There are a number of terms specific to online marketing and the internet that are helpful to know in order to understand how Kinetica Media can make your business money. The following are a sampling of these internet marketing terms. We always strive to speak in plain, easy-to-understand English, but if you ever don't understand something we say or write, please ask! You won't know how effective we really are at generating profits for you through our internet marketing services if you don't understand the basics.
Quick Jump to Internet Marketing 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
Above the Fold – The part of the page you can see without scrolling down or over. The exact amount of space will vary by viewer because of screen settings. You often pay a premium for advertisement placements above the fold, which will add to the costs of internet marketing services, but may also add to results.
Advertising Network – A group of Web sites where one advertiser controls all or a portion of the ads for all sites. A common example is the Google Network , which includes AOL, Amazon, Ask.com (formerly Ask Jeeves), and thousands of other sites.
Affiliate Marketing – A type of internet marketing in which you partner with other Web sites, individuals, or companies to send traffic to your site. You may pay on a Cost per Click (CPC) or Cost per Acquisition (CPA) basis.
Algorithm – The term search engines use for the formulae they use to determine the rankings of your Natural Listings. Search engines will periodically send a Spider through your Web site to view all its information. Their programs analyze then analyze this and other data to value your site and fix whether or not, and how high or low pages on your site will appears on various searches. These algorithms can be very complicated (Google alone currently uses 106 different variables) and search engines closely guard their algorithms as trade secrets.
Banners – Picture advertisements placed on Web sites. Such advertising is often a staple of internet marketing branding campaigns. Depending upon their size and shape, banner ads may also be referred to as buttons, inlines, leaderboards, skyscrapers, or other terms. When using specifics, banner ads refer to a 468x60 pixel size. Banner ads can be static pictures, animated, or interactive.
Banner ads appear anywhere on a site – top, middle, bottom, or side. Banner costs vary by Web site and advertiser; two of the most popular pay structures are Cost per 1,000 Impressions (CPM) and flat costs for a specified period of time.
Blog – Short for Web log, blogs are part journal, part Web site. Blogs are becoming increasingly popular as forums for people to express their views to a potentially unlimited audience. Personal recommendations from bloggers with large or dedicated followings can greatly help a business. Likewise, complaints can drive away many potential clients.
Behavioral Targeting (BT) – An area of internet marketing becoming increasingly refined, behavioral targeting looks to put ads in front of people who should be more receptive to the particular message given past Web behavior, including purchases and Web sites visited. The use of cookies enables online behavioral targeting.
Click through Rate (CTR) – # of clicks / # of impressions. Click through rate is a common internet marketing measurement tool for ad effectiveness. This rate tells you how many times people are actually clicking on your ad out of the number of times your ad is shown. Low click through rates can be caused by a number of factors, including copy, placement, and relevance.
Contextual Advertising – A feature offered by major search engine advertisers allowing your advertisement to be placed next to related news articles and on other Web pages. Contextual advertising seeks to match Web content from the display page with your advertised search term(s). Like Behavioral Targeting, contextual advertising has come a long way since its conception, but is still an area of internet marketing being refined.
Conversion Rate – This statistic, or metric, tells you what percentage of people is converting (really!). The definition of “conversion” depends upon your goals and measurements. It could mean a sign up for free information, a completed survey, a purchase made, or other.
Cookie – Think of cookies like Batman's Bat Tracer. When you visit a Web site, Batman sticks a cookie on your browser to follow you around. Batman can then go back to his Bat Cave and watch where you're going and where you've been. A little Big Brother-ish to be sure, but cookies also provide direct benefits to surfers, including remembering passwords and bringing you offers in which you are genuinely interested (see Behavioral Targeting above).
Cost per Acquisition (CPA) – An online advertising cost structure where you pay per an agreed upon actionable event, such as a lead, registration, or sale.
Cost per Click (CPC) – A common way to pay for search engine and other types of online advertising, CPC means you pay a pre-determined amount each time someone clicks on your advertisement to visit your site. You usually set a top amount you are willing to pay per click for each search term, and the amount you pay will be equal or less to that amount, depending on the particular search engine and your competitors' bids. Also referred to as PPC search engine marketing (pay per click).
Cost per 1,000 Impressions (CPM) – A common internet marketing cost structure, especially for banner advertising. You agree to pay a set cost for every 1,000 Impressions your ad receives. Search engine marketing may involve CPM costs for Contextual Advertising.
Domain Name – A Web site's main address. Direct Online Marketing™'s domain is DirectOM.com.
Forum – A place on the internet where people with common interests or backgrounds come together to find information and discuss topics.
Geo-Targeting - The ability to reach potential clients by thier physical location. The major search engines now all offer the ability to geo-target searches in their Pay-Per-Click campaigns by viewing thier ip addresses. Geo-targeting allows advertisers to specify which markets they do and don't want to reach.
HTML– HyperText Markup Language, the programming language used in Web sites. Developers use other languages that can be read and understood by HTML to expand what they can do on the Web.
Hyperlinks – Often blue and underlined, hyperlinks allow you to navigate to other pages on the Web with a simple click of your mouse.
Impressions – The number of times someone views a page displaying your ad. Note that this is not the same as actually seeing your ad, making placement and an understanding of the site's traffic particularly important when paying on a Cost per 1,000 Impressions basis.
Internet Marketing – Any of a number of ways to reach internet users, including Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, and Banner advertising. Kinetica Media specializes in these internet marketing services.
Interstitial – An ad that appears between two pages a person is trying to view. The ad often appears near a hyperlink allowing someone to quit viewing your ad and go directly to the page he or she originally tried to access. Kinetica Media typically does not employ this type of advertisement as part of its internet marketing services.
Keyword – Almost interchangeable with “Search Term”, keywords are words or a group of words that a person may search for in a Search Engine. Keywords also refer to the terms you bid on through search engine marketing in trying to attract visitors to your Web site or Landing Page. Part of successful Search Engine Optimization is including keywords in your Web site copy and Meta Tags.
Landing Page – The first page a person sees when coming to your Web site from an advertisement. This page can be any page on your Web site including your home page. Almost anytime you direct someone to your Web site from an advertisement, you should send them to a specialized landing page with tailored information to increase your landing page conversion rate. Radio advertisements are a notable exception as spelling out specific URL's can be time consuming and difficult to remember. Kinetica Media has extensive experience in creating, testing, and modifying landing page conversion rates to give your business the highest quality, least expensive, most cost effective leads possible.
Link Popularity – How many Web sites link to yours, how popular those linking sites are, and how much their content relates to yours. Link popularity is an important part of Search Engine Optimization, which also values the sites that you link out to.
Meta Tags – Meta tags allow you to highlight important Keywords related to your site in a way that matters to Search Engines, but that your Web site visitors typically do not see. Meta tags have risen and fallen in terms of valuation by internet marketers, but they still play an important role in Search Engine Optimization.
Natural Listings - Also referred to as "organic results", the non-advertised listings in Search Engines. Some search engines may charge a fee to be included in their natural listings, although most are free. How high or low your Web site is ranked depends on many factors, two of the most important being content relevance and Link Popularity.
Opt-in – This type of registration requires a person submitting information to specifically request he or she be contacted or added to a list. Opt-ins typically lower lead flow rates and raise Costs per Acquisition from internet marketing campaigns, but may produce higher percentages of interested leads.
Opt-out – Here people are automatically signed up to receive contact, but can opt out of receiving newsletters, calls, etc. at any time.
Pay per Click (PPC) – See Cost per Click (CPC), above. The most common type of search engine advertising cost structure is PPC search engine marketing. Google, Yahoo, MSN, and many more search engines all use PPC.
Permission Marketing – Along the lines of Opt-in registrations, permission marketing focuses on receiving the consent of users before being contacted or, in some cases, even seeing an advertisement. Permission marketing is centered around the concept that people are increasingly tuning out the barrage of advertisements they see each day. Its focal tenet is that a business will have a better chance of gaining a client when the client first gives permission to be sent an ad or contacted. Search engine marketing by its nature can be thought of as a type of permission marketing – showing advertisements to people already searching for that information – as long as the ad is relevant to what they are searching.
Pop-Under – An advertisement that opens in a new Web Browser window once you visit a particular page or take some other action. Considered less annoying than Pop-Up ads because the new window appears behind the existing one.
Pop-Up – An extremely abused type of online marketing advertisement, pop-ups open new windows on your screen that partially or wholly cover your current Web Browser window. Some search engines ban ads that create a certain number (or even any) pop-up ads. Kinetica Media does not include pop-ups or pop-unders as part of its internet marketing services.
Rich Media – Web advertisements or pages that are more animated and/or interactive than static Banners or pages.
Real Simple Syndication (RSS) – An increasingly popular new technology that allows information to be easily shared on Web sites or given directly to users per their request. RSS feeds create new online advertising opportunities, although marketers are still debating how best to use them.
Return on Investment (ROI) – The key statistic for many companies: are your advertisements generating profits, and how much profit given the money you have had to pay. Kinetica Media always has its eye on ROI for all partners…and you should, too!
Run of Site (ROS) – A contract specifying Run of Site means that a Banner or other type of online advertisement can appear on any page, and usually in any open placement, of a particular Web site.
Search Engines – Search engines are places people go to search for things on the internet, such as Yahoo!, Google, or MSN Search. They're pretty popular. According to comScore qSearch data from January 2005, 133 million people are making 4.9 billion searches each month and 99% of all internet users utilize search engines.
Most search engines provide Web sites two ways of appearing: Natural (free) and Paid. Natural Listings, also referred to as organic listings, appear based on the search engines' own formulae. You can't pay to have your site listed higher (although some search engines require that you pay to be included in the Natural listings), but you can perform Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Paid Listings usually appear above or to the side of Natural listings and are typically identifiable as advertisements. The most common cost for Paid listings is Pay per Click (PPC) Search Engine Marketing.
Search Engine Marketing – Search engine marketing typically refers to the use of Paid Listings within results returned by Search Engines. A good search engine marketing company will select an exhaustive set of industry-related Search Terms to advertise on, set up your Search Engine Marketing accounts, write advertising copy, create Landing Pages, control your bidding (how much you're willing to pay per Search Term click), and test and refine your advertising for effectiveness. The above items serve as a general outline for how Kinetica Media will help your business through Search Engine Marketing.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – A fancy way of saying “making your site search engine friendly”. Search engine optimization is typically difficult to do on your own, especially given the increasing complexity and differences among all the search engines. Two important factors that rank highly in all major search engines are Link Popularity (how many Web sites – and how highly ranked those sites are – link to you) and relevant content (how pertinent information on your Web site or a particular Web page is to a search).
Search Terms – A search term is a word or group of words that a person types into a Search Engine to find what they are looking for. Based upon what a company sells, a Web site should incorporate the most popular or most popular specific search terms into the copy as Keywords. Figuring out the appropriate search terms to put into a Web site and to advertise on is a huge part of a Search Engine Marketer's job.
Spider - A noun and a verb, Search Engines have spiders crawl through all the linked pages of a Web site to gather information to include the site in their Natural Listings and also use to determine their ranking on various Search Terms.
Stickiness - How often people return to a Web site. Constant updates, news feeds, and exclusive content are all ways to make a site stickier.
Targeting - Shaping internet marketing campaigns to attract certain specific groups of prospective clients. Examples of Targeting include women, gun owners, and Medicare recipients. Behavioral Targeting is a newer, specific type of focus for advertisers.
Text Ad - An online advertisement that contains only written copy. Paid listings found on the results pages of the main Search Engines are Text Ads.
Tracking Code - Information typically included in the URL that allows an advertiser to track the effectiveness of various aspects of an advertisement. Commonly tracked items include Search Term and referring Search Engine. Kinetica Media relies heavily on tracking code because tracking results is the only way to determine how effective our internet marketing services are.
URL - Uniform Resource Locator. These are the letters and symbols that make up the address of specific Web pages.
Unique Value Proposition (UVP) - In essence, what it is that sets your product, service, or company apart from others and why potential clients should care enough to choose you.
Usability - How easy it is for a user to navigate a Web site and find the information he or she is seeking.
Viral Marketing - A newer method of internet marketing that attempts to make advertisements so interesting that viewers will pass them along to others free of charge to the advertisers.
Web Browser - The program you use to access the internet. Common browsers include Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE), Netscape, and Mozilla Firefox.
Web 2.0 – A trendy buzzword for the internet marketing services industry, but also a legitimate idea and movement: the internet as a platform. Wikis, MySpace.com, and user-edited search all operate under this premise.
Wiki – A user-written, -controlled, and –edited site. Anyone with web access can change information appearing on Wikis, which can be about broad or specific topics. Wikis are becoming increasingly popular Web sites as people search for quality and (hopefully) unbiased information. The best known example is Wikipedia.