A beginner's guide to the most common digital marketing terms

Digital marketers love an acronym. There is certainly no shortage of them, along with any number of strange-sounding buzzwords.

 

Since the start of the pandemic, many organisations have had to scramble to gain a footing on digital platforms and learn the basics of marketing and communicating with online audiences. But coming up against technical terms can be confusing to the uninitiated, causing people to assume that digital marketing might be too technical or specialist to start experimenting with. But it doesn’t need to be that way.

 

Here are a few of the most common digital marketing terms that charity marketers should know, explained:

 

A/B testing

 

An A/B test is where two different versions of the same thing are sent out and tested against each other. This can be an email, web page, social media post or website landing page.

 

The main reason to carry out an A/B is to find out which version of something is more effective. In an email, for example, an A/B test might be carried out using email marketing software to find out which subject line, image or email layout gets the most opens, interactions or results you’re looking for.

 

What’s important is to only make one change per version, so you know what factor the audience is responding to.

 

 

Bounce rate

 

A web page’s bounce rate tells you the percentage of readers who ’bounce’ after visiting. This means that they don’t visit any other pages or click on anything, but simply view the page and leave (usually a good indicator that the page has caught their attention, or given them what they’re looking for).

 

Digital marketers generally aim for a low bounce rate. However, certain pages on a charity’s website should expect to see a high bounce rate compared to others – for example, the ’contact us’ page.

 

Google Analytics is a free dashboard that charities can use to view the bounce rate of their web pages and other metrics.

 

 

Click-through rate (CTR)

 

The click-through rate is another metric that tells you what percentage of people, out of everyone who has viewed a webpage, email or social ad, click a link or button. This is an important way of telling how effective your marketing has been in meeting its goals.

 

In an email campaign, it’s often the click-to-open rate that is used to measure overall success – check out some tips on improving this here.

 

 

Conversion

 

A conversion rate takes things one stage further, looking at the goal action you want those clicks to result in. For a charity, that might mean filling in a donation form. You’d typically expect this percentage to be lower than the click-through rate, as not all the people who’ve gone to the webpage will go on to donate.

 

It’s often important to look at these two metrics together, as a low click-through rate isn’t necessarily a bad thing if the percentage of people converting is high.