eBiz ROI Internet Marketing Glossary
Home :: Internet Marketing Glossary
Internet Marketing Glossary of Frequently Used Industry Terms
A-B-C-D-E-F-G-H-I-J-K-L-M-N-O-P-Q-R-S-T-U-V-W-X-Y-Z
Adsense Arbitrage (Garbitrage):Adsense Arbitrage is a specific approach to Affiliate Arbitrage where the traffic is purchased through Google AdWords to a landing page made up of primarily PPC ads and affiliate links. Garbitrage is a phrase coined by Kris Jones at an animated SES “Dealing with Affiliates” panel in April of 2007.
Affiliate Arbitrage: Affiliate Arbitrage is a specific affiliate marketing strategy where the affiliate will bid on keywords from programs such as Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing or Microsoft Advertising with Bing. The paid placement ads, purchased on a PPC model, links the ads to either their own affiliate web site, or directly to the merchant's. Some merchants disallow direct linking from a PCC add such as Amazon.com. To be profitable in implement an affiliate arbitrage, the affiliate must factor in cost per click bid price and conversion rates as compared to the commission or payout to ensure a profitability.
The practice of a third party marketing a merchants products. The third parties are paid a commission each time they sell one of the merchants products. Commissions can be based on either a flat rate for each sale (or lead captured) or a percentage of sale. These and other terms of the affiliate relationship including terms and conditions of payment, sale verification techniques and types of marketing allowed our spelled out in the Affiliate Agreement between the merchant and the affiliate marketer.Algorithm: algorithm, as it relates to SEM (Search Engine Marketing) is a defined set of instructions and criteria used by search engines to rank the relevance of websites relative to search containing certain keywords or key phrases.
Autoresponder: A software solution that is automatically invoked when a user sends an e-mail to a certain email address, this software automatically responds back an e-mail; autoresponder applications can be used to provide users with some valuable information such as a while paper or product brochure. It is a good mechanism to capture customer email addresses while promoting your business. Auto responders are sometimes bundled in with web hosting packages and are the e-mail equivalent of a fax-back service.
Bounce Rate:The percentage of visitors to a website who view only one page before leaving the site. This is a key metric to track and is a good indication of landing or entrance page's ability to monetize traffic to that page. This Bounce rate is calculated by the number of visits viewing one page divided by the total visitors entering that page. Bounce rate is associated with a defined period of time.
CAN-SPAM: Stands for Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing. The CAN-SPAM Act is a federal law, passed by Congress in 2003 and signed into law by George Bush in January of 2004, which governs the circumstances in which a marketer can send email solicitations. Penalties for violating terms of CAN-SPAM include fines up to $11,000 per incident and possible jail time for repeat offenders.
Click-Through: The act of clicking on an online advertisement, redirecting the user to the advertisers offer page, sometimes referred to as "clicking-through" to the advertisers offer. Advertisers who purchase ad space on a CPC (Cost per Click) or PPC (Pay per Click) basis are charge a fee each time their add is clicked.
Commission: A fee paid to an affiliate or partner who drives traffic to the merchant's website resulting in a sale. Commissions can be based on a flat fee or percentage of sale. Commissions can be one time, or for subscription based products, can be a recurring payment.
Cookie: A cookie is a file sent by a website and saved by a users a web browser used to record a user's activities on a particular websites. Cookies can be used to track where a users came from (referring link), what ads they clicked on, if made a purchase or submitted their information in a lead form. Cookies can provide functionality like remembering passwords to commonly visited websites or maintain persistent shopping carts even after you have left a website or turned your computer off. Cookies are used to implement re marketing and re targeting advertising strategies. As you can imagine, there are many privacy advocacy groups who view cookies as an invasion of privacy.
Content: Content is the information contained in text, visual images, audio sounds and video formats providing value to Internet users. In SEM (Search Engine Marketing), unique, relevant content is one of the most important variables in attracting repeat visitors, inbound links to positively impact search engine page rank.
CPA: Stands for Cost per Acquisition. In this advertising model, the advertiser pays a flat fee or percentage of sale for each conversion, regardless of click-through or conversion rates. The publishers generally like this model least as click-through and conversion rates are generally outside of their control, yet their ability to monetize their inventory efficiently depend on these two key performance metrics. CPA is the how performance advertisers doing direct response, prefer to acquire their media is it fixes the cost per acquisition to enable them to manage their advertising ROI. Performance advertisers, large and small, get much of the advertisement distribution through affiliate marketers who are set up to manage campaigns on a CPA basis.
CPC: Stands for Cost per Click. In this advertising model, the advertiser pays a flat fee for each click. When everything is tracking correctly and pages load to completion, their is a one to one correlation between clicks and visitors. In this model, publisher's revenue is directly impacted by CTR (Click Through Rates), which is driven by offer differentiation, creative quality and call to action, all of which are generally outside the publishers control. Advertisers prefer this model over CPM since they are guarantee to get a certain amount traffic independent of the realized click through rate which can vary by publisher, even for the same offer, creative and call to action.
CPM: Cost per a thousand impressions. In this advertising model, the advertiser pays a flat fee for 1000 impressions, where each impression is an instance of their ad being displayed. Publishers prefer to sell advertising space using this model as their revenues are more stable and correlated directly with their traffic level. In this model, the advertiser is going to monitor click through rates and conversion rates to judge the overall performance of their campaign and ROI on their advertising investment.
CTR: Stands for Click Through Rate and is calculated by the number of clicks received from a specific ad unit or link divided by the number of times that unit or link was show. CTR is on of the most important key performance metric used to evaluate online campaigns.
Double Opt-in: The recommended approach for setting up an email newsletter or any email list where the person submits their email address for the first opt-in then clicks a link in an email automatically from the list owner which is the second time they perform an opt-in action, hence the term Double Opt-in. Support of this feature in email marketing software and service platforms, both paid and free, is common. The eBiz ROI Weekly Newsletter Sign-Up works this way.
eCommerce: Business conducted over the Internet, usually involving the online promotion and sale of good and services. Products can be either durable goods or digital products that can be purchased and downloaded immediately. Sometimes referred to as eBiz.
FSI: Stands for Free Standing Insert; an FSI is a preprinted advertising message which is inserted into, print media unbound. These are most commonly found in newspapers.
FTP: Stands for File Transfer Protocol. FTP was designed to support the quick and easy transfer of files to computers connected by networks, either private networks and/or the Internet. Most applications that require the transfer of files such as web development environments or content management systems, support the FTP protocol.
Googlebot: A Google software program, often referred to as a "spider," designed to continually discover and index new Internet content to keep current Google's search engine database and search results returned to users.
HTML: Stands for HyperText Markup Language used to implement web pages. HTML provides web browsers (e.g. Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc.) with the instructions to display web pages
Keyword: A word entered into a search engine (e.g. Google, Yahoo, Bing) for the purpose of finding related web content
Keyword Optimization: intentional use keywords within a web page to improve a pages position in search results for that keyword, targeting 2-4 occurrences of keyword per hundred words of copy
Key Phrase: A group of words, usually surrounded by quotes, entered into a search engine (e.g. Google, Yahoo, Bing) the purposed of finding related web content
Long Tail Key Phrases: Refers to a key phrase that is comprised of at least 4 words and is generally characterized by lower search volume. Search queries with long tail key phrases are generally enclosed in quotes returning only pages that are indexed on the exact phrase. Since Long Tail Key Phrases are very specific, the response rates tend to be higher when the anchor text, description or pay per click ad copy is tailored to a specific niche.
Meta Tags: Tags in the HTML that provide information about the web page which contains them. Examples include title, content and description tags that are used by the search engines to rank web pages and display results.
Natural Search: Synonym for Organic Search; The process of generating search engine results based on their perceived relevance to a search terms, or a keyword, entered by a search engine user
Organic Search: Synonym for Natural Search; The process of generating search engine results based on their perceived relevance to a search terms, or a keyword, entered by a search engine user
Off Page SEO: Refers to optimization strategies outside of your website's design such as link building with authoritative sites with relevant content
On Page SEO: Refers to website implementation strategies to optimize position of a website in search results of particular words or phases
Opt-in: The act of a subscriber requesting to be sent information via emails and providing you official, legal permission to do so. The application for Opt-in is typically for managing subscriber lists for a newsletter or ezine.
Opt-Out: The action a subscriber takes when they request to be removed from an email list. Based on the Federal CAN-SPAM Act, it is illegal to ignore an Opt-out request and continue to send email to persons who have opted out.
Page Rank: An algorithm used by Google that assigns a value of 0 - 10 for each web page on the Internet; websites assigned a value of 10 deemed by google to be the "most important" within a set of related pages
PPC: Stands for Pay Per Click. PPC is a pricing model used for predominantly contextual based text link advertising. In this pricing model, the advertiser only pays for clicks, regardless of how may times an advertisement is shown. This is a de facto pricing model for paid placements within search engine marketing
Robots.txt: A file used to let search engines know whether or not to include a web page in the search engines database or not. From a technical perspective, the Robots.txt is parsed based on the Robot Exclusion Standard, also known as the Robots Exclusion Protocol or robots.txt protocol. This standards was developed to prevent search engines who support the standard from accessing all or part of a website which is otherwise publicly viewable. The name is based on the fact that Robots, or Bots for short, are often used by search engines to index web content, or by webmasters to proofread source code. The standard is unrelated to, but can be used in conjunction with, sitemaps, a robot inclusion standard for websites.
SEM: Search Engine Marketing is the discipline of applying tools such as PPC - Pay Per Click adverting and techniques SEO - Search Engine Optimization to increase and maintain a websites prominence in the search results Keyword Optimization A Technique of intentional use keywords within a web page to improve a pages position in search results for that keyword
SEO: Stands for Search Engine Optimization which uses tools and techniques to enhance the position of a website in the search results from a particular keyword or key phrase
SERP:Stands for Search Engine Results Page. SERP refers to the listing of links to web pages returned by a search engine query. The SERP listings of typically include titles, a link to the page, and a short description highlight the keywords or phrases which have matched content. The use of SERP may refer to an individual page of links or to the set of all pages returned for a search query.
Suppression List: A list of people who have registered to avoid receiving emails or who have chosen to opt-out of an email list after signing up initially. A suppression list is similar in concept to the National Do Not Call Registry used to suppress calls from telemarketers. The suppression list is designed to prevent any further emails to be sent to those suppressed email addresses on the list and is a key tool used by email marketers to avoid any potential CAN-SPAM non-compliance issues.
XML Sitemap:. An XML file that lists all the URLs for a website. The XML Sitemap file use enables a webmaster to inform search engines about URLs on a website that are available for crawling so that they are included in the search engine's database. This file supports SEO and allows webmasters to include additional information about each URL: when it was last updated, how often it changes, and how important it is in relation to other URLs in the site. This allows search engines to crawl the site more intelligently. Sitemaps are a URL inclusion protocol and complement robots.txt, used to also provide instructions to search engines about to include and exclude from its database of web pages.