Affiliate Marketing: Revenue sharing between online advertisers/merchants and online publishers/salespeople, where compensation is based on performance measures, typically in the form of sales, clicks, registrations, or a hybrid model.

 

Affiliate Tracking: Software that tracks clicks, sales or other performance measures to determine revenue sharing or commission.

Affiliate: Any web site or business that provides links or sales to your site through their own marketing efforts.

B2B: Generally refers to selling products or services to other businesses.

B2C: Generally refers to selling products or services to end consumers.

Banner Ad: An advertisement or image displayed on one or more web sites to attract visitors to your site.

Business Model:  An architecture for the product, service and information flows, including a description of the various business actors and their roles; and a description of the potential benefits for the various business actors including  a description of the sources of revenues.

Caching: The storage of web files on a computer or server so they can be accessed quicker by the end user.

Click-through: The act of clicking on an online advertisement (banner) to the advertiser's web site.

 

Clicks and Mortar Business: A business that combines an online business with a traditional business.

 

Conversion rate: Also Transaction Conversion Rate... The percentage of visitors who take a desired action on your web site – see also Look to Book Ratio.

 

Cookie: Information stored on the users computer by a web site. The information can be recalled by the web site at a later time.

 

Cost-per-click: Online advertising payment process where payment is based on qualifying actions such as clicking on a banner or search engine listing.

 

Directory: A search service that arranges the web pages in it's database (often through a registration process) into categories and subcategories.

 

Domain Name: A user friendly name that represents a location on the Internet.

Doorway Page: A page made specifically to rank well in search engines for particular keywords. Also... an entry point through which visitors pass to reach your web site's main content.

Double Opt in: The process whereby a consumer “opts” in to an email list and is then asked to confirm that they really wanted to opt in. Considered best practice in email marketing circles.

eBusiness: Business Process improvement through technology.

e-commerce: Generally refers to the exchange of goods or services via the Internet. Also e-business... both electronic sales via the Internet and business to business transactions via a dedicated connection (modem or broadband).

e-commerce catalog software / solution: Generally refers to a fully functional online catalog site management system. Management functionality generally includes products, shipping, sales tax, sale pricing, featuring products, sales, payment processing, order processing as well as marketing features.

 

Email Marketing: The use of email to promote or market your products or services.

Email Spam: Unsolicited commercial email.

EMarketing: The process of online marketing. It involves Search Engine Optimisation (organic and paid), site optimisation, page ranking, email marketing, viral campaigns, statistical reports and sales management.

EPC: Earnings Per Click is calculated by dividing the total number of clicks (usually an advert) by your total earnings (e.g. how many sales you convert as a result of a person clicking on your advert). This can be used to determine the effectiveness of an Ad campaign.

Ezine: An electronic magazine generally on the web or delivered through email.
FFA: Free-for-all... Sites that have no qualifications for adding a link to your web site. Generally these sites provide little or no traffic to your site.

Forum: An online discussion where visitors may read and post information or comments.

.gif: Image file format used widely on the web.

Hit: Any request for any file located on the web.

Home page: The opening page of your web site.

Impression: A single instance of an online ad being displayed. Also know as a page impression.

Inbound link: A link from a site other than yours.

JavaScript: A scripting language used in the development of web pages. Generally refers to client side web programming.

.jpg / .jpeg: Image file format used widely on the web.

Key phrase: A phrase used to perform a search.

Keyword density: On a web page, the keywords as a percentage of indexable text on the web page.

Keyword research: The search for keywords related to your web site. Also... the analysis
of which words or phrases are used by visitors to locate sites similar to yours. Also... the analysis of which key words or phrases will yield the highest return on investment.

Keyword: A word used to perform a search.

Link exchange: A site that exists to faciliate people linking together so as to increase all parties involved rankings on search engines.

Link popularity: A measure of the quality and quantity of sites that link to your site.

Link text: The text (words) used to create a hyperlink.

Log file: The files that maintain a record of the requests for resources on your web site.

LTB - Look to Book Ratio: The ratio of web site visitors/visitors who book using any metric.

Merchant Account. A gateway accepts your order information and connects to your Merchant Account to authorize and transfer funds.

MCommerce:        eCommerce over your mobile phone.

Merchant Account: A bank service account that allows you to accept credit card transactions. Just one part of the process of accepting online credit card orders. (See Payment Gateway)

META tags: Tags that describe various aspects of a web page. META Keywords, META Title, META Description are the most commonly used.

Natural Search Results: The non-paid listings displayed as a result of a key phrase search using a search engine. Featured, pay-per-click and sponsored listings are generally used by less than 40% of search engine users. This makes natural search placement over twice as effective as paid search results.

Navigation: Generally referred to as the structure and process of moving from one page or section of a web site to another.

Opt-in email: A process for allowing people to request email from you.

Opt-out email: A process for allowing people to request that you stop sending email.

Page view: A request to load a single HTML page.

Payment Gateway: An internet service that connects your e-commerce site with you’re the bank for transferring funds or debiting a credit card.

Pureplay eCommerce business: A pure online business with no shopfront or traditional business behind it.

Pay-per-click (PPC): Used to describe those search engine services that charge for creating visitors to your site. The cost of each visitor is determined either by a BID or FLAT FEE that you are charged each time a search engine user clicks on a link to your site from these sponsored links. Often confused with SEO. Pay per click is a subset of SEO.

Permission marketing: Marketing based on getting a users consent to receive information from your company or web site.

Pop-up-ad: An ad that automatically opens a new browser window also know as a spawning page.

Reciprocal links: Mutually agreed upon links between two sites.

Search engine: A program that indexes web documents and attempts to match those documents with search words or phrases enter by a user.

SEO: Search Engine Optimisation. This term is widely used in the search engine industry as a collective name for those activities that are directly or indirectly aimed at improving a page's search engine ranking. Sometimes the term SEO is also used to refer to providers of SEO services - in other words it's used in the place of terms like "SEO provider" and "SEO specialist". An art form that now sees whole businesses dedicated to its pursuit.

Shopping Cart: Generally refers to the portion of an e-commerce site that maintains a list of the products chosen by a visitor to purchase. Can be stand alone (using an HTML or other product presentation format) or part of an e-commerce solution.

SPAM: Unsolicited commercial email.
Spiders: Software used by search engines to locate new Web pages for their document databases.

Unique visitors: An individual visitor to a web site at least once within a fixed time frame.

URL: Universal Resource Location - Location of a resource on the Internet.

Value Proposition: What’s in it for consumers or customers?

Web browser: A software application that allows you to view resources on the Internet.

Web design: The creation and coordination of information in a web site.

Web hosting: A computer that is always connected to the internet and provides access to
web resources for a web site.

Web Resource: Any HTML file, image or other computer file that can be reached through a URL.

Web site traffic: The number of visitors and visits to your web site. Can be measured in Hits, Page Hits or Unique Visitors.

 

Contact Malcolm Burrows if you would like any further terms added to the glossary