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

 

Engagement

 

The engagement rate is a metric that’s used to measure social media posts to find out how to what extent users are interacting with your charity’s brand, through reactions, comments, replies and sharing.

 

There are multiple ways to calculate this, depending on different social media channels, using in-app analytics or a third-party tool.

 

While you could go off likes or followers alone, engagement is designed to constitute a more reliable way of telling you how well your content is doing. For more, take a look at this guide to benchmarking engagement on social media.

 

 

Impression

 

An impression means every time a piece of content lands in front of a user. For example, the number of times someone sees your Facebook update in their newsfeed, or a Google ad whilst searching, will be counted as the number of impressions. A user doesn’t have to interact with the ad or post in order for it to count as an impression, only to have seen it. This is a common metric tracked by Pay-per-click advertisers.

 

 

Organic traffic

 

Organic traffic is simply the number of users coming your charity’s website through a search engine like Google. Unlike paid traffic, these users found your website of their own accord and uninfluenced by advertising. It’s an important metric to track when considering Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), as it shows that your brand is being searched for and found.

 

 

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

 

SEO is the process of improving organic traffic to your website.

 

Google uses algorithms to work out how likely your brand is to show up in search results for relevant terms. Using SEO tactics, organisations can make themselves more visible by improving their search engine ranking. How high up you rank is important because numerous studies have shown that the majority of people never click beyond Google’s first page.

 

However, Google’s algorithms are a complex system that changes often, in order to ensure that people get the best quality results from searches. As technology and the way people view websites changes, so does SEO.

 

What’s important to know is that Google always rewards quality, original content that is written with the user in mind and that works smoothly on mobile devices. There are a few basics that you can be doing to improve your SEO – here are ten essential tips.

 

 

Pay-per-click (PPC)

 

Pay-per-click advertising is a model where advertisers pay a certain amount whenever a user clicks on their ad. It’s how Google’s search engine advertising works, and it means that you only pay for the ads that are seen.

 

The big advantage of PPC advertising is that it puts your ad in front of the eyes of a specific target audience, who are far more likely to want to engage with your content, as opposed to a more scattergun approach.

 

For a small charity, it can be difficult to know if PPC is a cost effective route to getting results. Take a look at our guide ’When should small charities use paid advertising?’ for more insight.