Lauren Thurman
By: Lauren Thurman – Bayshore Solutions Digital Marketing Team
Take a walk through the Bayshore Solutions’ offices in Tampa, Denver, or Ft. Lauderdale, and you’d probably hear something like “When I updated the content in the CMS and added the CTA, it increased the ranking on the SERPs, increased the CTR, and decreased the BR.” I’ve seen many tilted heads from customers and prospects who walk past my desk wondering what the heck all of those acronyms mean.
In the digital marketing industry, we live and breathe acronyms. The most common ones are SEO, SEM and PPC. (Those stand for Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing and Pay Per Click for those who don’t know. Read more on those here.) In this day and age, and in order to keep up with Google’s ever-changing algorithms, who has time to say “Content Management System” when you can simply say “CMS”?
So what are some of the other important digital marketing acronyms and how do they affect a company’s marketing results and strategy?
1. What is GA?
Google Analytics – It’s the best relationship you’ll ever have. By attaching Google Analytics to a website, you can view the analytics from a certain time frame, pull top traffic sources, as well as measure conversions, sales and much more! – and the GA tool is free.
2. What is a CMS?
Content Management System. This is a software program used to edit and publish website content. Many companies like the ease of being able to edit a webpage themselves versus submitting a ticket to a website provider. By having a website built on a CMS, it allows for SEO keywords and meta data to be easily added to the back end of the website – without requiring the skillsets or costs of a web programmer.
3. What is HTML?
Hyper Text Markup Language. This language has many tags written to depict the font, color, images and hyperlinks of a site. Web browsers such as Google Chrome, and Internet Explorer read HTML documents and compose them into visible pages that a user sees.
4. What are SERPs?
Search Engine Results Pages. A company’s SERP ranking will be the difference between success and failure. By landing high on a Search Engine Results Page more customers will see your website and the website will gain traction.
So how can a company rank high on the SERPs? Contact Bayshore Solutions!
5. What does CTA mean?
Call To Action. These would be buttons or content on a website to get a user to take action. Examples are “Contact Bayshore Solutions today for a Digital Marketing assessment!” or “Learn More about website design from the Bayshore Solutions team!” Adding CTAs on a website has proven to increase CTR, form submissions and phone calls.
6. What does CTR stand for?
Click Through Rate. In order to measure the CTR of a particular link, take the number of visitors compared to the number who clicked on that link. This can be used in SEO, SEM, email and PPC strategies.
7. What is a CPC?
Cost Per Click. This is an acronym associated with PPC marketing. A Max CPC is the dollar amount set by an advertiser that they are willing to spend every time a user clicks on an ad. An Average CPC is the actual price that a company is charged per click. This number will always be less than the Max CPC.
Learn more about how a PPC strategy can deliver cost-effective and immediate results to grow a company’s business.
8. What is a BR?
Bounce Rate. This is a website analytics metric that describes the percent of visitors to a website or a web page that enter, then “Bounce” off of the site, without viewing any other pages. In many cases this can be interpreted as a “First impressions fail.” The visitor was not enticed enough by what they found on the landing page (a.k.a. LP) to stick around and click further through the website. This is a metric that businesses want to minimize, relative to what is normal for their specific industry or website purpose.
9. What do WOW, MOM and YOY mean?
Week Over Week, Month Over Month and Year Over Year. These acronyms are often used to present changes in numbers over the designated time frame. WOW and MOM tend to show more extreme measures, as they are affected more by timely events such as website visits over a holiday weekend, coupon code influences on ecommerce websites, etc.
This is just an introduction to the various digital marketing acronyms that are being used in our industry on a daily basis. To learn more about how your business can grow using some of the tactics represented by the acronyms above, contact the Bayshore Solutions team!
P.S.: Pop Quiz — How many CTAs were there in this post?
Lauren Thurman is a Digital Account Manager at Bayshore Solutions—a Web Design, Web Development, and Digital Marketing Agency.