Acronyms in Online Marketing and Digital Media……WTF?

In the new world, the online world, the populace is inventing acronyms to help communicate across languages but it is also a form of elitism.

Most “geeks” love to meet “newbies” and hear them ask for help in understanding the internet or online acronyms, with a question like “URL….what does that stand for ?”

So here is an extensive list of Internet Marketing and Digital Media acronyms, to help you understand the terms but also to allow you to impress people in everyday life……knowledge is the new status symbol!

Please comment and add more so we have the definitive list………

SEO – Search Engine Optimization probably one of the more obvious ones you’re going to hear. The overriding purpose of SEO is to improve your websites visibility in the organic search engine results pages.

PPC – Pay Per Click most commonly associated with Adwords (at least in Google).

SEM – Search Engine Marketing anything that involves publicising your website on the internet.

HTML – HyperText Markup Language literally is a whole new language to learn. This is the standard language behind most websites and what the search engines read when they look at/crawl your site.

CRM – Customer Relationship Manager simply designed to help you manage useful business information. 

CMS – Content Management System used to manage the content of your website. A popular example of a CMS would be Joomla or WordPress.

SERP’s – Search Engine Results Pages  position x in the SERP’s.

URL – Uniform Resource Locator  website address, so http://www.yourwebsite.com would be your URL.

EPC – Earning per Click stands for average earnings per 100 clicks. EPC is the ultimate test to tell how well an affiliate merchant campaign is performing.

EPM – Earnings per Thousand stands for average earnings per 1,000 impressions. An impression is each single instance that the ad is viewed.

ROI – Return on Investment is the measure of how much profit is made after advertising and other costs have been subtracted.

RON – Run of Network banner advertising, your banner will be rotated among a certain number of your affiliate’s network sites with no particular targeting used.

ROS – Run of Site banner advertising,banner will be rotated among all pages of a particular website only (not multiple sites like a RON ad).

USP – Unique Selling Proposition the reason why somebody should buy from you and not your competition.

B2B – Business to Business trade between businesses rather than between businesses and consumers

B2C – Business to Consumer  businesses selling products or services to end-user consumers.

CPC – Cost Per Click cost to an advertiser for each click on a promotional link by a site visitor or newsletter reader.

CPL – Cost Per Lead advertising expenditure required to obtain each new sales lead.

CR – Conversion Rate/ Ratio percentage of respondents to an ad, or readers of a sales message that complete the action desired.

CTR – Click-Through Rate/ Ratio The percentage of website visitors or newsletter readers who click on a particular link. Used to measure response to ads or sales messages.

PPA – Pay-Per-Action affiliate commissions where a set amount is paid for generating a specific action, such as taking a free trial or subscribing to an ezine. PPL, PPC and PPS are usually considered as PPA.

PPI – Pay Per Impression Where an advertiser pays for each display (impression) of their advertisement (usually a banner).

PPL – Pay-Per-Lead Where a commission is paid for each sales lead generated by an affiliate. A “lead” is usually defined as somebody who signs up for a free trial, or requests further information, etc.

PPC – Pay Per Click – Ad sales or affiliate commissions where a set amount is paid for each click on a promotional link by a consumer.

WCAG – Web Content Accessibility Guidelines guidelines created by W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative to allow the disabled to understand content on the internet.

WOMM – Word Of Mouth Marketing advertising your website off the internet, which usually involves handing out business cards

WWW – World Wide Web interlinking of every website, article, image, video and document in the world with the use of hyperlinks and URL’s.

WYSIWYG – What You See Is What You Get  a text editor that allows you to type just as you would in a word document, which then converts the word document into HTML

XML – Extensible Markup Language XML is a programming language designed to share structured data across multiple platforms of software.

FTP – File Transfer Protocol network protocol used to transfer files between hosts, or in many cases, files on your web developer’s computer to the website’s server.

KPI – Key Performance Indicators a type of measurement for success of an activity like an internet marketing campaign.

OS – Operating Systems are the systems in which computer hardware can communicate with software. Common OSs include Windows, Linux, iOS and Mac OS X.
PR – Page Rank an algorithm used by Google that is used to measure the importance of a site. Contrary to some belief, the word Page is actually derived from its creator, Larry Page, and not in reference to a web page.
RSS – Really Simple Syndication is a type of web feed format that is commonly used for blogs and news sites to allow them to syndicate their content (really) simply. Subscribers using an RSS reader can access the information in the feed that is structured in a layout that is easier to read.
SMM – Social Media Marketing a variety of channels including popular social media outlets like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr and YouTube .