Marketing Glossary
Plain-English definitions for the terms agencies use — including the ones used to make simple things sound complicated. 52 entries, each written out in full on its own page.
Commercial · 1
Conversion · 3
Measurement · 14
Paid ads · 8
SEO · 11
Social · 1
Strategy · 1
Systems · 1
52 terms, in plain English
Each entry explains what the term means, why it matters to a business your size, what people commonly get wrong, and what to do about it.
A/B test
Running two versions of a page, an ad or an email at the same time, splitting traffic between them, and keeping whichever…
Read the full entry → Paid adsAd extensions
The extra lines that appear beneath a Google ad — additional links, a phone number, prices, location. Google now calls them…
Read the full entry → Paid adsAd rank
The score that decides whether your ad shows and in what position. It is roughly your bid multiplied by your quality, with…
Read the full entry → SEOAlgorithm
The system deciding which results appear for a search and in what order. It changes constantly, and nobody outside Google has…
Read the full entry → SEOAlt text
A written description of an image, read aloud by screen readers, shown when the image fails to load, and used by search engines…
Read the full entry → MeasurementAttribution
The set of rules that decides which marketing touchpoint gets credit for a sale, when someone saw a Facebook ad in March,…
Read the full entry → SEOBacklink
A link from another website to yours. Still one of the strongest ranking signals there is, and the hardest thing in SEO to earn…
Read the full entry → MeasurementBounce rate
The share of visits where somebody arrived, did nothing measurable, and left. In GA4 the equivalent is the inverse of…
Read the full entry → MeasurementCall tracking
Using a different phone number for each marketing channel, so that when the phone rings you know whether it came from Google…
Read the full entry → ComplianceCASL
Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation. It governs commercial electronic messages — email, texts and some social messages — sent to or…
Read the full entry → Local SEOCitation
A mention of your business name, address and phone number on another website — a directory, an association listing, a supplier…
Read the full entry → MeasurementClick-through rate (CTR)
Clicks divided by impressions, as a percentage. If an ad was shown a thousand times and clicked twenty, the click-through rate…
Read the full entry → MeasurementConversion
A visitor doing the thing a page exists for — submitting a quote form, booking a call, phoning, or completing a purchase.
Read the full entry → MeasurementConversion rate
Conversions divided by visits. Twenty enquiries from a thousand visits is a 2% conversion rate.
Read the full entry → TechnicalCore Web Vitals
Google's three measures of user experience: how quickly the main content appears, how quickly the page responds to a tap, and…
Read the full entry → MeasurementCost per acquisition (CPA)
What you spent on advertising to win one customer. Two thousand dollars of ads producing eight customers is a CPA of $250.
Read the full entry → Paid adsCost per click (CPC)
What one click on your ad costs. In competitive Calgary trades — legal, dental, emergency plumbing, HVAC in a cold snap — it…
Read the full entry → MeasurementCost per lead (CPL)
What you paid in advertising to produce one enquiry — a form, a call or a message — before anybody has bought anything.
Read the full entry → TechnicalCrawling
Search engines visiting your pages and reading them. It is the step before indexing, and the two are not the same thing.
Read the full entry → SystemsCRM
Customer relationship management software — the system holding your contacts, enquiries, deals and history in one place instead…
Read the full entry → ConversionCTA (call to action)
The thing you are asking the visitor to do — call, book, request a quote, download. Both the instruction and the button that…
Read the full entry → SEODomain authority
A score out of a hundred, invented by SEO software companies, estimating how strong a website is likely to be. Moz calls it…
Read the full entry → SEOE-E-A-T
Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust — the qualities Google asks its human quality raters to look for when…
Read the full entry → SocialEngagement rate
Interactions — likes, comments, shares, saves — divided by reach or followers, depending on which platform is doing the…
Read the full entry → SEOFeatured snippet
The answer box at the top of some search results, lifting a paragraph, list or table straight out of a page — with a link back…
Read the full entry → StrategyFunnel
The path from first hearing about you to buying. It is drawn as a funnel because most people leave partway, which is the point…
Read the full entry → SEOGEO (generative engine optimisation)
Making your content usable by AI answer engines — ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews, Perplexity — which increasingly sit between a…
Read the full entry → Local SEOGoogle Business Profile
Your business listing in Google Maps and the local results. Formerly Google My Business.
Read the full entry → MeasurementImpressions
The number of times something was displayed. Not the number of times it was noticed, and certainly not read.
Read the full entry → TechnicalIndexing
Search engines storing a page so it can appear in results. Crawled and indexed are not the same thing — a page can be read and…
Read the full entry → SEOKeyword
What somebody types into a search box. The phrase they use is rarely the phrase your industry uses.
Read the full entry → ConversionLanding page
A page built for one campaign and one action, usually with the site navigation stripped back so there is nowhere to wander off to.
Read the full entry → ConversionLead magnet
Something useful given away in exchange for contact details — a checklist, a guide, a calculator, a template.
Read the full entry → Local SEOLocal citations consistency (NAP)
Keeping your name, address and phone number identical everywhere they appear online — same suite number format, same…
Read the full entry → Local SEOLocal pack / map pack
The block of three business listings, with a map, shown above the normal results for searches with local intent — "plumber near…
Read the full entry → Paid adsLookalike audience
An audience the advertising platform builds by finding people who resemble a list you give it — your customers, your website…
Read the full entry → SEOMeta description
The short summary shown beneath your title in search results. It is not a ranking factor, but it heavily influences whether…
Read the full entry → Paid adsNegative keyword
A word or phrase you tell Google never to show your ad for. "Free", "jobs", "salary", "DIY" and competitor names are the usual…
Read the full entry → SEOOrganic traffic
Visits that arrive from unpaid search results. Not social, not direct, not advertising.
Read the full entry → TechnicalPage speed
How quickly your pages load and become usable. Measured properly on real visitors rather than in a test on a fast connection.
Read the full entry → Paid adsPerformance Max
A Google campaign type that runs across Search, Display, YouTube, Gmail, Maps and Discover at once, with the targeting and…
Read the full entry → CompliancePIPEDA
The Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act — Canada's federal private-sector privacy law, covering how…
Read the full entry → MeasurementPixel
A small piece of code placed on your website that reports visitor behaviour back to an advertising platform, so it can measure…
Read the full entry → Paid adsQuality Score
Google's one-to-ten rating of how relevant your keyword, your ad and your landing page are to each other and to what the…
Read the full entry → Paid adsRemarketing
Advertising to people who have already visited your website or interacted with your business. Also called retargeting.
Read the full entry → CommercialRetainer
A fixed monthly fee for ongoing work, as opposed to a one-off project price or an hourly rate.
Read the full entry → MeasurementROAS
Return on ad spend: the revenue an advertising campaign produced divided by what it cost to run. A campaign that spent $2,000…
Read the full entry → TechnicalSchema / structured data
Code added to a page that tells search engines what it is about in a machine-readable way — that this is a service, this is the…
Read the full entry → SEOSERP
Search engine results page — everything Google shows for a query, including the ads, the map pack, answer boxes, People Also…
Read the full entry → MeasurementSession
One visit to your website. It ends after thirty minutes of inactivity, at midnight, or when the visitor arrives again from a…
Read the full entry → TechnicalSitemap
An XML file listing the pages on your site, so search engines can find them all without relying on links alone.
Read the full entry → MeasurementUTM parameters
Tags added to the end of a link — utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign and two optional others — that tell Analytics exactly…
Read the full entry →Heard a term that is not here?
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