Marketing Jargon Glossary

Marketing is common sense, but often trends and technical language overtake the conversation and understanding. At MasterJack, one of our points of difference is that we will speak in a language you understand. There’s no such thing as a stupid question because that question often leads to a light bulb moment that creates a synergy in your marketing.

A/B testing

A/B testing is when you send out two versions of the same newsletter (or web page, or any other digital marketing item) with differences – it might be in the headings, imagery, or subject line. A small percentage of your newsletter send will be split, some sent to group A and some to group B. After a period, whichever group returns the most favourable data (opens and clicks), the rest of the database will be sent that version. It’s a great way to discover what your audience will put up with. Swearing or proper English? Graphic imagery or standard photos? Short and sweet or detailed?

Blog
An informational website displaying information on the world wide web, usually in reverse chronological order. Blogs provide commentary on a particular subject or topic and can be used as instructional resources.

Bot
An internet bot, web robot, web crawler, spider, spider bot, or bot is a software application that runs automated tasks on the internet. The most common use of bots is for web crawling, in which a script fetches, analyses and files information from the web. Often used to seek out email addresses to which it sends spam.

Call to Action (CTA)
A prompt for an immediate response or to encourage an immediate sale. The use of words or phrases that compel an audience to act in a specific way.

CAPTCHA
An acronym for ‘Completely Automated Public Turing Test’ which is a type of challenge or test to tell computers and humans apart.

Content Marketing
A strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience – and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action. It’s not informational garbage to fill the space, nor is it trying to sell ‘stuff’.

Cluster
Groups of related content that link internally on your website to help you rank as an authority on the subject matter.

Evergreen topic
Topics with consistent interest and search demand over time. For example “How to lose weight” – it doesn’t matter if it’s today or 100 years from now. People will always want to lose weight. Evergreen content stays relevant over a long period of time. 

Desktop
A personal computer designed for regular use at a single location due to its size and power requirements.

Developer
An individual that builds and creates software and applications. They write, debug, and execute the source code of a software application.

Domain Name
This is the address of your website that people type into a browser. It is not to be confused with website hosting. In simple terms, it’s like the physical address of your house.

Font
A set of printable or displayable text characters in a specific style – the text you are reading right now is a font, how it’s displayed on the screen.

Google
An internet search engine that uses a proprietary algorithm that’s designed to retrieve and order search results to provide the most relevant and dependable sources of data possible.

Hamburger Menu
This is a navigation tool used on websites and apps that, when clicked or tapped, opens a side menu. It’s called hamburger because the horizontal lines look like a universal symbol for a hamburger.

Honeypot
A security mechanism to detect, deflect or in some manner, counteract attempts at unauthorised use of information. A simple example is a website form in which a field is hidden from the human viewer. A bot would not realise the field was hidden and would populate it, thus telling your website that it’s a bot and not human.

HTTPS
It stands for ‘Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure’ which is used for secure communication over a network. It works together with an SSL (see further on). It essentially scrambles communications between viewer and provider of online information so that it can’t be obtained whilst travelling from one place to another (like sending credit card details on your computer, to the shop you’re buying from).

IP Address
The internet is a giant network of computers connected to each other through a global network of cables. Each computer on this network can communicate with other computers. To identify each of them, they are labelled with a series of numbers, which looks like this: 34.729.84.3. Domain names were invented to solve the issue of trying to remember all the numbers.

Jargon
Special words or expressions used by a profession or group that are difficult for others to understand. If we’ve used a word you don’t understand, please let know so we can add it to this glossary.

Keyword
A search term that you want to rank for with certain content, so when people search on Google with that word, that page on your website should come up in the results.

Long-tail
A long-tail keyword is a phrase that is generally made from three to five words. Since these keywords are more specific than generic terms, they allow you to target niche demographics. These keywords are also less competitive than generic keywords because they are designed to better reflect how people make queries.

Open Source
Computer software that is released and the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change and distribute the software. Open-source software is an example of open collaboration, where any capable user can participate in its online development.

Organic
Organic search results are the listings on a search engine results page (SERP) that appear because of factors such as relevance to the search term and valid search engine optimisation (SEO) efforts rather than because of search engine marketing (SEM) or trickery.

Pillar
A subset of topics or themes used to organise your content.

Marketer
Someone who is responsible for creating an involvement chain between the customer and the product or service offered by a company. See ‘MasterJack’.

MasterJack
Our role is to get your potential customer’s attention, help them figure out if you are a fit and then lower the risk and reduce the barriers to them taking the next step.

Meme
An image, video, piece of text, etc, typically humorous in nature, that is copied and spread rapidly by internet users, often with slight variations.

Meta Description
On a website page, each has a field in which you can write a description of the content on the page. A meta description is the information about your page that appears in the search engine results below the title / URL of your page. The description does not directly factor into your search engine results page (SERP) rank but influences whether a user clicks on the link to your page.

Mobile Responsive / Device Responsive
When a website is mobile responsive, it means the layout and content adapts based on the size of the screen they are presented on. A mobile phone would make content long and skinny, compared to a tablet or desktop computer.

Navigation
Website navigation allows viewers to flow from one page to another without frustration. It’s an organised list of what’s in your website.

Proprietary Software
Also known as non-free software or closed-source software, proprietary software is the opposite of open-source or free software. There’ll be some licensing rights to use, modify or share the software. With websites, it’s usually paid for as part of the development cost and then ongoing hosting costs.

Rank / Ranking
Google searches through hundreds of billions of webpages to list them on their search results. It works by counting the number and quality of links to a page to determine a rough estimate of how important the website is. A ranking of 1 means you are at the top, 11 means you are on page two of Google search results.

Scroll
Using your mouse or left/right/up/down navigation bars on a website to view different parts of the content.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
The process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website from search engines such as Google. There are two kinds, one known as ‘natural’ or ‘organic’ and the other is paid traffic.

Social Media
A computer-based technology that facilitates the sharing of thoughts, ideas and information through virtual networks and communities. It’s quick, electronic communication of content such as personal information, documents, videos and photos.

Spam
This is any kind of unwanted, unsolicited digital communication that gets sent out in bulk. Often spam is sent via email, but it can also be distributed via text messages, phone calls or social media. Spam is not an acronym for anything, although Stupid Pointless Annoying Mail gets my vote. The actual inspiration came from a Monty Python skit in which the actors declare that everyone must eat the food Spam, whether they want it or not.

SSL Certificate
It stands for ‘Secure Sockets Layer’ and it’s now a standard technology for keeping an internet connection secure and safeguarding any sensitive data being sent between two systems. So standard, that if you don’t have one, Google search results will now tell you whether the site listed in the rankings is safe or not.

Sticky Menu
A fixed navigation menu on a webpage, a sticky menu remains visible to the viewer even when they scroll down and move about the website.

Stock-photos
These are images that have already been taken, edited and are ready to use. Photographers can upload their images to online libraries, and you can purchase them for a price. Make sure you know the difference between royalty free and not – because some images you can only use once, or for a certain length of time, or on a particular medium.

Stop Word
We use stop words all the time, whether we’re online or in our everyday lives. These are the articles, prepositions, and phrases that connect keywords together and help us form complete, coherent sentences. Common words like its, an, the, for, and that, are all considered stop words.

Template
Website templates are pre-designed layouts that allow you to arrange content onto a webpage or post. Depending on the template you have, you can upload images, logos, videos, forms, and content.

Traffic
When we’re talking about websites, traffic is the amount of data sent and received by visitors to a website – which does not include traffic generated by bots. The data collected includes unique visitors, repeated visits, the number of pages they’ve visited. Knowing this information, what’s popular on your website and social media, helps figure out what kind of content your audience wants.

Website
A set of related pages located under a single domain name. These are stored/hosted on an internet friendly (and hopefully secure) computer so that the world can access it.

Website Hosting
If a domain name is the physical address to a house, then hosting is the ongoing rent/rates to have your house on that property. Usually charged monthly, website hosting varies from provider to provider. You want to have low ongoing costs, but you also want safe and secure, so you don’t get hacked, and getting updates sorted so your website doesn’t break or stop working.