Digital Marketing Acronyms Glossary
Learn what digital marketing acronyms really mean for your business
There are a ton of commonly used acronyms in digital marketing. As buying behaviors and technologies continue to evolve, new acronyms that continue to emerge.
Do you know what every acronym means that your digital marketing agency uses in your team meetings? If there are a couple marketing acronyms it might help to brush up on, we’ve compiled this list below.
40 Marketing Acronyms Defined
We’ve collected forty digital marketing acronyms that everyone should learn. Whether you’re new to digital marketing or just seeking to learn more about some of the terminology surrounding it, we have the information you seek.
Table of Contents Show
B2B
B2B (sometimes written as B-to-B) stands for business-to-business and refers to transactions in which businesses sell their goods or services to other businesses. This might be a manufacturer selling to a distributor, a wholesaler selling to a retailer, or a software company that creates applications for invoicing or customer database management.
B2B marketing campaigns are typically referred to as inbound marketing due to the longer customer journey cycle. Here are a few examples of B2B transactions:
A computer chip manufacturer sells its chips to automotive production companies for use in their vehicles.
A uniform manufacturer creates custom uniforms for various service industry companies and sells them to the company directly for distribution to employees.
A catering company offers its services to run company cafeterias within large corporations.
An IT company offers to support company technology for small businesses that cannot afford their own IT departments but still need IT support.
B2C
The opposite of B2B is B2C (or B-to-C), which stands for business to consumer. B2C companies sell their goods or services directly to the public, through retail, for example, typically by first purchasing parts or products from a B2B company.
B2C businesses have found valuable efficiencies and gains by using Shopify for direct-to-consumer or e-commerce transactions that fuel their business. Here are a few examples of B2C transactions:
A grocery store sells food and household items directly to members of the community.
A seamstress custom tailors clothing for people in her neighborhood.
A plumber fixes plumbing problems for homeowners.
A teenager babysits for the family next door.
A huge corporation manufactures smart devices and sells them directly to consumers.
BoFU
BoFU stands for bottom of funnel. Before you explore more about BoFU, you should first understand the concept of a sales funnel.
In marketing terms, a sales funnel describes the way a company goes about funneling potential customers from first awareness to final sale. The largest part of this funnel is the top, where you have people who are merely aware of the brand or product. Next comes opinion, where people form a stance regarding the brand. After that is evaluation, where potential customers determine whether or not the product or brand suits their needs. This is followed by the BoFU levels: Purchase is when the potential customer hits the checkout button or otherwise engages the brand in a transaction, and loyalty is when they become a return customer or tell others about the product or brand.
BoFU, then, largely refers to actual customers and the marketing processes for engaging with them. Example activities in the BoFU world may include the following:
Live demos
Consultations
Customer reviews
Case studies
Loyalty programs
Customer appreciation campaigns
BR
In the digital marketing world, BR refers to bounce rate – the rate at which website visitors abandon a site quickly, often after viewing a single page for a few seconds. Generally, this means visitors have found your site through a web search or other means, clicked through to see it, and then decided it wasn’t what they were seeking and left.
The average bounce rate across all industries is between 26% and 70%, but this is such a broad range that it’s not very helpful to marketers. Instead, most digital marketers focus on simply improving bounce rates, no matter where they start, or on bounce rates compared to their direct competitors in the same industry.
CAC
CAC stands for customer acquisition cost, which refers to the expenses related to acquiring new customers. You’ve probably heard it stated many times that it’s far less expensive to keep an existing customer than to attract a new one. This adage attempts to simplify the complexity of CAC compared to the cost of customer retention.
The basic means of determining CAC is dividing the marketing cost by the number of customers acquired. So if you run a new marketing campaign over a quarter of a year and it costs $10,000 but brings in 5,000 new customers, your CAC would be $2.00 (10,000 ÷ 5,000 = 2). If the same campaign had brought in 20,000 customers, your CAC would be $0.50 (10,000 ÷ 20,000 = 0.5).
CMS
CMS stands for content management system, typically a software application that brands use to manage the creation and editing of digital marketing materials and other content. This software may be part of a larger marketing software package, or it could be a standalone system used for only this purpose.
Some of the top CMS options on the market include:
Agility CMS
Contentful
Contentstack
dotCMS
Salesforce Experience Cloud
Sanity
Titan CMS
Umbraco CMS
Webiny
Zesty.io
Typically this software includes a user interface that allows anyone, no matter how knowledgeable about the workings of websites, to post content to the organization’s website. It also includes a back-end application that pushes the content through to the site, keeping it updated.
CPA
CPA stands for cost per acquisition, a measurement of how much your brand spends to get a customer to do something specific. These specific tasks may be any number of things, including:
Make a purchase
Sign up for your mailing list
Download your app
Join your loyalty program
Click through to your website from an email
Post a customer review
This metric is calculated by dividing the cost of a marketing campaign by the number of conversions it generates. So, if you run a $10,000 campaign to get people to download your newly revamped mobile app and get 2,000 downloads from it, your CPA would be $5.00 (10,000 ÷ 2,000 = 5).
CPC
CPC stands for cost per click and is a term relating to paid search and other paid digital advertising. To calculate CPC, you simply divide the ad campaign’s cost by the number of clicks it generated. So if you paid $100 for a brief campaign and got 1,000 clicks from it, you’d be paying a CPC of $0.10 (100 ÷ 1000 = 0.10).
CPC can also refer to a particular keyword’s average cost per click. When doing keyword research for a paid search campaign, you want to know which keywords will be affordable and which are likely out of your budget. In this case, you’d look for the average CPC for each keyword you’re considering and compare that against your target numbers for the campaign.
CPM
CPM is an acronym for cost per mille, which means cost per thousand. It refers to pay-per-impression ads where you are charged for every thousand times your ad is shown regardless of how often viewers click through to your site. This is often more popular with large companies than small businesses because there is no guarantee that any viewer will click through, much less convert into a sale.
There is also a subset of CPM called vCPM, which stands for viewable cost per mille, or cost per thousand views. While CPM ads may sometimes be shown on a portion of a page where the user would have to scroll to see them, vCPM ads are only charged for every thousand times the ad is actually seen.
CRO
When you see the acronym CRO, it refers to conversion rate optimization. CRO is how brands increase the number of people who will perform a desired action upon seeing their ad.
When considering CRO, there are three main areas to examine:
Drivers – What brings visitors to your site in the first place? This may be an ad campaign, organic search results, or any other means of getting people to visit your site.
Barriers – Once people are on your site, what keeps them from completing a purchase or taking the action you want them to take?
Hooks – What persuaded visitors to convert to sales (or to take another desired action)?
You can often achieve a far better CPA by optimizing these areas.
CTA
CTA stands for call to action, and it’s a common term in content creation. When creating ads, content for your website, social media posts, or other marketing materials, there is typically an action you want the viewer to take. This action is expressed in the content as a call to action. Some CTAs you may have seen are:
Learn more
Shop while supplies last
Visit [webpage] for more details
Join us today
Download the ebook
Give us a call
Subscribe now
Any advertising materials you create should include some form of CTA. Otherwise, viewers may be confused about the point of your ad or sometimes even what it is you’re advertising.
CTR
CTR stands for click through rate and refers to the ratio of users who click on your ad versus those who simply scroll past. It’s a good way to determine how effective your advertising efforts are and which campaigns need improvement.
To calculate your CTR, divide the number of clicks you received by the number of times your ad was seen, then multiply that number by 100. So if your ad was seen 1,000 times and 50 people clicked on it, your CTR would be 5% ((1000 ÷ 50) x 100 = 5).
The average CTR for search ads is around 1.91%, while display ads have an average CTR of around 0.35%, though these numbers may not represent all industries. Check your industry’s average click through rate to determine how well your ads are performing. If the numbers you are seeing are significantly lower than your industry average, you probably need to rethink your strategy.
DA
DA stands for domain authority, a measurement of how likely it is that your site will appear in Google’s search results. Moz developed this metric, and it’s a good overall indicator of a site’s authority on the web. Calculating your DA is extremely complex as several factors go into it. Instead, use Moz’s Link Explorer to see your site’s DA and several other useful metrics. It’s a free search, though you must create a free Moz account to access the data.
It’s important to remember that DA is not a factor Google uses to rank your site. Instead, it expresses the strength of your web presence within the search engine’s overall results.
D2C
When you see the acronym DTC, it refers to direct to consumer – a way of selling without any middlemen. DTC brands have been around for a long time, so this isn’t a new term for the internet age. It simply means that the company that creates a product then directly sells it to the public instead of going through wholesalers, distributors, or retailers.
In the past, these DTC companies were often something like bakeries that made bread and pastries on-site, then sold them to anyone who walked through the door. But today’s DTC landscape is far larger and more varied. Some popular DTC brands include:
Allbirds shoes
Casper mattresses
Dollar Shave Club razors
Peloton fitness equipment
Warby Parker eyeglasses
GA
GA is an acronym for Google Analytics, a powerful analytical tool used by nearly everyone in the digital marketing world. Google Analytics is a tool from Google that allows you to see all sorts of data about your website. Some of the metrics the tool will track for you include:
Traffic
Traffic sources
Bounce rate
Conversion rate
Network referrals
Landing pages
Exit pages
This powerful analytics tool is free to use, but you must be able to install a section of code on your site for the software to track. It will allow you to better understand how your site is viewed, how people interact with your brand online, and the demographics of your audience.
GTM
GTM is an abbreviation for an exceptionally useful tool called Google Tag Manager. This tag management system is a web-based user interface that interacts with your website to help you set up tags, triggers, and variables. These tags, triggers, and variables allow you to track all sorts of activities on your site. They may include:
Page views
Visitor analytics
On-page events
Scrolling
Clicking
Downloads
What happens after someone clicks through from a specific email campaign
When someone views a video and for how long
Visitor paths through your site
As you can see, the ways to use GTM are many and varied, but they all offer valuable insights into your site and how it’s used.
(By the way, GTM can also stand for Go to Market - as in a Go to Market Strategy)
KPI
KPI stands for key performance indicator, and it’s a term used in many industries and throughout the business world. A key performance indicator is simply a quantifiable measurement companies can use to determine how effective or successful something or someone is. Some common digital marketing KPIs include:
CTR (click through rate)
Bounce rate
Conversions
Keyword rankings
CAC (customer acquisition cost)
Return visitors
Page views
Net promoter score
KPIs should never be considered in a vacuum as there are plenty of reasons that they could be misleading. Instead, they’re a starting point for marketers to discover why something is or is not working. From there, you can discover how to improve the number.
LP
The acronym LP stands for landing page, a standalone web page created for an ad campaign or other marketing effort. It should be designed to get visitors to take some action, such as:
Sign up for a newsletter
RSVP for an event
Purchase a product
Download an app
Schedule a demo
Download an ebook or catalog
Pre-register for a future sale
Because a landing page may be a visitor’s only impression of your brand, it should be created thoughtfully and with great care. To be effective, it must contain everything needed to turn a visitor into a customer.
LTV
LTV stands for lifetime value, a projected estimate of the total revenue a given customer will generate for your brand throughout their lifetime as your customer. It’s especially useful for subscription-model businesses or any other brand that creates recurring revenue.
To calculate the LTV of your customers, multiply the average order value by the number of expected purchases over an average customer lifetime. So if most of your customers purchase your products every month for about a year and a half, that’s 18 expected purchases. If these purchases average around $60 each, your LTV is $1080 (18 x 60 = 1080).
MoFU
MoFU stands for middle of funnel, a marketing term that goes along with BoFU (bottom of funnel) and ToFU (top of funnel). We discussed the funnel above, but to reiterate, a sales funnel describes how a company goes about funneling potential customers from first awareness to final sale.
The funnel starts at the top, with a basic awareness of the brand or product followed by forming an opinion about it. At the bottom of the funnel is that magic moment when the potential customer hits the checkout button or otherwise engages the brand in a transaction. This is followed (hopefully) by loyalty – when they become a return customer or tell others about the product or brand.
In the middle section of this funneling process (MoFU) is an evaluation process, where potential customers determine whether or not the product or brand suits their needs. At this point, it’s helpful to provide them with customer reviews, demonstrations, and promotional materials.
MoM
When you see a marketer speak of MoM, they’re not referring to their mother. Instead, MoM stands for month-over-month, a statistic used to track how any given metric changes from one month to the next.
A few metrics that should be tracked MoM include:
Churn rate/retention rate – A MoM retention rate tells you how many of your customers are retained each month, while the churn rate tells you how many drop off.
Conversion rate – What percentage of visitors converted (purchased, signed up, etc.) compared to how many converted last month?
Growth rate – How is your business growing (overall) from one month to the next?
Number of active users – How many active users (or customers) do you have on your books, as compared to last month?
MQL
An MQL, or a marketing qualified lead, is a potential customer that meets certain criteria and will be handed over to the sales team to progress toward conversion. Often these are people who have already interacted with the brand in some way, such as:
Downloading an ebook
Signing up for a newsletter
Filling out a form
Using a demo version of software
Regularly or repeatedly visiting the site
Adding products to a wishlist
Adding items to a shopping cart
The key to a marketing-qualified lead is that it should be someone who has shown more than a simple passing interest in your product.
MTD
MTD is another term used far beyond the digital marketing world. It stands for month to date and refers to everything that has happened in the current calendar month up until this point. So if it’s the second of the month, your MTD data will only cover one day (since day two has not yet finished), while toward the end of the month, it will include a much larger data pool. This information is typically used to track campaigns that are currently running.
PPC
PPC advertising, or pay-per-click ads, is a form of digital advertising commonly preferred by small to medium businesses. In this payment model, a brand only pays for each time a viewer clicks on the ad, instead of paying for each time the ad is shown. Some types of PPC ads include:
Display ads
Affiliate marketing
Gmail sponsored ads
Google shopping ads
Price comparison site ads
Remarketing campaigns
Social media ads
Video ads
As you can see, these ads are many and varied, and PPC is a favored method of ad spending because you never have to pay for ads when nobody saw them, noticed them, or showed interest in them.
ROAS
The acronym ROAS stands for return on ad spend, a metric used to determine how effective your marketing has been. It’s commonly expressed as a ratio, so if you have an ad campaign that cost $3,000 and you brought in $15,000 in revenue from it, your ROAS would be 5:1 (your revenue was five times as much as your ad spending).
Generally speaking, a ROAS of 4:1 or better is considered profitable, but this can vary widely depending on your industry. A helpful chart of average ROAS by industry is available from First Page Sage so you can easily compare your numbers to your competitors.
ROI
ROI, which stands for return on investment, is a common business term across many industries. It’s used to determine how well a business investment (of any type) has performed. In digital marketing, it refers specifically to the profit earned as a result of the money you spend on your digital marketing efforts.
To calculate ROI, divide income generated by money invested, then multiply by 100. So if you purchase new software that costs $1,500, and it helps you bring in new revenue or save money totaling $3,000, your ROI is 200% (3,000 ÷ 1,500 x 100 = 200).
ROMI
ROMI is an acronym for return on marketing investment. It’s very similar to ROI, with one key difference. ROMI is specific to marketing efforts, while ROI can relate to anything your business has spent time or money implementing.
ROMI is often used as a benchmark to determine which marketing efforts are worthwhile and which are lacking. For instance, if your ROMI on social media is low, you may need to revamp your practices or even hire a consultant to help you create a new strategy. If it’s high, you know that what you are doing is working, and you might even want to invest more time and money in that channel.
SEM
Search engine marketing, or SEM, is a type of digital marketing that uses paid methods to get your pages to the top of search engine results. The most common form of SEM is paid search ads – those ads that run at the top of the search results anytime you search for a word or phrase through your favorite search engine. It may also describe shopping ads, Gmail ads, display ads, or any other type of paid search engine advertisement.
While Google is the primary search engine most digital marketers target, SEM can also go through alternative search engines such as Yahoo, Bing, or other search engines.
SEO
While SEO (search engine optimization) may often be used interchangeably with SEM, these two terms are distinct strategies used to promote a website in web search results. As discussed above, SEM refers to paid ads. Conversely, SEO refers to organic methods used to promote pages within search results.
SEO techniques are typically separated into four main categories:
Technical SEO focuses on the technical aspects of a web page, improving loading speed or making it mobile-friendly.
Content SEO creates blog posts and other content to help drive searchers to a website.
On-page SEO optimizes the visible factors on a given page, like adding alt text to images and ensuring that pages have relevant headings.
Off-page SEO targets link-building, authority-building, and other methods that aren’t part of the website itself.
SERP
SERP stands for search engine results page, the page you see when you search for a term or phrase. SERPs display organic search results, paid search results, and other results related to the term or phrase being searched.
For digital marketers, it’s essential to understand how your page will be displayed on search results. The primary items that people will see when your page pops up include a title and a description, but they may also include things like the date the page was published or other on-page information.
SM
In the digital marketing world, you may sometimes see social media abbreviated as SM. Most brands today recognize that social media is an excellent way to connect and communicate with your fans or clients for free. Brands can reach their audience through sites like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter.
In general, SM refers to organic activities such as posting text, images, and videos to your brand’s social media profiles or responding to questions and comments from visitors. Paid social media activities are designated as SMM (social media marketing), which we will discuss below.
SMART
SMART is an acronym used to describe a method for setting goals. It stands for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. Here are some details on each of those descriptors:
Specific: A vague goal doesn’t help anyone. Be specific.
Instead of “I want to improve my time management skills,”
try “I want to be on time with all of my deadlines.”Measurable: You won’t know if you’ve met your goal if it’s not measurable.
Instead of “I want more followers,”
try “I want 50% more followers.”Attainable: If the goal you set is so far out that you won’t reasonably be able to reach it, you’re unlikely to make as much progress toward it.
Instead of “I’ll publish 100 new blog posts this week,”
try “I’ll publish 1 new blog post every day.”Relevant: If the goal doesn’t further your business, it may not be a good use of your time and energy.
Instead of “I want to increase top keyword use on each page,”
try “I’ll find more relevant long-tail keywords and work them into content.”Time-bound: Leaving a goal open-ended creates no sense of urgency and may lead to it being placed on a backburner.
Instead of “I’ll complete a technical SEO audit,”
try “I’ll complete a technical SEO audit by the end of the month.”
Using this easy-to-remember acronym, digital marketers and others can set goals that make sense and are helpful rather than frustrating.
SMM
SMM, or social media marketing, is the paid version of social media that many brands like to employ. Unlike organic activities such as standard social media posts and responding to comments from followers, SMM activities are a paid form of advertising. This may include ads targeting users to simply follow or like a brand, or ones that directly sell products or services.
There are several platforms that allow digital marketers to use SMM to reach their target audience. First, you must understand which platforms match your intended demographics, then tailor your social media advertising to that audience.
SQL
You may frequently hear the term SQL, or sales qualified lead, in the digital marketing world. It refers to a prospective customer who has been vetted not only by the marketing team but by the sales team themselves. These leads are already far enough into the sales funnel that the sales team is now ready to convert them from potential customers to active ones.
At this point, there should be more targeted marketing efforts, including personalized emails, gmail ads, or other customer-specific messaging. More importantly, the sales team should reach out to this lead to attempt to convert them or determine what is blocking them from becoming a customer.
SWOT
Digital marketers may be requested to perform a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis to improve marketing strategies. This process will determine the following:
What are the strengths of the current strategy? These may include the strength of the brand’s name, the marketing team’s skills and experience, or other factors that could be employed to further the brand’s messaging.
What are the weaknesses of the current strategy? Look for gaps in the skills and experience of the current team, budgetary or time constraints, systems and processes that should be updated, and other problems hindering the team.
What opportunities exist for the marketing team? Look for a gap in the market or a new demographic your team should be pursuing, new tools or pathways that aren’t currently being used, or other ways to improve your marketing efforts beyond where they currently lie.
What factors pose threats to the current strategy? Determine if a new competitor popped up or an old competitor gained ground. Also, see if new regulations or other factors could hamper your marketing efforts.
ToFU
ToFU is not a soy-based meat alternative when it’s mentioned in the digital marketing world. Instead, it stands for top of funnel, the broadest category in the marketing funnel.
Unlike MoFU and BoFU potential customers described above, ToFU prospects may not even know that your brand exists. This means they are typically broad demographic groups like 20-30 year old singles or mothers of toddlers.
The marketing efforts used to reach this group also tend to be broad. Things like blog posts and podcasts, SEO efforts and SMM, infographics, and other public marketing efforts can all help you get your brand in front of new eyes and move them through the funnel toward becoming an active customer.
UGC
One of the most valuable types of content for digital marketers is UGC or user-generated content. Many of today’s consumers are savvy and know that marketing scams exist nearly everywhere online. They tend to trust other users more than they do new brands. So anytime you can get the public at large to create content that promotes your brand, that’s an excellent way to gain public trust.
UGC types may include:
reviews
unboxing videos
customer photos
social media posts
blog posts
case studies
USP
USP stands for unique selling proposition, and it’s something every digital marketer should note. In digital marketing, it’s essential to understand what sets your brand apart from the competition. This is your USP, and it should be top of mind while designing and implementing your marketing strategies.
First, determine how your brand fits with your target market’s values and desires. See what your brand does better than your competitors. Is there some quantifiable difference between your products and others on the market? Distill this information into a short message and include it in your marketing and communications.
UX
In the digital world, UX stands for user experience, a critical aspect of your brand’s identity. When someone goes to your website, what do they see? How does it make them feel? What does the experience of using your product look and feel like for the user? If you’re not asking these questions, you may be fighting a losing battle to gain loyal customers.
UX is more than usability. You could have the slickest, fastest, website in the world, but if your customers don’t like the feel of it, they’ll quickly abandon you for a competitor. Take the time to understand a typical user’s journey with your brand. Poll loyal customers about what they think and feel about your product. Then do everything you can to ensure that the user experience is not only memorable but satisfying.
YoY
The acronym YoY stands for year-over-year, a method of measuring any specific statistic’s direction. In the most basic terms, it compares one year to the next, determining how well your brand is performing or how things have changed over time. You may see YoY discussed as related to any of the following statistics:
Overall sales numbers
Sales across a specific channel or demographic
User Engagement
Quarterly or monthly earnings (comparing December to December rather than December to March)
Growth rate
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