8 Digital Marketing Terms
When developers need to know some marketing
If you search for Goats, you’ll get adverts for Goats and not Orange Bins.
As a hardcore developer I used to shun all this marketing stuff. I’d put it in a rusty bucket with people that do Business Studies at school.
It’s ironic now that one of my main interests is marketing. I wish I’d studied some business stuff at school, because while most things can be built with little effort; getting it out in front of people is a whole new ballgame.
Whether you work for a Digital Agency, or you’re a hardcore techie that has a handoff to the frontend, having some appreciation for these terms could help you navigate the seas of a “digital marketing divide”.
1. Landing Page
At the very beginning there was a landing page. Imagine a simple page on a website. The only purpose of a landing page is to get the user to do what you want them to do.
The most common type of landing page is to fill in a form.
Everything about this page will be geared towards getting you to fill in that form.
- It may not link to the main website
- Strong text will tell you the benefits of filling in the form
- Scarcity could be in play (4 out of 5 slots taken, 34minutes until this offer runs out)
- Images of people looking at the form
- Bold clear buttons with real text, no IT slanted “Submit”. “Send me my elves in the post now”
- Social Proof – Customer Reviews
Notice the difference between a bad and a good landing page.
2. Off-site vs On-site
There’re two types of landing pages. An off-site page is a purely standalone page. With minimal or zero links back to a main website, it is highly focussed and highly targeted towards its goal.
They are constructed purely for conversion and should have a well defined flow of traffic to them. More on that later.
An on-site landing page is part of a website. Users can navigate to the page using the website and it matches the overall flow and feel of the site. The example above is an on-site page. You can still search for other products and sign into your account.
3. SEM
So we’ve got these pages that have one job. Get the user to do something. But how do we get people to see these pages? Two of the main ways are Paid and NonPaid. Adverts or no adverts (organic).
Distinctly in the paid section we have Search Engine Marketing. Just sticking with Google for now, you can run adverts within Google (Google Ads – used to be Adwords).
Adverts will be shown based on what search terms (keywords) the user has entered into their search bar.
If you search for Goats, you’ll get adverts for Goats and not Orange Bins.
4. PPC
Unfortunately these adverts are not free. Adverts are Pay Per Click. A small charge is made when a customer clicks on an advert.
How much does a standard Google Ad cost?
That’s a very difficult question to answer accurately as Google calculate the cost based on a few things:
- CPC Click Bid – You get to specify how much you’d like to spend. You specify the spend against the set of keywords that the customer types into Google Search
- Quality
- How many people click on the AD
- The quality of your landing page
- “How closely your ad matches the intent behind a user's search”
An average guide to ad cost is about $1-$2, but that doesn’t stop you from bidding $40 if you have a highly converting product.
You can set spending caps; as if your ad isn’t converting into sales then it’s a very quick way to lose a lot of money!
5. SEO
Not all traffic can come from adverts though. For various reasons you’ll need to have a good organic game as well. How can you make people come to you website for free?
Well, not much is free in life, with organic there’s still a cost. Even if you’re doing this all yourself.. time is money etc
Search Engine Optimisation. There are many things you can do to drive traffic to your site/landing page for freeeeee!
- Build it correctly using valid HTML mark up
- Have it run under HTTPS
- Make sure it loads quickly
- Have your content laid out in a logical way
- Add meaningful content that a customer is interested in
- Ensure your keywords in your content match your customers search terms
The list goes on and on. The basic catch-all is: How is my site providing relevant information to the customer and giving them a good experience?
Is they can’t read the text because it’s too small and they’re being bombarded with ads… well, your Google ranking will suffer.
6. CRO
With some good adverts and SEO you should have traffic coming to your landing page/website.
The goal of most websites that use these techniques is to sell something. If you’re getting an influx of traffic, but no sales – or you would like to improve your sales – then doing some Conversion Rate Optimisation will help you.
Maybe your offer isn’t clear? Reduce the amount of content on the page. Highlight the benefits of your offering to the customer.
Maybe they can’t easily see your CTA? (Call To Action – the BUY IT NOW BUTTON). Make that button flash or something :D
Maybe they don’t trust your site? Add social proof.
Of course this is where a/b testing can come in handy. You could split test as to whether people click more on a sparkly or a flashing button etc
7. Tracking funnels
So to sum up we have the following funnel (vastly simplified and I’ll leave SEO off).
ADVERT => Landing Page => Conversion
If your advert is bad then no one will visit your landing page. You will fail.
If your landing page is bad then no one will convert to your offer. You will fail.
You need to ensure that everything is setup correctly end-to-end to give your product / service / offer the best chance of success.
8. GTM/GA
You can track how many people view your advert against how many people click on your advert.
You can track how many people visit your landing page against how many people convert to your offer.
You can track how many people convert to your offer from two different adverts. This is where things start to get a bit more interesting!
You can use Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics to do this tracking for you. If you want to track your Facebook ads, then you can inject the Facebook tracking pixel into your landing page via GTM. Like most of these topics, that’ll be a complete article.
To Wrap Up
I’ve mainly concentrated on marketing and offers to illustrate the terms above. But these transpose to other applications as well.
For recruitment, your advert could be with a job website. You’d want to track how many people click on that advert. Your landing page is your careers site and you’d want to measure how many people successfully fill in your application form.
If you’re a developer and you’re asked to quickly add a tracking pixel to a website and you don’t understand the urgency. It could be that the business is haemorrhaging money on ads and they don’t know why no ones signing up to their offer.
If you don’t see the reason to add image metadata, it could be that they’re trying to improve the relevance of those images in search and also provide a better experience for people using screen readers.
Hopefully, this gives you insight into what happening on the other side of the digital marketing fence. ;)