Glossary
Digital marketing speaks a language all its own, with industry-specific terms and abbreviations—keyword rankings, SEM, SEO, PPC, to name a few. Our glossary will help you make sense of all things digital marketing.
Learn the language of digital marketing, from keyword rankings to SEM, SEO and PPC. Below is our Glossary of Terms—learn a few, learn them all or feel free to bookmark the link to refer to during our monthly reporting calls. Don’t worry, we promise there won’t be a test.
Still have questions? No problem! Contact Intellitonic and we will happily assist you.
SEO Metrics
External Backlink
An external backlink is a link on another website pointing to your own. The more links you have pointing to your site, the more authority your website has with search engines.
Citation Flow
Citation Flow is a number that predicts how influential a URL might be based on the number of sites that link to it. It is a Majestic Flow metric weighted by the number of citations to a given URL or domain.
Majestic defines Flow Metrics as “scores assigned to websites and URLs by algorithms run on Majestic servers during the build of an index. Flow Metrics are expressed as numbers between 0 and 100, the higher the number, the stronger the signal.”
Trust Flow
Trust Flow is a number that predicts how trustworthy a page is based on the number of trustworthy sites that link to it. It is a Majestic Flow metric weighted by the number of citations to a given URL or domain.
Majestic defines Flow Metrics as “scores assigned to websites and URLs by algorithms run on Majestic servers during the build of an index. Flow Metrics are expressed as numbers between 0 and 100, the higher the number, the stronger the signal.”
Domain Authority
Domain Authority represents Moz’s best prediction about how a website will perform in search engine rankings. This prediction is calculated by combining all other Moz link metrics (linking root domains, number of total links, mozRank, mozTrust and more) into a single score out of 100.
MozRank
MozRank represents a link popularity score and reflects the importance of any given web page on the internet. Pages earn MozRank by the number and quality of other pages that link to them; the higher the quality of the incoming links, the higher the MozRank.
MozTrust
MozTrust is Moz’s global link trust score. It is similar to MozRank but, rather than measuring link popularity, it measures link trust. Receiving links from sources which have inherent trust, such as the homepages of major university websites or certain governmental web pages, is a strong trust endorsement.
Site Metrics
Site Metrics are derived using data from Site Auditor (a tool associated with Raven Tools, which we use for our monthly reporting) and Google. You do not need to run Site Auditor in order to gather this information—it will automatically populate when you navigate to Site Performance. This data mainly relates to the ways your website interacts with search engines, including how prepared your domain is for crawling.
All Traffic
Includes traffic from the three major sources:
- Direct Traffic: visitors who arrived by either typing your URL, clicking on a bookmark, or clicking on your link in an email or other message.
- Referring Traffic (also known as all referrals): visitors who arrived by clicking a link on another site.
- Search Engine Traffic: visitors who arrived by clicking on links displayed in search engine results—this traffic is further divided into organic (unpaid) and paid search (i.e. Google AdWords).
Page Views
When a visitor arrives at your website, they often search around on a few pages. On average, a visitor will look at about 2.5 pages. Each individual page a visitor views is tracked as a page view. This metric includes data from all sources of traffic.
Page Speed
The Google Page Speed score for your website is calculated from a series of variables including but not limited to the use of CSS and whether your images are optimized. More information about Google Page Speed criteria can be found in the Desktop Page Speed section of Site Auditor.
AdWords and Paid Social Metrics
Impressions
Each time someone searches Google or the Google Network and your AdWords ad displays, it is counted as one impression.
Clicks
A click (sometimes called a click-through) occurs when a user sees your ad and clicks on the title of your ad, leading them to your landing page. You are only charged when a user clicks.
Click-Through Rate (CTR)
Click-through rate (CTR) is the number of clicks your ad received divided by the number of times your ad was shown (impressions). Your ads and keywords have their own CTRs, unique to your campaign performance. Our goal is 1-3% CTR depending on the market—the higher the CTR, the more relevant your keywords are to your ads.
Cost
Cost refers to the total advertising costs that were charged for a given date range.
Average Cost-Per-Click (CPC)
The average cost-per-click (CPC) is the average amount you paid for a click on your ad. Average CPC is calculated by dividing the total cost of your clicks by the total number of clicks.
Conversions
Number of times an ad click converted on your site. A conversion could be a sale, a newsletter sign-up, or some other action taken by the user. Conversions must be set up manually and generally describe a favorable action or transaction.
Conversion Rate
Your conversion rate is calculated by taking the number of conversions and dividing that by the number of ad clicks you received during the same time period.
