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Campaign – A series of advertising messages that share a theme, and market a product or service. In the context of digital marketing, campaigns can be run through search and display network advertising platforms (i.e. Google, Bing), social media, email, or other online platforms.

Canonical (rel=canonical) – A piece of code that is added into the html head of a webpage to indicate to Google whether a piece of content is original or duplicated from somewhere else. Original content should canonical to itself, and content taken from other places should point the canonical to the original source URL. Canonicals can also be used to avoid duplicate content issues within a website.

Click-Through-Rate – A metric showing how often people click on an ad after they see it. It can be calculated by dividing the number of clicks on the ad divided by the number of impressions (how many times it was seen). This ratio can be useful when determining whether an ad’s messaging matches what the consumer is searching for, and if it resonates with them.

Code – The languages used to build a website. The most commonly used languages in web design are HTML, CSS, JS, and PHP.

Contact Form – A section on a website with fillable fields for visitors to contact the website owner, most commonly used to collect name, phone number, and email address of potential customers.

Content – Any form of media online that can be read, watched, or interacted with. Content commonly refers specifically to written material, but can also include images and videos.

Conversion – The completion of a predefined goal. This is often used to track the number of site visitors that have been “converted” into paying customers, though sales are not always chosen as the metric. Other common goals are newsletter subscriptions and downloads of content from the website.

Conversion Rate – The rate at which visitors to a website complete the predefined goal. It is calculated by dividing the number of goal achievements by the total number of visitors. For example, if 100 people visit a website and 10 of them complete the conversion goal (like filling out a contact form) then the conversion rate is 10%.

CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) – A metric in paid advertising platforms that measures how much money is spent in order to acquire a new lead or customer. It can be calculated by dividing the total spend by the number of conversions, for a given period of time. For example, if in a month a PPC account spends $1000 dollars and gets 10 conversions (leads), then the cost per acquisition is $100.

CPC (Cost Per Click) – The amount of money spent for a click on an ad in a Pay-Per-Click campaign. In the Adwords platform, each keyword will have an estimated click cost, but the prices change in real time as advertisers bid against each other for each keyword. Average CPCs can range from less than $1 dollar for longtail or low-competition keywords, to upwards of $100 per click for competitive terms, primarily in legal, insurance, and water damage restoration industries.

CPM – Stands for “Cost Per Thousand” (M is the roman numeral for 1,000). This is the amount an advertiser pays for 1,000 impressions of their ad. For example, if a publisher charges $10 CPM, and your ad shows 2000 times, you will pay $20 for the campaign ($10 x 1000 impressions) x 2. Measuring ad success with CPM is most common in awareness campaigns, where impressions are more important than conversions or clicks.

CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) – a branch of digital marketing that aims to improve the conversion rate of web pages, thus making the pages more profitable. Conversion rate optimization combines psychology with marketing and web design in order to influence the behavior of the web page visitor. CRO uses a type of testing called “A/B split testing” to determine which version of a page (version A or version B) is more successful.

CSS – stands for “Cascading Style Sheets”. CSS a document of code that tells the website’s HTML how it should be appear on screen. CSS is a time saving document for web designers as they can style batched-sections of HTML code, rather than styling individual lines of code one-at-a-time.

CTA (Call to Action) – an element on a web page used to push visitors towards a specific action or conversion. A CTA can be a clickable button with text, an image, or text, and typically uses an imperative verb phrase like: “call today” or “buy now”.

CTR (Click Through Rate) – the ratio of how many times an advertisement was clicked on, versus how many times it was shown. It is calculated by dividing the ad’s clicks by the ad’s impressions. For example, if an ad is shown to 100 people, and 10 of them click the ad, then it has a click through rate of 10% (10 clicks / 100 impressions = 10%)