Digital Marketing 101: The Beginners Guide to Online Marketing Basics

on Blog January 20th, 2023

General Digital Marketing Terms

If you’re looking to promote your business website through a search engine, social media channel, or another type of online platform, you’ll need to familiarize yourself with certain digital marketing topics.

Let’s take a look at some key digital marketing terms 101.

Search Engine Results Page (SERP)

Search engine results pages or SERPs are generated when a user performs a search on Google or another platform. In simple terms, this is the page that contains the results of the user’s search. In search marketing, the SERP usually contains 10 results, which is the reason why most businesses aim to obtain one of these top spots.

Customer Acquisition

This term doesn’t only apply to online channels, but it’s an essential digital 101 piece of information. Customer acquisition describes the process through which you attract clients to your business, including all marketing and promotion practices you have in place.

Impression

An impression is a digital interaction that involves a user simply viewing an ad or SERP link. Additionally, this value can be used to calculate other metrics because it enables you to compare the number of people that saw a link to your content versus the number of people that clicked on it, whether it’s on a paid or organic campaign.

Click-Through-Rate (CTR)

CTR is a digital marketing metric used that allows you to see the percentage of people that click on your ad or SERP result. Search engines like Google use the number of impressions and clicks to calculate the CTR of specific ads, ad groups, and entire campaigns. That said, this metric has to be used in combination with other online marketing statistics to provide a wholesome picture of your performance.

Bounce Rate

Getting a top rank on search results and driving a lot of traffic to your website is a great start. But, the bounce rate, which is the percentage of people that visit a single page without exploring the rest of your site, can help you assess the success of your content.

Contextual Advertising

Contextual advertising is a common element of strategies like influencer marketing and PPC. Simply put, context advertising is the process of adjusting a marketing message based on the user’s context.

Buzz Monitoring

The online “buzz” your company generates can be compared to the amount of visibility you get. If you create more buzz on search engines, social media networks, and other marketing channels, you’ll see a rise in brand recognition, SEO rankings, and overall results.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate advertising is the practice of partnering with an independent digital marketer that helps you promote your products and services through social media and other channels.

A/B Testing

A/B testing is the practice of creating two or more versions of an ad, page, or another form of content in order to compare both. The goal is to identify the best performer and repeat the process to ensure the best outcome. This can be used to build a better keyword strategy, boost rankings on search results, and craft a better social media campaign, among other uses.

Brand Positioning

Brand positioning refers to your company’s reputation and how it measures up to competitors. In addition to how users perceive you, brand positioning also includes your product’s quality, prices, and other variables that can help determine your success.

Customer Segmentation

In traditional and online marketing, customer segmentation refers to the process of separating your target audience into different groups based on common demographic factors. This allows you to create digital marketing content for specific cohorts and distribute these materials among distinct groups in order to get better results.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising Terms

PPC has become a major staple of online marketing and for good reason. That said, paid digital marketing campaigns represent a direct investment. So, you need to have an in-depth understanding of keyword research and other practices that go beyond basic digital marketing.

Here are essential PPC digital media 101 terms you need to know.

Search Volume

Search volume represents the number of users who search for a specific keyword on a monthly basis. While also applicable in organic approaches, search volume usually determines the cost of a paid ad. Which makes this term an essential part of paid digital advertising campaigns.

Cost-Per-Click (CPC)/Keyword Price

Cost-per-click or CPC is a metric that tells you how much it costs, on average, to run an ad with a specific keyword. The CPC of a word can vary tremendously, so you need to research the cost of your keywords before building your paid digital marketing plan.

PPC Tracking

PPC tracking is the process of tracking and monitoring the performance of your paid campaigns. This area of digital marketing helps ensure that your ads are producing results, whether it’s through an SEM or social media campaign.

Bid

In the PPC context, a bid refers to the maximum amount of money you are willing to pay for an ad. To be successful, your bids usually have to be around or higher than the CPC value. With that said, many companies opt to leave this part to the platform’s marketing automation system, but this doesn’t always provide the best possible results.

Search Engine Optimization Terms

No list of key internet marketing 101 terms is complete without an SEO section.

Here are the concepts you’ll need to understand in order to learn the internet marketing basics of this approach.

Search Term/Keywords

In digital marketing, a keyword refers to the term or phrase that an individual uses to perform a query on a search platform.

Crawl Depth

The crawl depth refers to the number of pages that a search engine robot has indexed during a single crawl or analysis.

Query Refinement

In digital marketing, this is the process that users go through to find out exactly what terms they need to search for in order to find the content or product they need.

Meta-Search Engine

Also known as a search aggregator, a metasearch engine uses multiple search engines to come up with results whenever a query is performed.

Gateway Page

A gateway page in digital marketing contains a list of links and resources that users have to analyze in order to find what they need.

Sitemap

A sitemap is an XML file that contains a list of every single page on your website.

What’s the Best Way to Stay Updated with Digital Marketing?

Learning about the best online promotion techniques goes beyond digital marketing 101. The best way to keep up with the most recent changes is to be connected to the right outlets and apply what you learn in your campaigns on a daily basis.

Why is Digital Marketing Important?

Online marketing is essential because it allows you to connect with your audience while they are searching the web. This means that your potential customers are already engaged and looking for great content, which creates a golden opportunity for you to deliver outstanding materials.

Conclusion

Want to get more tips and learn concepts beyond digital marketing 101? Stay tuned to our blog and contact us today if you need help creating an online marketing strategy for your business.

Keith Eneix

My brother Neil and I founded Fannit in 2010 and set out to help entrepreneurs just like us achieve their dreams of being successful business owners. It’s been a rewarding journey for us, and we love every day of it. Inside of Fannit, I work with both our internal team and our clients to make sure that we have everybody working the right roles and we’re being as efficient as possible as a team. I’m always happy to step in whenever there is a difficult SEO challenge at hand... it’s the element of marketing that I’m most passionate about. We’re all here to get better and grow, and that’s what gets me up in the morning! Connect with me on LinkedIn >