Digital Marketing Terms Explained

Rusty Pile - President and Director of MarketingWritten by: Rusty PilePresident and Director of Marketing

As a leading Arizona digital marketing agency, local and national clients look forward to our reports every month. We regularly update our online marketing clients on the status of their SEO and PPC campaigns with reports filled with great information. Although digital marketing terms make complete sense to us, the jargon may not be as clear to you. What good are the reports if you don’t understand the data, right? So we put together an overview of online marketing terms to help you better understand website Ranking reports, SEO reports and AdWords (PPC) campaign reports.

Ranking & SEO Report

This report gives you your website’s current position (“ranking”) on Google for each search phrase we are targeting. The objective each month is to move up in ranking with our monthly SEO maintenance work. Although this will occur with many of our targeted key phrases, it won’t happen with all of them every month. This is why it is so important to understand that even if the key phrase maintains its position while others are climbing, that is also a win. Small drops in rank here and there should also be expected as changes to the website are made and as competitors and their ad agencies do the same.

Impression

An impression or a “view” refers to how many times an ad is presented. The main reason for tracking impressions is to help determine whether an advertising campaign is working or not. If you have a lot of impressions and very few clicks, then something needs to change with your ad.

Click

A click or clicks are number of times people have clicked on your ad and been taken to your website. The more clicks, the better chance of a conversion, meaning the chance of the visitor turning into a customer. Keep in mind some of the clicks may have been in error as people are not always aware of what they are clicking on. It is up to your ad agency, marketing company or web design firm to make sure your ads catch attention, are easy to understand and get your message across to reduce bad clicks.

Conversion

When a website visitor completes a certain task that we consider important, we can track that behavior and call it a conversion. Some examples of conversions include a visitor filling out a form, a visitor calling your company, and a visitor completing an online purchase. Web design is an important factor in determining higher conversion rates, however visitor analysis and marketing strategies play an even heavier role. After your website is designed and launched, then the website optimization, search engine marketing, and other digital marketing strategies begin. Website analytics are tracked for a period of time, then the site is modified as necessary to increase conversion rates. This process should continue for the lifetime of the website.

Search vs. Display Ads

Search ads only appear on search results pages. They are shown to people looking for products or services on Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. Display ads are shown to your audience when they are on other websites but are not necessarily looking for your products or services. Display ads help introduce or remind your audience of your brand, even when they are not thinking about it, thus creating brand awareness. Ideally, your display ads should reflect the design of your website or landing page that your favorite Phoenix web design, digital marketing and branding agency has developed for you. 😊

A good campaign will not only have a large number of impressions but a good conversion rate as well.

So there you have it. Understanding the above referenced terms will help decipher your SEO and PPC reports so you have a better understanding of the results of your online marketing campaigns. It will also help you understand the work we have completed and our ongoing strategy.

We are one of the oldest, most respected Arizona web design, marketing, branding, graphic design and advertising agency. Other local website design firms don’t provide the range of services we do. The fact is, most marketing companies, web design and ad agencies don’t provide search engine optimization work in-house because it is so tedious and difficult to achieve real results. SEO used to be a relatively easy thing to accomplish for anyone with a little coding knowledge, but has become a highly complex field requiring constant dilligence. Finding another digital marketing agency in Arizona who knows what they’re doing and can show top results on a limited budget is nearly impossible. That’s what clients keep telling us anyway.