Digital Term

Explained

301 Redirect

A method of redirecting a visitor from one web page to another web page.

404 Error

The error message that appears when a visitor tries to go to a web page that does not exist.

Ad Extensions

Additional pieces of information that can be added to Google Ads ads, including reviews, address, pricing, callouts, app downloads, sitelinks, and click to call

Ads (Google Ads)

A Google owned program that is used by advertisers to place ads on Google search results pages, on Youtube, and on Google ad network sites. Ads is the primary platform for PPC advertising.

Alt Text (or Alternative Text)

An attribute added to HTML code for images, used to provide vision impaired website visitors with information about the contents of a picture. Best practice dictates that all images on a website should have alt text, and that the text should be descriptive of the image.

Analytics (or Google Analytics)

A Google platform that allows webmasters to collect statistics and data about website visitors. Google Analytics (sometimes abbreviated as GA) allows webmasters to see where web traffic comes from and how visitors behave once on the site.

Anchor Text

The clickable words in a hyperlink.

Average Position

A metric in Google Ads that helps advertisers understand where, on average, their ads are showing in Google search results pages.

Avg. Session Duration

the length of time the visitor stays on your website. The longer they stay, the more interested they are in your product.

Backlink

This is when one website hyperlinks to another website using html href code. Backlinks are a major factor used by Google in determining organic rankings.

Bing Ads

A platform that provides pay per click advertising on both the Bing and Yahoo! search engines.

Blog

Short for “web log”, a blog is a web page or a website that is regularly updated with new written content. Blogs are an important section of a website in digital marketing, as they offer fresh new content on a regular basis which can help attract new visitors.

Bot

An automated program that visits websites, sometimes also referred to as a “crawler” or a “spider”. Search Engines like Google uses bots to crawl websites so that they can be ranked and added to search indexes.

Bounce Rate

The percentage of visitors to a website that leave immediately without clicking or interacting with any portion of the page.

Business Manager

A Facebook platform that allows marketers to manage multiple pages and ad accounts in one central location.

Conv Value (Conversion Value)

The revenue generated from your ads.

Conversion

The completion of a predefined goal. This is often used to track the number of site visitors that have been “converted” into paying customers, though sales are not always chosen as the metric. Other common goals are newsletter subscriptions and content downloads from the website.

Conversion Rate

The rate at which visitors to a website complete the predefined goal.

Cookie

A small item of data sent from a website, that is stored on the user’s device.

CPA (Cost Per Acquisition)

This is the percentage of spend relative to the amount of money generated e.g. €61 spend & €1132 generated is a CPA of 5.3%. Anything under 10% CPA is considered good. The lower the better.

CPC (Cost Per Click)

The amount of money spent for a click on an ad.

Crawler

An automated program that scans websites to determine their content and purpose.

CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization)

A branch of digital marketing that aims to improve the conversion rate of web pages.

CTA (Call to Action)

An element on a web page used to guide visitors towards a specific action or conversion.

CTR

Click Through Rate: A metric showing how often people click on an ad or search result after they see it. It can be calculated by dividing the number of clicks, by the number of impressions (how many times the ad or search result was seen).

Direct

these are people who visit your hotel through a ‘direct’ link e.g. typing the hotel url into the search bar or clicking a link from an ezine etc.

Display Ads

Ads on a display network which include many different formats such as: images, flash, video, and audio. Also commonly known as banner ads, these are the advertisements that are seen around the web on news sites, blogs, and social media.

Display Network

a network of websites and apps that show display ads on their web pages.

Duplicate Content

Refers to instances where portions of text are found in at least two different places on the web. When the same content is found on multiple websites, it can cause ranking issues for one or all of the websites, as Google does not want to show multiple websites in search results that have the exact same information. Generally, the site that indexed the content first is considered to be the original content and would not be penalized. Duplicate content can result from plagiarism, automated content scrapers, or lazy web design. Duplicate content can also be a problem within one website — if multiple versions of a page exists, Google may not understand which version to show in search results, and the pages are competing against each other, this is also known as keyword cannibalization. Issues like this can occur when new versions of pages are added, without deleting or forwarding the old version, or through poor URL structures.

Email Marketing

The use of email with the goal of acquiring sales, customers, or any other type of conversion.

Facebook Business Page

A public webpage on Facebook created to represent a company. Using a business page gives users access to Facebook Ads Manager. It also allows businesses to engage with users (i.e. page likes, message responses, post content).

Featured Snippet

A summarized piece of information that Google pulls from a website and places directly into search results, in order to show quick answers to common and simple queries.

First Page

when a site ranks on the first page of google search results.

Google Ads

Google’s online advertising service. This system allows advertisers to reach customers through their search and display networks.

Google Analytics

A free software platform created by Google, which is used to analyse nearly every aspect of users accessing a website. Website traffic, conversions, user metrics, historical data comparisons, and effectiveness of each channel of marketing can all be managed using this tool.

Google Maps

The location and navigation service provided by Google.

Google My Business

The platform on which businesses can input information to appear in the search results, map packs, location searches, and more. Name, address, phone number, website link, hours of operation, reviews and more can all be managed through this tool. GMB is crucial to local SEO campaigns, and is directly related to location based searches.

Google Reviews

Reviews left using the Google My Business platform. Reviews are on a 1 to 5 star scale, and include a brief message written by the reviewer. Reviews can show up in the knowledge graph in Google searches, and have been shown to positively correlate with SEO rankings.

Hashtag

a phrase beginning with the symbol “#” used in social media as a way for tagging content for users to find. Adding hashtags to a post allows users to find that post when searching for that topic. This can be used for finding users looking for broad topics on social media, as well as niche, detailed topics.

Header

Can refer to either the top portion of a webpage that typically contains the logo and menu, or the section of HTML in a website’s code that contains important information about the site.

Heatmap

A heatmap is a graphical representation of how users interact with your site. Heatmapping software is used to track where users click on a page, how they scroll, and what they hover over. Heatmaps are used to collect user behaviour data to assist in designing and optimizing a website.

HTML

Stands for Hypertext Mark-up Language.

HTTP

Stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol.

HTTPS

Stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure.

Hyperlink

A hyperlink is an HTML code that creates a link from one webpage to another web page, characterized often by a highlighted word or image that takes you to the destined location when you click on that highlighted item.

Iframe

An HTML document that is inside of another HTML document on a website. Iframes are used commonly to embed content from one source onto another web page.

Impression

A term used in Pay per click advertising that represents how many times an ad was shown.

Impression Share

Used in Pay per click advertising, this metric refers to the percentage of times viewers have seen an advertiser’s ad, in relation to the total possible amounts that ad could have been seen.

IP Address

An IP (Internet Protocol) address is a unique number that identifies a device using the internet to communicate over a network.

Keyword

A word or phrase indicative of the major theme in a piece of content. When you search for something in a search engine, you type in a keyword and the search engine gives you results based on that keyword.

Keyword Stuffing

When a web page uses a keyword too often or superfluously, with the intent of manipulating search engines.

Landing Page

The destination webpage a user lands on after clicking on a link.

Medium (source/medium)

Medium is the general category of traffic to a website tracked in google analytics. Some examples of common medium are:

Meta Description

One of the meta tags that gives a description of the page.

Metasearch

Official listing for your hotel, on OTA channels. It enables direct competition with OTAs, who have historically dominated these search channels.

Organic

A source of traffic to a website that comes through clicking on a non-paid search engine result. Organic traffic is a primary measurement of an SEO campaign and will generally grow as a site ranks better for relevant keywords in search engines.

Page/Sessions

the number of pages visited on the website by the visitor.

Position

The placement in a search engine’s (Google, Bing, etc) search results, where a site ranks.

PPC/Pay

Per Click – An online advertising model in which advertisers are charged for their ad once it is clicked.

Rankings

A general term for where a website appears in search engine results.

Redirect

A way by which a web browser takes a user from one page to another without the user clicking or making any input.

Referral

A medium denoted in Google Analytics that represents a website visit that came from another website.

Remarketing

Also known as retargeting, a type of paid ad that allows advertisers to show ads to customers who have already visited their site.

ROAS

Stands for Return On Ad Spend.

ROI

Stands for Return On Investment.

Search Network

A group of websites in which ads can appear. Google’s Search Network, for example, is a group of Google & non Google websites that partner with Google to show text ads.

SEM

Search Engine Marketing.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

the process of improving a website’s performance and positioning in organic search engine results through a variety of methodologies including content production or improvement, technical and code improvement, and link acquisition.

SERP

Stands for Search Engine Results Page, the page featuring a list of search results that is returned to the searcher after they submit a keyword search.

Sessions

A metric in Google Analytics that measures one user interacting with a website during a given period of time, which Google defaults to 30 minutes.

Sitelink

An ad extension in Google Ads that appears below the main ad copy which links to a specific page on the website or booking engine.

Spam

A broad term that includes many different nefarious activities in digital marketing that are done either to help a website rank better or to harm a competitor website. Spam is often in seen the form of hundreds or thousands of low quality backlinks that were built by a black hat SEO to manipulate rankings.

Spend

The total cost of people clicking on your ad.

Spider

An automated program that visits websites, sometimes also referred to as a “crawler” or a “bot”.

SSL Certificate

These small data files are added to web servers that then allow a website to use the HTTPS protocol. SSL certificates digitally connect a cryptographic key to an organization’s details. Originally, these were used to secure logins, data transfers and credit card transactions, but have recently become the go to system for websites, especially after the Google Chrome update that displays a warning message to users, if the certificate is not present.

Title Tag

An HTML element that is used to describe the specific topic of a web page.

Tracking Code

A script, often placed in the header, footer, or thank you page of a website that passes information along to software tools for data gathering purposes.

UI

Stands for User Interface. User interface is the area with which a user interacts with something through a digital device.

URL

stands for Uniform Resource Locator and is the address of a web page. The URL refers to what specific web page a web browser is viewing.

UX

stands for User Experience. UX refers to how a user interacts with a website.

XML Sitemap

is designed to help search engine crawler bots easily find all of the pages for a given website.