Digital marketing glossary from AdRoll

Welcome to the AdRoll Marketing Glossary. We have curated a list of commonly used marketing terms, and demystified them with clear definitions and resources for how to utilize them in your own marketing.

Ad Personalization

Ad personalization is the act of using customer insights to increase the relevancy of an ad to that specific person. These insights could be anything from demographic information to their specific interests, purchasing intent, and buying behavior.

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Ad Server

If your company is ready to step up its advertising investments, then finding the right ad server to suit your goals, budget, and resources will be vital to your success. An effective ad server will help you manage the full scope of your digital marketing efforts in a single platform, including media planning, targeting, ad placements, reporting, and bid and performance optimization.

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Click-through Rate (CTR)

Click-through rate, commonly known by marketers as CTR, is the percentage of views or impressions that result in a click on an ad or link.

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Cost Per Click

CPC, or cost-per-click, is a metric that represents the price an advertiser pays to the ad publisher for each click-through by a user. Marketers often set target CPC rates for their campaigns to maximize the ROI of their spending.

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CPM in Digital Marketing

CPM stands for cost per thousand impressions and is typically used in measuring how many thousands of people your advertising or marketing piece has (hopefully!) left an impression on.

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Customer Journey

The customer journey is the complete lifecycle of a customer’s relationship with a business. It describes the process that they go through when interacting with your brand, from the moment they learn about your company (brand awareness) to the years of repeat purchases and deep customer loyalty. This process also includes deadends, where customers may stop and decide not to proceed with a purchase.

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E-Commerce Marketing

The internet offers a wide range of marketing tools to promote digital retail startups and storefronts, from sleek website templates and search engine optimization (SEO) to promotional email, social media, and influencer marketing. The good news is that you’ll always have ways to advertise your product and engage with new audiences.

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First Party Data

Data is essential for success in marketing today. Different types of data provide valuable information to marketers and increase the success of advertising campaigns.

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Marketing Attribution

Marketing attribution is a way for brands to evaluate their customer journey and find which touchpoints in the marketing funnel are most impactful for their target audience. Marketers will analyze data from different channels, campaigns, and customer touchpoints to assign credit for each digital purchase or conversion.

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Native Advertising

Native advertising is a form of paid advertising that is unobtrusive and appears to be part of the normal content offering of a given website. In order to distinguish them from unpaid content, they will generally be tagged as a suggested post, sponsored content, or another identifier that is unobtrusively located in a corner.

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Omnichannel Marketing

Omnichannel marketing uses multiple channels such as, for example, website, mobile apps, email, events, social media and brick and mortar stores to deliver a seamless customer experience. At a glance, many wonder if omnichannel marketing is the same thing as multichannel marketing. It is not.

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Persistent Carts

Persistent carts are a feature that preserves the items that a customer has placed in their shopping cart when they exit the site without purchasing, using a cookie that identifies the customer for future sessions, even on other devices.

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Return on Ad Spend

Return on ad spend (ROAS) is a marketing metric that tells you how much revenue you make for each $1 you spend on an advertising campaign. The goal is to make more than you spend, resulting in a positive ROAS. You can calculate your return on ad spend across your entire marketing budget or break it down to find the ROAS of specific ads, campaigns, and more.

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Social Media Advertising

Social media advertising is a form of digital marketing in which paid ads are served to a target audience via social media networks. These ads allow marketers to reach desired consumers, promote their brand, and drive sales on popular media channels that house billions of active users.

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