Digital Marketing Glossary

A/B testing is a method of comparing two versions of a page or element by splitting traffic between them to see which performs better.

Ad Rank is the value Google uses to decide whether your ad shows and in what position, calculated mainly from your bid, Quality Score, and context.

Answer Engine Optimization is the practice of optimising content to be the direct answer surfaced by answer engines such as AI Overviews, featured snippets, and voice assistants.Read more →

An AI crawler is a bot operated by an AI company to collect or retrieve web content for training or for answering live queries, such as OpenAI's GPTBot, Google-Extended, and Anthropic's ClaudeBot.Read more →

AI Overviews are Google's AI-generated answers that appear at the top of many results pages, summarising multiple sources with links, evolved from the earlier Search Generative Experience.Read more →

Alt text is the written description of an image in a page's HTML, read by screen readers and used by search engines to understand the image.

Anchor text is the visible, clickable words of a hyperlink.Read more →

An answer engine is a search experience that returns a direct, synthesised answer rather than a list of links, including tools like Perplexity and AI Overviews.

An attribution model is the rule that decides how credit for a conversion is assigned across the touchpoints a user interacted with before converting.

An attribution window is the period after a click or view during which a resulting conversion is credited to an ad.

An audience is the defined group of people a campaign targets, built from attributes like demographics, interests, behaviours, or past interactions.

A backlink is a link from another website to yours, treated by search engines as a signal of trust and relevance.Read more →

In GA4, engagement rate is the percentage of sessions that were engaged, and bounce rate is simply its inverse, the percentage that were not.Read more →

A breadcrumb is a secondary navigation trail showing a page's position in the site hierarchy, such as Home > Glossary > Anchor Text.

A canonical tag is an HTML element (rel="canonical") that tells search engines which version of a page is the original when near-duplicate URLs exist.Read more →

A CDN is a network of distributed servers that delivers website content from a location near each user, speeding up load times and reducing strain on the origin server.

Click fraud is the practice of generating illegitimate clicks on pay-per-click ads, by bots or competitors, to waste an advertiser's budget or distort data.Read more →

A CMS is software that lets people create, manage, and publish website content without coding each page by hand.

A content gap is a topic or query your audience searches for that your site does not yet cover well, often one competitors do.

Content marketing is the practice of creating and distributing useful, relevant content to attract and retain a defined audience and drive profitable action.Read more →

Content optimisation is the process of refining a page's text, structure, and relevance so it better matches search intent and ranks well.

Content pruning is the practice of removing, merging, or improving low-value pages to raise a site's overall quality.

A conversion is any completed action you define as valuable, such as a form submission, purchase, call, or signup.Read more →

Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors or clicks that complete a desired action, calculated as conversions divided by visits times 100.

The Conversions API is a server-side method of sending conversion data directly from your server to Meta, rather than relying only on the browser-based pixel.

Core Web Vitals are Google's three page-experience metrics: Largest Contentful Paint (loading), Interaction to Next Paint (responsiveness), and Cumulative Layout Shift (visual stability).Read more →

CPA is the average cost to win one conversion, calculated as total spend divided by the number of conversions.Read more →

CPC is the amount an advertiser pays for each click on an ad, calculated as total spend divided by clicks.

CPL is the amount spent to generate one lead, calculated as total spend divided by number of leads.

CPM is the cost an advertiser pays per one thousand ad impressions, common in awareness and display campaigns.

Crawl budget is the number of pages a search engine will crawl on a site within a given window, set by the site's size, speed, and authority.Read more →

Crawling is the process by which search engine bots discover pages on the web by following links and reading content.Read more →

Conversion rate optimisation is the practice of improving a site or page so a higher share of visitors complete a desired action.Read more →

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is the language used to control the visual presentation of web pages, including layout, colours, fonts, and spacing.

Click-through rate is the percentage of people who click after seeing your ad or listing, calculated as clicks divided by impressions times 100.Read more →

A custom audience is a targeting group built from your own data, such as website visitors, customer lists, or people who engaged with your content.

Digital PR is the practice of earning coverage and links from media outlets and online publications through newsworthy stories, data, and outreach.Read more →

Disavow is the process of telling Google, through its disavow tool, to ignore specific backlinks when assessing your site.

A domain is the human-readable address of a website, such as relevantaudience.com, that maps to the server where the site lives.

Domain authority is a third-party score, on a 1 to 100 scale, that predicts how likely a domain is to rank, based largely on its backlink profile.Read more →

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, the qualities Google's human quality raters use to judge content, with first-hand Experience added in 2022.Read more →

Embeddings are numerical representations of text that capture meaning, letting AI systems judge how semantically close two pieces of content are rather than matching exact words.

An entity is a distinct, well-defined thing, such as a person, company, place, product, or concept, that search engines and LLMs recognise and connect within a knowledge graph.Read more →

Evergreen content is content that stays relevant and useful for a long time, continuing to attract traffic well after publication.

A featured snippet is a short answer pulled from a page and displayed in a box at the top of Google's results, above the normal listings.Read more →

Frequency is the average number of times each person in your audience saw your ad, calculated as impressions divided by reach.

GA4 is the current version of Google Analytics, built around an event-based model that tracks user interactions across web and apps.Read more →

Generative AI is a class of artificial intelligence that creates new content, such as text, images, or code, rather than only analysing existing data.

Generative Engine Optimization is the practice of optimising content so it gets surfaced, quoted, and cited by generative AI systems like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews.Read more →

A Google algorithm update is a change to the systems Google uses to rank pages, ranging from minor daily tweaks to major named "core updates." Large updates can noticeably shift rankings and traffic across many sites at once.Read more →

Google Business Profile is a free listing that controls how a business appears in Google Search and Maps, including its name, hours, reviews, photos, and location.Read more →

Google Search Console is a free Google tool that shows how a site performs in search, including the queries it ranks for, its clicks and impressions, and any indexing or technical issues.Read more →

Google Tag Manager is a free tool for managing tracking tags and snippets on a site through one interface, without editing code for each change.

Grounding is the process by which an AI system anchors its answer to real, retrievable sources rather than producing unsupported text, and citations are the links it shows to those sources.Read more →

A hallucination is when an AI system produces confident but false or fabricated information, such as inventing a statistic or misattributing a quote.

Header tags are HTML elements (H1 through H6) that structure a page's content into a hierarchy of headings and subheadings.

A headless CMS separates content management from the front end, delivering content through an API to a custom-built presentation layer, often a modern JavaScript framework.Read more →

Hreflang is an HTML attribute that tells search engines which language and region a page targets, so the right version is shown to the right user.Read more →

HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is the core language used to structure content on web pages, defining elements like headings, paragraphs, links, and images.

HTTPS is the secure version of HTTP, encrypting data between a browser and a server using an SSL/TLS certificate.Read more →

Impression share is the percentage of impressions your ads received out of the total they were eligible for.

Impressions are the number of times an ad or piece of content is displayed, whether or not it is clicked.

Indexing is the process of storing and organising crawled pages in a search engine's database so they can be returned for relevant queries.Read more →

An internal link is a link from one page on your site to another page on the same site.Read more →

JavaScript is a programming language that adds interactivity and dynamic behaviour to web pages, from menus and sliders to complex applications.

JavaScript rendering is how and when a page's content is generated: on the server before delivery (SSR/SSG) or in the browser after load (CSR).Read more →

A keyword is the word or phrase a user types into a search engine, and the term content is optimised to rank for.

Keyword difficulty is an estimate, usually on a 0 to 100 scale, of how hard it is to rank on the first page for a given keyword.

Keyword research is the process of finding and analysing the terms your audience searches for, so you can target them with content.Read more →

Keyword stuffing is the outdated tactic of cramming the same keyword into a page unnaturally in an attempt to rank higher.

A knowledge graph is a database of entities and the relationships between them that search engines use to understand the world and answer questions directly.

A landing page is a focused page designed to convert visitors toward a single goal, often where users arrive from an ad or campaign.Read more →

A LINE Official Account is a business presence on LINE, Thailand's dominant messaging app, used to broadcast messages, run promotions, and chat directly with customers.Read more →

Link attributes are values on a link that tell search engines how to treat it.Read more →

Link building is the practice of earning links from other websites to improve a site's authority and rankings.Read more →

Link equity, sometimes called link juice, is the ranking value passed from one page to another through links.

Live commerce is selling products through live video streams where hosts showcase items and viewers buy in real time.Read more →

A large language model is an AI model trained on vast amounts of text to understand and generate human language, the technology behind ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.Read more →

llms.txt is a proposed plain text file at a site's root that gives AI systems a curated, easy-to-parse guide to a site's most important content, conceptually similar to robots.txt or a sitemap but aimed at large language models.Read more →

The local pack is the block of three local business listings, with a map, that Google shows for searches with local intent.

A long-tail keyword is a longer, more specific search phrase with lower volume but clearer intent and usually lower competition.Read more →

A lookalike audience is a new group built by a platform to resemble an existing source audience, such as your customers or site visitors.

Marketplace management is the practice of running and optimising a brand's presence and sales on platforms like Shopee and Lazada, covering listings, ads, pricing, and promotions.Read more →

Match types are settings in Google Ads that control how closely a search must match your keyword for your ad to show, ranging from broad to phrase to exact.

A meta description is the short summary shown under the title in search results, ideally around 150 to 160 characters so it does not get truncated.Read more →

The Meta Pixel is a piece of tracking code placed on a website to measure actions visitors take after seeing or clicking Meta ads.

Mobile-first indexing means Google predominantly uses the mobile version of a page for indexing and ranking.

NAP stands for a business's Name, Address, and Phone number, the core contact details that must stay consistent across the web for local SEO.

A negative keyword is a term you exclude so your ads do not show for irrelevant searches, preventing wasted spend.

Noindex is a directive (a meta robots tag or HTTP header) that tells search engines not to include a page in their index, even though they can crawl it.

Organic traffic is the visitors who reach a site through unpaid search results rather than ads.Read more →

Page authority is a third-party score predicting how well a single page (rather than a whole domain) is likely to rank.

Page speed is how quickly a page loads and becomes usable, on both desktop and mobile.Read more →

People Also Ask is the expandable box of related questions Google shows within results, each revealing a short answer when clicked.

Performance Max is a goal-based Google Ads campaign type that serves across all of Google's inventory, including Search, Display, YouTube, Gmail, and Maps, from a single campaign using automation.Read more →

A pillar page is a broad, authoritative page that introduces a major topic and links out to more detailed pages covering its subtopics.

Pay-per-click is an advertising model where advertisers pay a fee each time their ad is clicked, most commonly on search engines like Google.Read more →

A prompt is the instruction or question a user gives an AI system.

Quality Score is Google Ads' 1 to 10 rating of the relevance and quality of your keywords, ads, and landing pages.Read more →

Query fan-out is a technique where an AI search system silently breaks one complex query into several related sub-queries, retrieves sources for each, and synthesises a single answer.Read more →

Retrieval Augmented Generation is a method where an AI model retrieves relevant external documents at query time and uses them to ground its generated answer, rather than relying only on its training data.Read more →

Reach is the number of unique people who saw your content or ad at least once, regardless of how many times.

A referring domain is a unique website that links to your site, regardless of how many individual backlinks it sends.

Remarketing, also called retargeting, is the practice of showing ads to people who have already visited your site or interacted with your brand but did not convert.Read more →

Responsive design is an approach where a website automatically adapts its layout to fit any screen size, from phones to desktops.

ROAS is the revenue generated for every unit of currency spent on advertising, calculated as revenue from ads divided by ad spend.Read more →

Robots.txt is a plain text file at the root of a domain that tells crawlers which areas of the site they may or may not access.Read more →

Search intent is the underlying goal behind a query, generally informational, navigational, commercial, or transactional.Read more →

Search volume is the average number of times a keyword is searched in a given period, usually shown as monthly searches.

Search engine marketing is the broad practice of gaining visibility on search engines through both paid ads and organic optimisation.Read more →

Semantic search is search that interprets the meaning and context behind a query rather than matching literal keywords.Read more →

Search engine optimisation is the practice of improving a website's content, technical health, and authority to earn higher unpaid rankings in search results.Read more →

A SERP is the page a search engine returns after a query.Read more →

A session is a group of user interactions with a site within a given timeframe, such as page views, clicks, and events.

Smart Bidding is Google Ads' set of automated, machine-learning bid strategies that optimise toward goals like target CPA or target ROAS in each auction.

An HTTP status code is the three-digit response a server returns for a request, telling browsers and crawlers what happened.

Structured data is code added to a page, usually in JSON-LD format, that labels its content so search engines understand it explicitly rather than inferring it.Read more →

A title tag is the clickable headline of a page shown in search results, best kept around 50 to 60 characters or roughly 600 pixels so it displays in full.Read more →

A topic cluster is a group of related pages covering one subject in depth, organised around a central pillar page and linked together.Read more →

A toxic backlink is a low-quality or spammy link, often from link farms, irrelevant foreign sites, or paid networks, that could be seen as manipulative.

A URL is the full web address of a specific page or resource, including the protocol, domain, and path, such as the address of this glossary.

A URL slug is the readable part of a web address that identifies a specific page, such as `seo-audit` in `/seo-audit/`.

UTM parameters are tags appended to a URL that tell analytics tools where a click came from, including source, medium, and campaign.

WordPress is the world's most popular content management system, powering a large share of all websites, valued for its flexibility, plugin ecosystem, and SEO-friendliness.Read more →

An XML sitemap is a machine-readable file listing the URLs you want search engines to crawl and index, submitted through Google Search Console.Read more →

A zero-click search is one answered directly on the results page, through an AI Overview, featured snippet, or knowledge panel, so the user never clicks through to a site.Read more →