Confusing Marketing Terms
There’s a reason communication is such a blast and also so insufferable. We humans really like to gum up our sentences by shortening our phrases.
Australians quite literally renamed McDonalds to “Macca's” and it became so popular, McDonald’s themselves have adopted the name as their DBA. DBA… see! Why do we do this??
Everybody loves a good acronym. And no one enjoys it more than the marketing and advertising field.
This week’s Sip & Strategy is about the various forms of terminology, digital or other. Push up your glasses, prepare to squint at abbreviations, and welcome to the Confusing Marketing Terms episode.
There are so many abbreviations used in the marketing world that it’s hard to count. Here, we’ll attempt to compile all the acronyms used in today’s advertising world to help you understand, communicate, and seem like a professional marketer. Nothing feels better than sounding smart, and there’s no better way to do that than shortening a set of words into a few simple letters.
Digital Advertising Terms
This is the lion’s share of terminology. There is no campaign or ad platform you’ll find that doesn’t shorten the various columns of data into specific 3-5 letter initials. When you need to know what you’re looking at and understand the analytics, you need to know what that data set is referencing. Here are all the digital marketing terms:
CPA (Cost Per Action)
How much it costs to get a particular desired event to take place. Whether that event is a lead form filled, someone checking out on your ecommerce site, or watching the video ad you made. It could have several steps to get to that action, or one.
CPC (Cost Per Click)
This is quite literally the cost you were charged for each individual click you received on your ads.
CPL (Cost Per Lead)
The cost it took to get a new lead. Identical to CPA but more linear in regards to leads.
CR (Conversion Rate)
This is the rate at which your audience actually made the action you were intending with the campaign. If your ad was presented to 100 people, and 20 of them clicked the ad and bought your product, then your conversion rate is 20%.
CRM (Customer Relationship Management)
This typically refers to a specific app, platform, or website that manages the interaction, engagement, data, and insights around your clientele. Think Hubspot.
CTA (Call to Action)
This one’s funny, and as inspirational as it is poignant. “Call to action” means the specific messaging used to ask your viewer to do something. Buy Now, Contact Me, Learn More, etc. are CTA’s.
CTR (Click Through Rate)
The rate at which your ad was clicked. Calculated based on the total number of times the ad was presented to your audience and how many clicks the ad received.
KPI (Key Performance Indicator)
You can’t really know you are succeeding unless you have set some goals. These are the KPIs for any campaign.
MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead)
There’s a difference between a lead and qualified lead, and the primary attribute is legitimacy. Sure, a business may fill out a form with their information, but that doesn’t mean the lead has the business specs and model you need to make them a client. That, my friend, is their qualification.
PPC (Pay Per Click)
Originally, this campaign type just refers to paid advertising with the goal being clicks. Over time, however, PPC has become a moniker for search ads; more specifically, even, a term for Google search ads.
SMM (Social Media Marketing)
This is marketing on any digital media platform that is considered to be driven by social engagement. SMM could refer to content marketing or paid advertising.
Website Terms
As if websites weren’t already confusing enough, coders just love to shorten phrases to shave off a second in any TPS report. Here’s a comprehensive list of acronyms and abbreviations regarding all the ins and outs of websites.
BR (Bounce Rate)
This rate is calculated around viewers who go to your website and leave within three seconds of arriving. It’s important to note because short visits mean that the visitor did not find what they were looking for, and answering why is a valuable insight to your website strategy.
CMS (Content Management System)
This is a website application that allows you to fully build, manage, and create a website from scratch. For example, Squarespace and Wix are both a CMS.
DNS (Domain Name System)
Let’s get technical. Basically, the DNS translates understandable human words, like wild101fm.com for example, and connects it to the server IP address (which is a long list of numbers). Without the DNS, we would have to type in a 32-digit address just to watch funny dog videos on YouTube…. Ain’t nobody got time for that.
ESP (Email Service Provider)
These bad boys are services like Mailchimp that house your contacts, create easy design templates for your emails, and allow you to send an email blast to your mailing list. Typically built with cross-platform integration and detailed contact segmentation options.
GA (Google Analytics)
A free service provided by Google, that once connected to your website, will give you insights and data on your website traffic.
ISP (Internet Service Provider)
An ISP is the business that provides access to the internet, often for a fee. Sparklight or CenturyLink are some local options, for example.
RSS (Rich Site Summary)
An RSS feed gives you a website’s current and updated information.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
SEO is definitely something that will make you sound smart. The acronym means any work or action to increase the likelihood of populating higher on search engine results.
UI (User Interface)
This is the interface that users experience…planning, mapping, and implementing all the assets, widgets, and buttons that function.
UX (User Experience)
The user experience is just that, the exact experience that someone has when they explore your website and the feeling it creates.
URL (Uniform Resource Locator)
Quite literally the website address. Ours is www.iliadmediagroup.com for example. Feel free to add it to your bookmarks, home default, and even the lock screen on your phone. We won’t be mad.
UV (Unique Visitor)
A new specific individual who visited your website. That means it wasn’t the same person who checked your frequently asked questions section 219 times that morning. It’s the one singular user who went to your careers page once, for the first time.
Radio Advertising Terms
Traditional advertising has a lot of crossover, but also a ton of words and phrases that only really apply to their respective platforms. If you’re meeting with an account executive in the radio world, it’s nice to show up to the meeting with some knowledge. Here’s a breakdown of some radio terminology:
Ad (Advertisement)
Ads, Ad, Addos (no one says that last one) - it’s all short for advertisement. It’s a commercial that is airing in a radio schedule.
Call Sign (Call Letters)
All radio stations have registered call signs. They often start with a K or Q and are designated to a specific station or channel entity. It is a requirement, by law, that radio stations mention the name and call letters once every hour the station is airing.
Copy:
The written words meant to be delivered by a DJ, voiceover talent, or business owner in a radio spot that explains (hopefully creatively - crossing fingers) your company’s marketing message, story, and/or offering.
Cume (Cumulative Audience)
This is the unduplicated number of households listening during a specified period of time. It avoids crossover from multiple members of the same house (one-household entity).
Daypart
A specific window of time during which a radio commercial could be aired. Often broken down into morning, mid day, afternoon, evening, and overnight.
Drive Time
Debatably the best time to air your ad, drive time is the two dayparts that most people are driving. Often on their way to work in the morning and on their way home from work in the later afternoon/early evening.
DMA (Designated Market Area)
This applies to many things outside of radio, but it’s a map of a specific metropolitan area that radio stations audibly can reach with their signal.
Format
Format alludes to the type of music or content the radio station produces. Whether that’s a talk show, politics, sports, or a specific genre of music, it’s all in the format.
Frequency
When constructing a radio schedule, this may be the most important factor of the strategy. Frequency is how often the radio commercial will be heard by the same audience (same station). You want at least a 3.0 on frequency, as most statistics claim that it takes at least three listens for a person to act, based on an advertisement they heard.
Jingle
There’s a reason why music sticks in your head. Catchy tunes create additional memory potential. Tie in your business message and you just may have the perfect combo for marketing success. A jingle is a song with the lyrics being about your business.
Promo (Promotion)
A promo is a specific message that a business would pay for a DJ to speak about, live or pre-recorded on air, as a part of their segment.
Ratings
This data presented via The Nielsen Company is an estimate of the size of an audience.
Remote
If your business has an event, there’s no better way to make sure you get enough heads there than a remote. This is where a radio station physically sets up at a location to remotely stream their show; often at an event or noticeable public space.
Segment
A specific, often consistent type of content that on-air talent will deliver. Not the whole show completely, but a feature or talking point within the talent’s radio show.
Share
The number of persons who listened to a station during a given time period, expressed as a percent of all persons who listened to radio during that time period.
Spot
This is basically just another word for a radio commercial or advertisement. Each commercial fills a “spot” on the radio schedule.
Stopset
The period of time in which commercials are played outside of the normal radio station content.
Syndicated
This is a type of radio show that is not necessarily local, but has evergreen potential and can be customized to air in any local market.
VO (Voiceover)
An ad came on after your favorite song and there’s a person talking about having the best HVAC service in the area. That voice is the voiceover. It’s a hired voice to speak the ad copy.
Why Do We Abbreviate Words?
As humans, we’ve been shortening titles and phrases to save on time for hundreds of years. NY Times did a pretty good job of explaining why and when it started. We have evidence of roots of this from the early Christians, using the Greek word “ichthys”, which translates to FISH. These four letters stood for “Jesus Christ, God’s son, Savior”. It’s wild to see that we’ve been looking for ways to save time, sound smarter and more in the know, and also use language as a way to connect with like-minded individuals.
Whether it’s a new term that pops up because there's a hot new social platform or rustic terminology from ancient tech, we’ve got the information you need to stay at the top of your marketing game. If you like the content, consider joining our mailing list.
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