search engine.

Most useful for: SEO

77) Repin: The equivalent of a share on Pinterest – when you pin something to your profile/board that another user originally pinned.

Most useful for: Organic Social

78) Retargeting ads: Ads which are shown to people who have taken some action before. For example, visitors to a webpage can be retargeted with ads – the point being if they visited your webpage they are more likely than the general public to be interested in your message.
Most useful for: Online Advertising

79) Search Query Report: A report in Paid Search platforms which tells you the actual search terms which your ads showed for. These SQRs are powerful tools to tell you what you should (and shouldn’t be targeting).

Most useful for: Paid Search

80) Second Price Auction: When the winner of an auction pays 1 penny more than second place. This ensures the lowest price for bidders (while encouraging high bids).

This is how bidding in online advertising *used to* work.
Most useful for: Online Advertising

81) Single Keyword Ad Groups: SKAGs. An Ad Group on a paid search platform which only targets a single exact match keyword. The idea is that the keyword can be entirely focused on in the ads and on the landing page, increasing the chance of success.
Most useful for: Paid Search

82) Spark Ads: A way of boosting organic posts on TikTok. It differs from TikTok Promote (or Facebook Boost) in that you can also boost other people’s posts (with their permission). It’s a novel idea, and helps influencers and brands equally.

Most useful for: Paid Social

83) Squarespace: A website builder. Rumour has it that it is finally fixing its SEO problems. One to watch.
Most useful for: Website Publishing

84) Surveillance Marketing: Marketing that collects and uses a surprising amount of data to target people. A terrifying and unnecessary paradigm the internet has stumbled into due to a lack of awareness around privacy concerns.
Most useful for: Digital Marketing

85) Swipe file: A file that marketers keep with inspiration in it – ads and ideas that they have liked in the past.
Most useful for: Digital Marketing

86) TCF: Transparency & Consent Framework. A way to gather consent from users to be shown online advertising (via cookie consent banners). This is then passed onto ad platforms and/or advertisers.
Most useful for: Display Advertising

87) The Delta: Δ means change or difference, and is used in digital marketing to discuss either the rate of change or difference a campaign or action will make.

For example, someone might say “What’s the delta to our revenue from our Facebook campaign?”

Most useful for: Analytics

88) TikTok Ads: The ad platform on TikTok.
Most useful for: Paid Social

89) TikTok Audience Network: The network of sites that run TikTok ads on them (not including TikTok itself).
Most useful for: Paid Social

90) TikTok Promote: A way to pay to show posts on TikTok to more users. As with Facebook Boost, there are almost no targeting options, and so this product is favoured by organic social marketers, but not paid media marketers.
Most useful for: Paid Social

91) TikTok Pulse: Influencers with over 100,000 followers can enrol in TikTok Pulse for an ad rev share of 50%. Advertisers can contextually target TikTok Pulse to have their ads shown amongst the top 4% of videos in a category.
Most useful for: Influencer Marketing

92) Title Tag: The title of a webpage. This is what search engines typically use as the link to the page on their search results pages. It should be noted that Google has started to more frequently rewrite the title of pages that they show if their algorithm thinks more people will click on it.
Most useful for: SEO

93) Topic Cluster: A group of related topics. A tactic in SEO is to find a target topic to create content about, and then to also create content on closely related topics and then link all the pages together in a logical way.
Most useful for: SEO

94) Topics: A Google initiative that aims to make behavioural targeting transparent. Sites/advertisers participating in Topics are told 3 topics of interest for each user (from the past 3 weeks’ browser history) to target.
Most useful for: Display Advertising

95) TopView Ads: A type of TikTok ad which appears at the top of the For You page. This is TikTok’s version of ‘above the fold’ advertising.
Most useful for: Paid Social

96) TrueView: A YouTube ad format where advertisers only pay when a certain amount of the ad is watched. They include:

• In-stream ads (ads before videos that you can skip after 5 seconds)
• Discovery Ads (ads that appear in search results or by videos – advertisers only pay when they are played).

These ads are the video ads version of marketing qualified leads. The first 5 seconds gets rid of people who truly aren’t interested in the ad.

Most useful for: Video Advertising

97) Tumblr Blaze: A way to pay to boost posts on Tumblr to random users (with no ability to target ads whatsoever). Often used by individuals for their own random posts, Tumblr Blaze has been well received by the Tumblr community.

Most useful for: Paid Social

98) Twitter Circles: A feature from Twitter where people can build a list of ‘trusted friends’, and then create tweets that *only* that list (or Circle) can see or reply to. Similar to Instagram’s ‘close friends’ feature. This was initially tested under the name “Twitter Flocks”.

Most useful for: Organic Social

99) Two-Click Penalty: A method that Google uses to prevent click fraud. If Google suspects that clicks on display ads on a website are frequently fraudulent or accidental it may implement a Two-Click Penalty. When this happens, when people click on an ad on that site an overlay will appear asking them to Click to go the site (or similar).

This means that ads need two clicks to get someone to the site. This of course reduces the amount of traffic that ads send (legitimately or otherwise) and so also reduces revenue from those ads (which is why it’s called a penalty).
Most useful for: Website Publishing

100) VCG Auction: In Facebook Ad’s own type of ad auction, the winning advertiser pays the amount bid by the advertiser they beat to have their ad shown.

This encourages high bids (to win auctions), but saves advertisers money.
Most useful for: Paid Social

101) Wix: The second most used (non-eCommerce) website builder after WordPress.
Most useful for: Website Publishing

You did it! You made it all the way through the list! Don’t you feel smarter now?

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