Glossary

@ – The @ sign is used to call out usernames in tweets, like this: Hello @Twitter! When a username is preceded by the @ sign, it becomes a link to a Twitter profile. 

About – Depending on your Page’s category, different types of basic information will appear in your Page’s About section. It's important to add accurate details for people to be able to quickly learn about you.

Activity Log – A Facebook feature that shows you all of your scheduled content, as well as past content posted to your page.

Ad Delivery – A setting that determines how quickly you want Google to use your budget each day: Either spread throughout the day (standard) or more quickly (accelerated). This setting affects when during the day your ads are likely to show, especially if your campaigns are limited by budget.

Ad Extensions – Additional incentives that increase the likelihood that users will click your ads. Advertisers can include business addresses and phone numbers, additional site links or specific product information.

Ad Group – A set of keywords, ads and bids that is a key part of how your account is organized. Each campaign is made up of one or more ad groups, while each ad group typically includes about five to 10 keywords.

Ad Position – The order in which your ad appears on a page in relation to other paid ads. An ad position of “1“ means that your ad is the first ad on a page. Position 1 doesn’t mean that you are on top of the organic results necessarily. You can be in position 1 while appearing on the side of the results.

Ad Rank – Not to be confused with Ad Position, Ad Rank is a value that’s used to determine your ad position behind-the-scenes. This is calculated as the product of your bid and Quality Score.

Ad Rotation – A preference that determines which ad in your ad group should show when you have multiple ads active. Rotation settings include Optimize for Clicks, Optimize for Conversions, Rotate Evenly (90 days) and Rotate Indefinitely. This setting is important to check to ensure that you have a proper balance between testing of your messaging and performance of your account.

Ad Scheduling – Setting that allows you to control and specify which hours and days you want your ads to appear, targeting periods of time when you expect your ads to be more successful. It can also be used to automatically adjust bids during specific time periods (which is also known as day parting).

Ad Status – A status for each ad that describes whether that ad is able to run, and if so, whether there are any policy restrictions on how or when it can run. Common ad statuses include Under Review, Eligible, Approved and more.

Admin – If you are an admin in a Facebook group or page, you are permitted to edit the group description, tags and settings, add more admins to the group, and remove posts or block members. You are automatically an admin if you created the group or page.

AdWords Campaign Experiments (ACE) – Allows users to test changes to their account on a portion of the auctions that your ads participate in. ACEs can be set up to test new keywords, bids, placements and more. Users can also choose how much of the traffic they want to test and even discard the experiment at any point. If the experiment is discarded, your changes will automatically revert to the way they were before the test.

AdWords Editor – A free software application by Google that allows you to make changes to your account in bulk. This allows users to add new campaigns/ad groups/keywords, make bid changes and more.

AdWords Labels – These allow advertisers to organize elements within their accounts into meaningful groups for faster and easier reporting. Labels can be applied to keywords, campaigns, ad groups and ads.

Alt Attributes with Keywords – The American with Disabilities Act (508 Compliance) states that a website should always describe the image on the page for the vision impaired. To do so, we ensure your images have proper descriptions associated with them, and if appropriate, keywords for the page. Alt attributes are also required to validate your HTML code.

Amplify – Twitter Amplify enables media companies and brands to capture the excitement on TV and distribute it to fans and audiences across Twitter, beyond their followers. Audiences can immediately relive that moment or experience it for the first time on their mobile phones while they engage in Twitter conversations.

Analytics Content Experiments – Formerly known as Website Optimizer (stand-alone), this tool is built into the Analytics platform and allows users to setup A/B or multivariate tests for their landing pages to see how those changes affect user behavior. This tool can be a great way to make incremental improvements to conversion rates.

Application Program Interface (API) – An application that interacts directly with one or more external servers.

Audiences – In PPC, audiences are used to define the customers you target with your PPC ads. An audience can also refer to a group of users that have visited one or more pages of a website or completed a specific action. After this happens, they are included on lists that can be used to enhance your display network and re-marketing efforts. Advertisers can also create custom combinations, which can be a good way to target more specific audiences. Audiences are used to define the customers you target with your PPC ads.

Automated Rules – A feature that automatically adjusts your ad statuses, budgets and bids, so you don’t have to spend so much time manually monitoring your campaigns. The cool part about automated rules is that you can customize and fine-tune them to your individual account goals/KPIs.

Automatic Bidding – Automatic bidding allows you to put your bidding on autopilot with the goal of getting the most possible clicks within your budget. You can also set a CPC bid limit if you don’t want to exceed a particular price for each click.

Automatic Placements – Locations or domains on the display network where your ads can show that are automatically matched to your keywords and/or other targeting methods.

Auto Tagging – A feature in AdWords that automatically appends a custom code to your destination URLs to help you track your ad performance using website tracking programs like Google Analytics.

Average Cost-Per-Click (Avg. CPC) – The average amount that you’ve been charged for a click on your ad. Average CPC is calculated by dividing the total cost of your clicks by the total number of clicks.

Average Position – A statistic that describes how your ad is typically positioned on search results pages.

Behavioral Targeting – A method that relies on capturing website and landing page visitor information and using that data to provide these visitors with advertisements that are relevant to their needs and interests.

Bid – The maximum amount you are willing to pay for a search keyword click.

Bidding Types – There are several ways to bid on your keywords, depending on what matters most to you and your business. There are three main bidding types available: focus on clicks (CPC), impressions (CPM), or conversions (CPA).

Bing Ads – Formerly known as adCenter, Bing Ads is a service that provides pay-per-click advertising on Bing and Yahoo! search properties.

Bing Ads Editor – A free desktop tool designed to help you manage your account offline and easily make changes in bulk. As it stands currently, this is only available for Windows OS applications.

Bing Campaign Analytics – The Campaign Analytics tool helps you track whether or not your ads are achieving your desired goals. You might also think of this as Bing’s version of Google Analytics.

Bidding Software – As the title indicates, this type of software is primarily used for the automatic controlling of bids. However, bidding software is also helpful for consolidating multiple advertising channels in one place, as well as providing the ability to create high-level rules and algorithms to help optimize large PPC accounts.

Bio – A short personal description of 160 characters or fewer used to define who you are on Twitter.

Bounce Rate – Percent of people who enter your site but leave without visiting any other page.

Broad Match – The default matching option, broad match means that your ad may show if a search term contains your keyword terms in any order, and possibly along with other terms. Your ads can also show for singular or plural forms, synonyms, related searches, and other relevant variations. Sticking with the broad match default is a great choice if you don’t want to spend a lot of time building your keyword lists and want to capture the highest possible volume of ad traffic.

Broad Match Modifier (BMM) – You can add a modifier, a plus sign (+), to your broad match keywords if you’d like your ads to show when someone searches for close variants of your keywords in any order. Close variants include misspellings, singular/plural forms, abbreviations and acronyms. Unlike broad match, using a modifier excludes synonyms or related searches. For this reason, it adds an additional level of control. Using broad match modifier is a good choice if you want to increase relevancy even if it means you might get less ad traffic than broad match.

Call Extensions – Feature that enables users to display a Google forwarding or business phone number along with their PPC ad.

Call-to-Action Post- A Facebook post that includes a call-to-action button specifically made to drive traffic to your website.

Campaign – A set of ad groups (ads, keywords and bids) that share a budget, location targeting and other settings. Your AdWords account can have one or many ad campaigns running.

Change History – A tool that lists the changes you’ve made to your account during the past two years. See details about changes like bid adjustments, status changes, keyword additions and more. This is particularly helpful because you can filter changes based on a specific date or date range.

Check-Ins – Users can self-report their positioning and share their location with friends on various social media platforms. 

Circles – Clusters of a user's friends on Google+, meaning you can group certain people you choose to connect with on your Google+ into a certain circle--such as colleagues, college connections, family, etc. When you want to share content with only these individuals, you include that specific circle in your post's sharing options.

Clicks – In PPC, a click is registered when someone clicks on one of your search or display network ads.

Click-Through Rate (CTR) – A way of measuring the success of an online advertising campaign. CTR is determined by dividing the number of users who clicked on an ad by the number of impressions.

Click-to-Call – Another name for Call Extensions, where you can add a business phone number to your ad. The “click-to-call” comes from users having the ability to simply click on the phone number in your ad to place the call.

Client ID – Known as an XID in Bing Ads, a client ID is a 10-digit string of numbers that help distinguish one account from another in the Google system.

Comment – A comment is a response that is often provided as an answer or reaction to a blog post or message on a social network. Comments are a primary form of two-way communication on the social web.

Competitor Retargeting – A form of audience targeting that reaches consumers who have shown interest in a competitor destination through their search and site visitation history.

Content Marketing – The creation and sharing of media and publishing content in order to attract and retain customers through relevant and valuable content.

Contextual Targeting – Targeting feature that matches your ads to other relevant sites on the display network using your keywords and/or topics.

Conversion – A desired action taken by a website visitor, such as filling out a form or making a purchase. Search engines track visitors for up to 30 days, so your conversion may not happen until a subsequent visit several days later.

Conversion Optimizer – Also known as CPA bidding, this is a feature that uses historical conversion data to predict which clicks are likely to be valuable, then changes your bids to help you maximize conversions.

Conversion Rate – Conversions divided by clicks, which represent the rate at which a click on your ad resulted in a conversion or desired action.

Cookies – Not to be confused with snack food, this is a small file saved on people’s computers to help store preferences and other information regarding previous search history. Engines use these to track conversions and build audiences for re-marketing lists.

Cross-Device Retargeting – Tracking users across devices is a complicated process that involves the collection and processing of many different signals (such as machine configuration, operating system, or wireless setting) that when combined can be used to build a unique "fingerprint" of the device that is being used. Correlation analysis can provide an estimation of the likelihood that separate fingerprints (devices) are of the same individual profile. Cross-device targeting promises more effective audience engagement across multiple devices belonging to the same user.

Cost-Per-Engagement (CPE) – Measures the performance of your content based on the amount of engagement with your content on social media.

Cost-Per-Click (CPC) – The amount of money an advertiser pays search engines and other Internet publishers for a single click on its advertisement that brings one visitor to its website.

Cost-Per-Lead (CPL) – Also referred to as Cost-Per-Acquisition (CPA), this refers to the amount of money an advertiser pays search engines and other Internet publishers for a lead generated on its advertisement.

Cost-Per-Phone Call (CPP) – Maximum amount you’re willing to pay for a phone call. This feature will only work when using call extensions and a Google forwarding number with your ad.

Cost-Per-Thousand (CPM) – Pricing means advertisers pay their maximum bid amount for every 1,000 impressions received. This option is only available on the display network.

Cost-Per-View (CPV) – Used with TrueView video campaigns, this is a bidding option that allows users to pay each time your video is played.

Cover Photo – The 851×315 pixel image found at the top of your page or profile.

Daily Budget – An amount set for each ad campaign to specify how much, on average, you’d like to spend each day. However, it is important to know that on any single day, you can receive up to 20% more in costs than your daily budget.

Dashes vs. Underscores in URLs – Underscores are alpha characters and do not separate words. Dashes are word separators, and should not appear too many times.

Data Filters – A feature that allows users to select, sort and view only the information that is most important to them. This oftentimes makes large quantities of data easier to digest.

Day Parting – Optimization technique where you adjust your ads to run during the most profitable hours and/or days. For example, if you run a call center that operates from 8-5, you can schedule ads to run during that time span only.

Default Maximum CPC – Set at the ad group level, this represents the maximum amount you’re willing to pay for each ad click. If you don’t set a specific keyword bid, AdWords will apply your default maximum CPC bid.

Demand Side Platform Programmatic – Programmatic buying describes online display advertising that is aggregated, booked, flighted, analyzed and optimized via a demand side platform (DSP) and algorithms. Programmatic implies the use of multi-sourced data signals to inform targeting and optimization decisions. Although “programmatic” suggests little or no human intervention, algorithmic optimization can only do so much. Smart macro optimization by analytical “traders” can amplify programmatic performance significantly.

Description Tag – The description tag should include the most important info and keywords before the SERP cutoff at approximately 160 characters in Google. 

Destination URL – The URL address for the page you’re sending traffic to from your PPC ads. This is allowed to be different from the display URL, although it has to direct users to the same domain as what is in the display URL.

Devices – Electronics that are capable of displaying a PPC ad. Supported devices include desktops/laptops, mobile devices and tablets.

Dimensions Tab – Reporting section in AdWords that allows advertisers to segment and view data based on a variety of criteria. For example, you can view aggregate data by destination URL, geographic location, hour of day, day of week and more.

Direct Message (DM) – Most recently called simply a "message," these tweets are private between the sender and recipient.

Direct Site Targeting – A form of audience targeting where display banner ads are placed on sites that your target market regularly visit.

Display Ad - An ad you create that is shown on the right-hand side of Facebook along with other ads.

Display Campaign Optimizer (DCO) – Tool that increases conversions by automatically managing, targeting and bidding for campaigns on the Google Display Network. Simply set a CPA target and AdWords will do the rest. However, you must have enough historical conversion data in order to opt into this feature.

Display/Content Bid – The maximum amount you’re willing to pay for an ad click on the display network.

Display/Content Network – A collection of more than a million websites, videos, and apps where your ads can appear. Google’s network is called the Display Network, while Bing’s network of sites is called the Content Network. In a lot of PPC circles, the terms are used interchangeably.

Display URL – The webpage address that is shown with your ad. This is often different from your destination URL and much shorter. Just make sure you only have one display URL per ad group and that it uses the same root domain as your destination URL. AdWords allows 35 characters for display URLs, and if your domain is longer than that they may show a shortened version.

Duplicate Content – Content that has either been shared, copied or stolen between pages internally or externally.

Dynamic (Ad) Targeting and Retargeting – Targeting method that matches relevant searches with ads generated directly from your website automatically.

Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI) – Feature that allows users to dynamically customize an ad to include keywords contained in user search queries.

Editorial Review – Policies that govern the content and forms of advertising accepted by the search engines. Every time you create a new ad/keyword/etc., it will be submitted for editorial review to ensure guidelines are met.

Embed Tweet – Embedded tweets make it possible for you take any tweet and embed it directly into the content of your article or website. Tweets display with expanded media like photos, videos, and article summaries, and also include real-time re-tweet and favorite counts.

Embedded Negatives – Strategy that allows advertisers to show for every variation of a keyword, except for the keyword itself. This is a great way to help avoid cross-contamination of campaigns/ad groups housing similar or closely related terms along with ad groups that house different match types.

Embedding – The act of coding a website so that photos or videos can be hosted on one website yet viewed on another as though it were part of that site.

Enhanced CPC (ECPC) – Automatic bid management feature designed to increase your ROI by raising or lowering your bids for keywords that the system predicts are more likely to convert.

Engagement – Engagement is the number of unique people who have clicked on your posts, and measurements include all likes, comments and shares.

Engagement Rate – Percent of people who saw a post that liked, shared, clicked or commented on it.

Event – Facebook events can be created by a page or profile, and are used for parties, business events, planned chats, etc.

Exact Match – The most specific of the keyword match types and triggers your ad when users type your keyword exactly as is and in the same order.

Facebook – A free-access social networking website where users can join and organize themselves by city, workplace, school, and region to connect and interact with other people. People can also add friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves.

Facebook Ads – Online social advertising channel with over 1 billion people. Due to an abundance of demographic data, Facebook has become a valuable asset to many PPC marketers.

Facebook Exchange (FBX) – Advertising program that targets users who visit a site (other than Facebook) and spend some time looking at a product, but don’t make the final purchase. With FBX, that third-party site will now be able to follow you to Facebook and target you there with a highly specialized ad. Think of it as re-marketing to Facebook’s colossal user database.

Favorite – This functions just as a Facebook “like” does. You can also use this as a saving tool and go back to access your favorites at a later time.

First-Party Data Targeting – “Look-alike” campaigns targeted to reach consumers on all devices with similar demographic, psychographic and technographic characteristics to previous website visitors.

• – Image hosting websites, web services suite, and online community platform. This type of photo sharing app is quite popular.

Follow Friday (FF) – Twitter users often suggest which accounts other users should follow on Fridays by tweeting with the hashtag #FF.

• – To follow people on Twitter is to subscribe to their tweets or updates on the site. 
• – These are the people who have followed your handle and can see your updates in their feed. You do not have to follow them in order for them to become your follower.
• – A friend is someone who received your friend request and accepted it. Once the request is accepted, you will start seeing their updates in your newsfeed.

Free Clicks – Clicks that aren’t billed, such as actions taken on an interactive ads. For example, an expandable image as part of the ad format will result in “free clicks” when that interaction occurs.

Frequency Capping – Feature that enables advertisers to create a threshold for the number of times your ads appear to the same person on the display network.

Fully Qualified Links – These domains are the best for search engine spiders (Internet bots), allowing easy access to site content on all browsers and maximing SEO. If a link looks something like “../../pagename” (a relative link), as opposed to the typical http://www.URL, then it may result in crawl issues for some search engines.

Geotargeting – Also known as location targeting, this campaign setting allows advertisers to specify the geographical countries, regions, states, etc., where their ads will be served.

Google+ – A free-access social networking website where users can join and organize themselves by areas of interest, city, workplace, school, and region to connect and interact with other people. People can also add friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves.. Google+ also offers Hangouts, which are conversations that can range from simple texts to live video feeds with others around the globe.

Google AdWords – Online advertising platform that offers pay-per-click advertising and site-targeted advertising for text, banner and rich-media ads, and more.

Google Analytics – Free website optimization service and interface that provides detailed statistics regarding visits to your site and behavioral analysis.

Google Checkout – Google Checkout is a service that makes buying and selling across the Web fast, convenient, and secure. When you utilize Google Checkout an icon will be displayed within your pay-per-click ad; this can build trust with users and increase your click-through rate.

Google Forwarding Number – A unique phone number generated through Google that advertisers can use in their ads to help track business calls and performance.

Google Merchant Center – A tool that helps advertisers upload product listings and feeds to be used for Google Shopping, Google Product Ads, and Google Commerce Search.

Graph Search – Facebook Graph Search is a semantic search engine that is designed to give answers to a user’s natural language queries rather than a list of links. It uses an algorithm to find information from within a user’s network of friends.

• – This can be public or private, and gives users the chance to come together to talk about a specific subject in one place.
• – This is your username on Twitter and appears with an @ symbol in front of it.
• – The # symbol is used to mark keywords or topics in a tweet and creates a link unifying the conversation into one stream.

Head Section Order – Title > Description > Keywords. The information you put in these tags is used to render the title and description in the search engine results pages, and is what searchers see.

• – The larger customizable area for a photo on your Twitter profile (just like a Facebook “cover photo”). 

Heading Tags – In the body of your content, heading tags serve as a page’s table of contents. (They should begin as <h1>; subsequent heading tags should be <h2>, <h3>, <h4>, etc.)

• – When you star a post on your page, it will expand to widescreen. This allows you to better feature the posts you think are important.

Image Ads – Formatted for the Google Display Network, these are ads that include graphics to help promote your business. Ads of this type support a variety of sizes and formats, such as static, animated or flash.

Impressions – Number of people who see your PPC ad.

Impression Share – Impression share (IS) is the number of impressions you’ve received divided by the estimated number of impressions you were eligible to receive. Eligibility is based on your current ads’ targeting settings, approval statuses, bids and Quality Scores. Data is available at the campaign and ad group levels.

• – Measurements on your page's performance available after at least 30 people like your page. This is your analytics hub.
• ­– Image and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community platform. This type of photo sharing app is quite popular.

Interest (Targeting Categories) – Allows you to reach people based on their interests as they browse pages across the Google Display Network. You can select from a wide-ranging list of these categories – from autos and sports to travel and fashion – and Google will show ads to people who you think are interested in those categories.

Invalid Clicks – Also known as "click fraud," these are clicks on ads that Google considers to be illegitimate, such as unintentional clicks or clicks resulting from malicious software.

Key Influencers – Key and influential people within your community of followers that can provide you with great content. These accounts typically have a large, active base of followers.

Key Performance Indicator (KPI) – Performance measurement that stems from your primary metric or what is most important to a particular business’s success. For example, conversions and cost-per-acquisition can be popular KPIs for many PPC advertisers.

Keyword – A word or phrase that PPC advertisers use to target and display their ads in the sponsored search results.

Keyword Matching Options – Keyword-level settings that help control how closely the keyword needs to match a person’s search term in order to trigger your ad. These include broad, modified broad, phrase, exact and negative match types. You also have the ability to specify whether or not you want your phrase and exact match terms to show for plurals, misspellings or close variants.

Keyword Strategy – The keyword strategy is an ongoing process that essentially never ends. We start this process with extensive research to come up with keywords that will not only bring traffic, but also quality traffic.

Keywords Tag – A brief and concise list of the most important themes of your webpage. These are often listed in order from longest in length to shortest in length, separated by commas.

Keyword Tool – Found in the AdWords interface, this tool helps advertisers find new keyword ideas and add them to their account. This can also be used to estimate traffic volume, identify negative keywords and determine competition level.

Landing Page – Specified by the destination URL, this is the webpage where customers end up after they click your ad. It is important to note that landing page quality is an important factor in determining Quality Score.

Lead – Desired action taken by customers – such as filling out a form, submitting an email or downloading a whitepaper – that allows marketers to capture a user’s information for later use.

Like (a page, a comment) – An action that can be made by a Facebook user. Instead of writing a comment for a message or a status update, a Facebook user can click the "Like" button as a quick way to show approval and share the message. This is also the action taken to follow a brand page.

LinkedIn ­– An interconnected network of experienced professionals from around the world. Users can find, be introduced to, and collaborate with qualified professionals.

Linking Strategy – An internal linking structure typically stems from a siloing strategy. Inbound/outbound links should be part of an organic, natural strategy in compliance with search engine guidelines that builds high-quality targeted incoming traffic. Placing or getting incoming links creates a visibility for your site while also adding credibility.

• – Curated groups of other Twitter users. Used to tie specific individuals into a group on your Twitter account and segment conversations.

Location Extensions – Type of extension that includes a business address and phone number in text ads. These can be a great way to help attract more customers to local businesses.

Long-Tail Keyword – A specific keyword phrase that consists of two or more words. Most advertisers use long-tail keywords to target the customer at or near their buying stage. These also generally have less competition since they are more specific, which leads to reduced CPCs.

Making JavaScript/CSS External – One way to make sure that content is crawled first is to externalize the JavaScript/CSS code by eliminating unnecessary lines above the body content.

Make Robots.txt File – Making sure that a robots.txt file exists is very important, even if it is empty. The robots.txt file tells the search engine spiders what to index and what not to index. Make sure the file doesn’t accidentally exclude important files, directories or the entire site, as such an error would be critical.

Managed Placements – Placement targeting lets AdWords advertisers choose individual spots in the Google content network, basically particular sites, where they’d like to see their ads displayed. 

Manual Bidding – Default bidding option where CPC bids are set manually for a particular keyword, placement, etc. Advertisers also have the option to turn on automatic bidding if they don’t want to control their CPC bids manually.

Manual Tagging – As opposed to auto tagging, this option allows advertisers to tag their destination URLs manually with “_utm” information that can be read and understood by Analytics or third party tracking solutions. These are also used heavily in email blasts and promotional campaigns.

Match Type – Matching option that allows advertisers to control when their ad triggers in response to a particular search query.

• – Mentioning another user in your tweet by including the @ sign followed directly by their username is called a "mention." Also refers to tweets in which your username was included.

Modified Tweet (MT) – Similar to RT. Placed before the retweeted text when users manually retweet a message with modifications, such as shortening a tweet.

My Client Center (MCC) – A powerful tool for handling multiple AdWords accounts. MCCs are ideal for large advertisers with more than one account.

Negative Keywords – Advertisers add negative keywords to their account so their ads do not display when a customer types in a search query containing that keyword. Negative keywords help you qualify the clicks to your site more effectively.

News Feed – The first thing you see when you log in to Facebook. The feed shows new posts from pages and profiles you’ve “liked.”

• – This lets you view interactions, mentions, recent follows and retweets on your account. Using the Notifications tab you’re able to view who has favorited or retweeted your tweets, who has recently followed you, and all of your @replies and @mentions.

Opportunities Tab – Located in the AdWords interface, this is a tool designed to help you get the most out of your PPC campaigns. Common suggestions include budget recommendations, potential keyword additions and more. These are all automated opportunities, so use the opportunities tab with caution.

Organic Reach – The total number of unique users who were shown your post through unpaid distribution.

Overall Word Count – The amount of words you have on a webpage. This will vary by topic, keyword and intent. But, in general, less than 250 words is rarely recommended – especially if you’re trying to optimize for keywords. Informational webpages will almost always warrant at least 450 words. And quality content is key.

Page – Your business profile or “page” where customers can find your posts and business information.

Paid Reach – The total number of unique people who were shown your post as a result of ads.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) – A method of advertising where the advertiser pays for each click received through the search engines.

Pay-Per-Click Management – Service provided by certified agencies or individuals that help businesses achieve their PPC goals and maximize returns.

Personal Message (PM) – A private form of communication between different members on a social media platform. It is only seen and accessible by the users participating in the message.

Phrase Match – Keyword setting that allows ads to show only when someone’s search includes the exact phrase of your keyword or close variations of the specific keyword phrase.

Pinned Tweet/Post – You have the option of placing a tweet or Facebook post of your choice at the top of your Twitter/Facebook profile to be seen first (current promotions, etc.).

Pinterest – Another image-sharing site, Pinterest allows users to make “pinboards” for any topic they want. Users can also simply browse websites or other pinboards and find items they can pin to their pinboards.

Placement Exclusions – Similar to a negative keyword, exclusions prevent your ads from appearing on individual websites or categories of websites. These are designed to help increase relevancy and control of ad placement on the display network.

Post – A term used for sharing content on your Facebook page.

Post Reach – The number of unique people who saw your post. Your post counts as reaching someone when it’s shown in a user’s News Feed. Total reach includes the number of unique people who saw any activity from your page, including posts, posts by other people, page like ads, mentions and check-ins.

Predictive Modeling – Process used in predictive analytics to create a statistical model of future behavior. Predictive analytics is the area of data mining concerned with forecasting probabilities and trends. These models are made up of a number of predictors, which are variable factors (gender, age, purchase history) that are likely to influence future behavior or results.

Privacy Statement – Legal statement on a website that discloses all the ways a party gathers, uses, discloses and manages visitors’ data.

Product Listing Ads (PLA) – Search ads that include rich product information, such as images, pricing, and business names, without requiring additional keywords or ad text. Ads of this nature appear under the Google Shopping results automatically for consumer queries relating to one of your product offerings.

Profile Picture – The image that represents you or your business. This is the smaller photo that shows up alongside all of your posts.

Promoted Account – An ad that invited targeted Twitter users to follow your brand – attracting more of the right followers to your brand faster. It does not allow users to take any other engagement action except to follow your account.

Promoted Post – Also known as a sponsored post, posted to any community-driven notification-oriented website which is explicitly sponsored as an advertisement by a particular company. You can pay to boost a specific post so that it is shown to more friends or fans, and these promoted posts can be specifically targeted to reach whichever audience you desire.

Promoted Tweet – Tweets that brands pay to promote at the top of search results on Twitter to users who fall within the segmented audiences they have targeted. Brands can promote tweets based on keywords (conversations), interest groups or other handles.

Quality Score – A complex and partially hidden formula used by search engines that takes CTR and several other factors into account in order to decide whether your keywords are relevant to your ads and landing page. This is multiplied by your maximum CPC to calculate ad rank, that is, what your ad position will be.

• – The act of reposting a previously posted photo on Instagram, typically using the hashtag #regram, while crediting the original publisher.

Re-Marketing or Re-Targeting – Allows advertisers to show ads to users who’ve previously visited your website as they browse other sites on the display network. This creates a network of high-intent and relevant users that have the opportunity to click on your ad and return to your site to make a purchase.

• – A tweet posted in reply to another user's message, usually posted by clicking the "Reply" button next to their tweet in your timeline. Always begins with @username.

Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) – Ratio of money gained or lost on an investment relative to the amount of advertising (PPC) money invested.

Retweet (RT) – When someone on Twitter sees your message and decides to re-share it with his/her followers. A “Retweet” button allows them to quickly resend the message with attribution to the original sharer's handle.

Rich Media – While text ads sell with words, and display ads sell with pictures, rich media ads offer more ways to involve an audience with an ad. The ad can expand, float, peel down, play a video, etc.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) – Form of online marketing that involves the promotion of Web properties by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages and through paid online advertisements like PPC.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – Process of increasing organic traffic from search engine results pages. All major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing have such results, where webpages and other content are analyzed and ranked based on what the search engine considers most relevant to the user.

Search Engine Results Page (SERP) – The listings a user sees in the search engines after typing in a search query. The results typically consist of a series of organic listings and paid or sponsored search ads.

Search Network – A group of search-related websites where your ads can appear, including Google search sites and search partners.

Search Partners – Websites partnered with Google to show PPC advertisements on the search network. They can be opted out of in the Google interface, but advertisers don’t have the ability to bid exclusively on search partners.

Search Query – A basic search query is what the user enters when searching on any search engine. If their search includes the keywords that you are bidding on, your ad will appear (depending on match types and all of the other targeting options, of course).

Search Query Report (SQR) – Also known as a “search terms report.” this allows advertisers to review the actual search queries that triggered their PPC ads. This report is great for identifying new profitable keyword ideas and blocking irrelevant queries.

Search Retargeting Campaign – PPC paid search ads targeted to consumers who visited your site and did not complete a desired action. Search retargeting provides additional opportunities to connect with consumers when they continue to look for what they need on Google Search.

• – A self-portrait photograph, typically taken with a hand-held digital camera or camera phone. Selfies are often shared on social networking services such as Instagram, Snapchat, and Tumblr.
• – A metric that measures the tone of a conversation on a blog post, tweet, discussion, etc., usually by categorizing it as positive, negative or neutral.

Server Configuration – The network topography that is critical in SEO. By matching up with the correct and positive configurations, one can stop the issues that typically arise in the SEO process, such as 404 (page cannot be found), 302 (temporary redirects), etc.

• – The “Share” button lets people add a personalized message to links before sharing on their timeline, in groups, or to their friends via a Facebook message.

Shared Budgets – AdWords budgeting option that allows advertisers to specify a particular amount for a group of campaigns to spend in a given day. This can be a good way to avoid spreading budgets too thin, particularly in smaller accounts.

Site Linked (Extensions) – Feature that displays links to different pages of a website beneath the ad text. Sitelinks can appear in ads at the top and bottom of the SERPs and for some search partners. Sitelinks need to direct users to a different destination URL than what your main ad points to.

Site Map – An essential roadmap to a website that can help tell the search engine bots a physical location for each single landing page within a website. Often located on the footer section, they also provide hierarchy of the site structure to the search engine bots.

Site Retargeting – A form of audience targeting where display banner ads are shown to consumers who visited your site and did not complete a desired action. Site retargeting provides messaging that reminds the consumer of your site and encourages them to return to the site.

Social Extensions – Type of AdWords extension that displays public brand endorsements (+1s). However, you must have a Google+ page to be considered eligible.

SPAM Tactics – “Black hat” SEO techniques, if you will, that go against major SEO guidelines, such as Google Webmaster.

• – Not to be confused with the eight-legged arthropod, spiders are Internet bots (software apps that run automated tasks over the Internet) that systematically browse the Web, typically for indexing purposes. Also known as Web crawlers.

Static Index Pages – These pages contain chunks of constant text on the home page in order to avoid diluting the theme of a site and causing poor rankings for key terms.

Static Pages – A webpage that is delivered to the user exactly as stored, in contrast to the dynamic Web URLs that are generated by a Web application.

Tabs – These are found underneath your cover photo and include the number of friends/fans, photos, and any third-party apps you have.

• – Also known as social bookmarking, this is the act of using key words to describe online items and classify them using schemas that users have created and saved. You can also “tag” other brand pages or people in your posts when referencing them.

Text Ad – The standard type of AdWords ad, which typically includes a headline (25 characters in length), two lines of descriptive text (35 characters per line), and a display and destination URL (the display URL is limited to 35 characters).

Text Navigation – Tactic provides users a way to navigate the site, as well as providing search engines a way to find relationships between the “Home > Category > Sub-category” landing pages.

Text Placeholders – Placeholder variables, such as {param2} and {param3}, allow users to simultaneously update multiple ads in your campaign all at once. One or more placeholders can be added to the ad title, ad text, display URL, or destination URL of multiple ads.

Text vs. Images – Search engines cannot see images, yet are very good at seeing text. For that reason, it is important to use text vs. images as much as possible. This helps the spiders understand what the page is about, and allows a site to look good from both a user experience and search engine standpoint.

Throwback Thursday (TBT) – Weekly trend of sending out tweets with photographs from any previous time or event on Thursday.  

• – Stream of updates on your own personal profile or page based on the people/brands you follow.

Title Tag – Also called title elements, these tags define the title of the document. They are often used on search engine results pages (SERPs) to display snippets for a given page, and are important both for SEO and social sharing. Title tags should be approximately nine words, plus or minus three.

Top vs. Side – Refers to a paid ad’s placement on the SERPs. Ads can appear at the top of the page or along the right-hand side of the page. This can be helpful since an ad’s performance can oftentimes be affected by position.

Topics Targeting – Targeting method that allows advertisers to show ads on other websites around the display network that feature content related to your selected topics. Topics targeting is based on the content of the websites and how Google classifies them.

Tracking Code – Small snippet of HTML added to a “thank you” page that shows what happens after a customer clicks on an ad and enables the free conversion-tracking tool.

Traffic Estimator – Free AdWords tool that predicts how well a particular keyword could perform based on local and global search volume. Advertisers can also use this tool to research average prices and ad positions.

Trends – The most commonly used hashtags at that present time are considered trends. They can also be made to pull from a specific location.

TrueView Video Ads – Available in in-stream, in-slate, in-search and/or in-display formats, these are video ads through AdWords that give viewers the choice of messages they want to see and when.

Tumblr – A site that allows users to create blogs and share links, videos, images, news articles, or their own thoughts. Tumblr is image intensive, but text posts are just as popular.

• – A 140-character update shared through the micro-blogging site Twitter.

Twitter – A social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read other users' updates known as “tweets.” Tweets are sentences of up to 140 characters in length, which are displayed on users page and anyone who has signed up to look at that users page or be a follower will see it.

View-Through Conversion – Provides a measurement of the number of online conversions that happened within 30 days after a user saw a Google Display Network ad, didn’t click on that ad, and then converted via another means.

Vine – A social media channel that allows users to create and share 6-second videos on other social media channels. The small films are looped to play continuously, offering the option of a video with sound or without sound.

UGC: User-Generated Content – This refers to a variety of media content consisting of original words, thoughts and images that users voluntarily submit to an online entity.

Verified Account – This is used to establish authentic handles on Twitter. Verified accounts are signified by a blue symbol containing a white checkmark.

Web Analytics – The measurement, collection, analysis, and reporting of website data for purposes of understanding and optimizing Web usage. This is not just a tool for measuring Web traffic, but can be utilized for market research and measuring the results of traditional media ad campaigns as well.

YouTube – An online destination to watch and share original videos worldwide through a Web experience. YouTube allows people to upload and share video clips on YouTube.com and across the Internet through websites, mobile devices, blogs, and email. While individuals have uploaded most of the content on YouTube, media corporations and other organizations offer some of their material via the site. Unregistered users can watch the videos, while registered users are permitted to upload an unlimited number of videos. Accounts of registered users are called “channels.”