April 30, 2008
Article

Ultimate Search Marketing Glossary

SUMMARY: From 1st Party Cookie to XML, here's a handy glossary defining the most common terms used by search marketers.
Below are search marketing terms you're most likely to come across as you deal with paid search, search engine optimization, or in dealing with your IT department.

1st Party Cookie: A piece of code placed on the user’s browser by the Web site they are currently visiting that is used to track visitor behavior.

2nd Tier Search: Vague grouping of search engines/properties that can be simply any search property except Google, Yahoo!, MSN and AOL. In this Guide, any search property with less than 10% penetration.

3rd Party Cookie: A piece of code used to track user behavior, placed on the user’s browser by someone other than the Web site they’re currently visiting. Third-party cookies are used in Web analytics and in ad serving, among other areas.

A/B Split: Refers to a test situation in which two randomized groups of users are sent different content to test performance of specific campaign elements. The A/B split method can only be used to test one variable at a time.

Abandonment: As in call or site abandonment, when people leave a site, phone call, etc. The ‘abandonment rate’ measures the efficiency of the marketing tool.

Above the Fold: The part of an email message or Web page that is visible without scrolling. Material in this area is considered more valuable because the reader sees it first. It refers to a printing term for the top half of a newspaper above the fold, but unlike a newspaper, email and Web page fold locations aren’t predictable. Your fold may be affected by the users’ preview pane, monitor size, monitor resolution and any headers placed by email programs, such as Hotmail, etc.

Acquisition Cost: In marketing, the cost to generate one lead, newsletter subscriber or customer in an individual email campaign; typically, the total campaign expense divided by the number of leads, subscribers or customers it produced.

Addressable Calls: A description of phone inquiries that can result in an action or sale. A key metric in Pay-per-call search.

AdSense: Contextual advertising program from Google. The program displays text ads which are considered to be contextually relevant to the page.

AdWords: Pay-per-click advertising program from Google. The prices of keywords are determined by an auction system.

Affiliates: Websites which get a CPA commission of some kind in exchange for sending sales or another predetermined conversion activity to merchants’ Web sites. Affiliates range from hobbyist sites to highly evolved commercial ventures with multiple merchant relationships.

Agent Name Delivery: See Bait-and-Switch

Algorithm: A set of mathematical rules that describe or determine a circumstance or action. In the case of search engines, unique algorithms determine the rankings of Web sites returned within search queries. Although some of the qualities used to determine ranking (number of referring sites, metatags, etc.) are known, the precise functioning of search engine algorithms is a closely kept secret to prevent the manipulation of the system

Algorithmic Results: See Organic Listings

API: See Application Program Interface

Applet: Small program (usually written in Java or in another Web-friendly language) that runs within a Web browser. Some applets may be negatively viewed by search engine spiders, affecting indexing and page rank.

Application Program Interface (API): How a program (application) accesses another to transmit data. A client may have an API connection to load database information to an email vendor automatically and receive data back from the email. Also called API

Application Service Provider: Company that provides a Web-based service. Clients don’t have to install software on their own computers; all tasks are performed on (hosted on) the ASP’s servers. Also called ASP

ASP: See Application Service Provider

Auction: A server that determines the price of your ad based on what other advertisers are willing to bid for appearing next to results for the same term.

Automated Submission: Submitting a page or pages of a site to multiple search engines via software to automate the process. Most search engines frown upon auto submissions because they eat up unnecessary bandwidth. The exception may be when you have a prior relationship with the search engine, such as through a paid inclusion program or trusted feed relationship.

Average Adopters: They want to take advantage of new technologies but have lengthy processes in place to protect them from adverse reactions. They’ll often wait for a big-name company to offer a solution in an area spearheaded by smaller, faster-moving companies.

Awareness: The first phase of the product-marketing cycle during which prospects gain awareness of the product/service.

Backlinks: Links pointing to a particular Web page. Also called Inbound Links

Bait-and-Switch: The attempt to feed search engine spiders different content from what is delivered to “human” Web site visitors in an attempt to optimize for page ranking. Also called Agent Name Delivery; IP Delivery

BANT: An acronym for the basic pieces of lead development information: Budget … Authority … Need … Timeframe.

Black Hat Practices: Unethical practices. For example, loading your page with invisible text in order to “trick” the search engines into ranking your page highly is often considered black hat SEO.

Blog: See Weblog

Bot: See Spider

Broad Match: Campaigns in which you allow the search engine to serve your ad against searches that may seem similar although they do not include the exact explicit term you specified. These may be common typos, etc. This helps you expand your campaign to more searches without having to think up every conceivable way someone might search for you.

Buzz: The cumulative coverage of an issue, event, company, etc. in all media outlets and in the population at large. Companies that measure ‘buzz’ examine the volume and tone of coverage in both, individually-generated media — blogs, message board postings, discussion lists — and in mass-media outlets.

Cache: Some search engines (most notably Google) show the page of a site as it existed when it was added to the engine’s database. If a page has been edited since it was added, the cached version will not be exactly the same version a user would see when visiting the page.

Call to Action: In a marketing message, Web ad, e-mail, etc. the link or body copy that tells the recipient what action to take.

Cell: A segment of your list that receives different treatment specifically to see how it responds (vs. the control, normal treatment). Also called Test Cell; Version

CGI: A specification for transferring information between the Web and a Web server, such as processing email subscription or contact forms. Also called Common Gateway Interface

C-Level Executive: Any chief officer of a company. It can be a CIO, CEO, CFO, COO, CTO or others. CXO can refer to any C-level executive.

Click Fraud: The use of various tactics in attempting to inflate click rates on search engine listings artificially, to increase the cost to particular advertisers, or to increase the clicks attributed to an affiliate Web site.

Clickthrough Rate: See CTR

Clickthrough Tracking: When a hotlink is included in an email, search ad or online ad, a clickthrough occurs when a recipient clicks on the link. Clickthrough tracking refers to the data collected about each clickthrough link, such as the number of people who clicked it or the number of clicks that resulted in desired actions, such as sales, forwards or subscriptions.

Clickthrough: The process of clicking on a link in a search engine output page to visit an indexed site.

Client: Commonly, the user’s computer, browser or application that requests information from another online application. Most client applications request information from a ‘server-side’ application.

Cloaking: Showing the search engine one page and the end user a different page. Search engines (surprise!) frown upon this tactic.

Collaborative Filtering: Using the experience of previous searchers to return more relevant results. Also called Social Filtering

Commercial Email: Email the purpose of which, as a whole or in part, is to sell or advertise a product or service, or to persuade users to perform an act, such as purchasing a product or clicking to a Web site the contents of which are designed to sell, advertise or promote.

Common Gateway Interface: See CGI

Comparison Shopping Sites: Similar to search engines, Comparison Shopping Sites or engines allow users to compare products from a variety of sources (Web sites). Merchants feed product data to the comparison sites and pay for leads or sales generated. Also called Shopping Search Engines

Conditional Content: Use of a database to allow or to block content based on user behavior. This is done with “if” and “then” statements.

Consideration Phase: The second phase of the buying cycle, when consumers familiarize themselves with products, features and benefits.

Consideration: The second phase of the buying cycle, when buyers are becoming familiar with products, features, benefits, prices, etc. Consideration is the phase during which relationship marketing using email, telemarketing, etc. is commonly used to ‘warm’ the lead, or move the lead from consideration to the sales funnel.

Consumer Generated Media: Any of the many kinds of online content which are generated at the user level. Personal web pages, such as those found on MySpace, are rudimentary examples; blogs and podcasts are more evolved ones.

Content Rich: Refers to a web page that contains content relevant to the topic at hand. Usually, it is used to refer to the need to repeat keyword phrases within the body copy of a web site. Search engine algorithms give higher ranking to a site that contains the keyword phrases that a user is searching for.

Conversion Rate: The percentage of visitors/users who ‘convert’ on the action of a Web page or campaign. For example, actions may include purchasing, submitting a form, downloading content, calling a phone number, or making an extended site visit.

Conversion: When a recipient of a marketing message performs a desired action based on a mailing you have sent. A conversion could be a monetary transaction, such as a purchase made after clicking a link. It could also include a voluntary act, such as registering at a Web site, downloading a white paper, signing up for a Web seminar or opting in to an email newsletter. In search engine marketing, this usually refers to the number of visitors from the search engines who take the desired action when they reach the Web site. Conversions can include signing up for a newsletter, calling or emailing for more information, or making a purchase.

Cost per Acquisition: See CPA

Cost per Action: See CPA

Cost per Click: See CPC

Cost per Lead: The advertiser’s payment of a set amount for each lead generated by a marketing campaign. Also called CPL

Cost per Thousand: See CPM

CPA: A model in which returns are based on qualifying actions, such as sales or registrations. Many affiliate and lead generation advertisers are compensating marketing partners currently through CPA. Also called Cost per Action; Cost per Acquisition

CPC: The cost of clicking on a sponsored link or pay-per-click ad. Much of search marketing advertising is sold on a CPC basis. Also called Cost per Click

CPL: See Cost per Lead

CPM: The cost per 1,000 impressions; an impression is when a site visitor sees (but doesn’t need to click) a banner ad or Web page. Much of banner advertising is sold on a CPM basis. Also called Cost per Thousand

Crawl: What a search engine’s automated robot (also known as a spider or bot) does when following links from page to page on the Internet.

Crawler: See Spider

CRM: Software and processes of tracking the information that defines a prospect or customer relationship. CRM systems typically store contact and interaction data, such as number and dates of touches, products considered. Also called Customer Relationship Management

Cross-Campaign Profiling: A method used to understand how email respondents behave over multiple campaigns.

Cross-Post: Sending the same email message to at least two different mailing lists or discussion groups.

CTR: The percent of ad viewers who click an ad. This stat will always vary slightly depending upon who reports it – the server that sends the click or the server that receives it. Inevitably, there’s a tiny amount of fallout. Also called Clickthrough Rate

Customer Lifetime Value: A measure of the total amount the customer is going to spend with a merchant during their tenure. Usually calculated by their spending per year multiplied by the average number of years they are likely to be a customer.

Customer Relationship Management: See CRM

Daypart: Division of the day into sections for the purposes of targeting marketing.

Dayparting: Scheduling ads to be run at only certain times of the day, such as only during business hours or only late at night. While costs per click may not very, conversion rates often will.

Deep Linking: Links that direct the person clicking on the link to a page beneath the home page of a Web site. Sometimes used to mean linking to a deep page on someone else’s Web site, which has different legal issues than simply directing someone to a home page.

Deferred Conversions: Sales that take place following a Web site session that may result from it. With many online marketing tactics, it’s not always possible to discern whether a sale took place as the result of some past interaction. Also called Latent Conversions

DHTML: The technology on which “floating” online ads are built. DHTML can be made to sit on top of the page, incorporating movement and sound. DHTML is not typically blocked by pop-up/pop-under blocking software.

Direct Feed: Paid partnership programs with some search engines that permit you to feed information about your pages through a direct XML feed to the search engine without the search engine crawlers needing to visit your site. This is generally reserved for large (500-plus pages) sites, such as dynamically generated ecommerce sites with query strings (question marks and equal signs) in the URL. Google and MSN don’t accept direct feed. Also called Trusted Feed; Paid Inclusion

Domain Name System: Method by which computer networks locate Internet domain names and translate them into IP addresses. The domain name is the actual name for an IP address or for a range of IP addresses, e.g., MarketingSherpa.com.

Doorway Pages: Pages that are created primarily to rank highly in the search engines and are not generally meant for human visitors to see. These are often hidden within a site (or perhaps hosted separately and link to a site) and cannot be navigated to through normal site navigation. Also called Gateway Pages

Dynamic Content: Webpage information that changes according to rules that are set by the client or server, and can adapt to instructions. For example, a dynamic content system makes it possible for unique home pages to be delivered to millions of Yahoo! users whose personal preferences have been set.

Dynamic Keyword Insertion: Some search ad services allow the precise search term to be automatically inserted into the copy of your ad – so you can hand over one piece of copy that reads differently depending on what the viewer searched for when they saw it. Many marketers now also use similar programming on their landing pages to insert keywords into headlines and body copy.

Dynamic URL: A Web page address that is created on the fly at the server level from content contained within a database. Dynamic URLs often contain query strings such as question marks, ampersands, and equal signs. The search engines are hesitant to crawl dynamic URLs because they can lead to infinite loops that may trap their spider and cause a server crash. Dynamic URLs can often lead to duplicate content, which is another reason the search spiders are reluctant to crawl them.

Early Adopters: The first to experiment and benefit from new technologies. They are often beta testers and tech companies.

Editorial Listings: See Organic Listings

Exact Matching: Returns only the ads for queries that exactly match the keyword set.

Eyetracking: A type of Web page testing that follows the eye movements of participants to gauge how they interact with the page.

Fast Followers: They keep themselves informed about new technologies as they appear, and move to integrate them as soon as they’ve proven effective. The sale process can be a long one with fast followers because they want information long before they’re ready to buy.

Firewall: A program or a set of programs designed to keep unauthorized users or messages from accessing a private network. The firewall usually has rules or protocols that authorize or prohibit outside users or messages. In email, a firewall can be designed, so that messages from domains or users listed as suspect because of spamming, hacking or forging will not be delivered.

Free Listings: See Organic Listings

Frequency: The number of times someone is exposed to an advertisement or to a marketing message.

Gateway Pages: See Doorway Pages

Heatmap: A map of a Web page that displays where on the page the consumers are most likely to direct their eyesight.

Hidden Text: A search spam technique in which text is invisible to readers (the same color as the background, an HTML comment, etc.) but is visible to spiders. Most search engines can detect this practice, and pages suffer the consequences in rank.

Inbound Links: See Backlinks

Index: A database of Web pages the search engine has crawled and found useful and unique enough to include.

Invisible Text: Using a font for page content that is the same or similar color as the page background so a search engine will read it but a human visitor will not. All search engines consider the use of invisible text to be a deceptive practice.

IP Delivery: See Bait-and-Switch

Keyphrase: See Keyword Phrase

Keyword Density: The percentage of a page’s text that is comprised of a single keyword. For example, if a 500-word press release has the keyword ‘security’ in it ten times, it has a 2% keyword density.

Keyword Phrase: The words a person uses when querying a search engine to find what they’re looking for. A keyword phrase is also what an SEO would optimize a given page to rank highly for. Also called Keyphrase

Keyword Prominence: The position of keyword phrases within the HTML code and copy of a Web page.

Keyword Stuffing: Repeating keywords excessively or putting an inordinate number of keywords into the copy or HTML tags of a page. All search engines frown upon this practice.

Keyword: A word which forms all or part of a search engine query.

Laggards: They make up only 17% of respondents in this survey, but we know anecdotally that often the largest buyers of technology in the Fortune 1000 and Government are laggards. They depend on tried and true technology and are more concerned with stability and security than the slight edge a new tech might grant them.

LAN: Technologies and industries that create and maintain data communications networks which are geographically small, and allow interconnection of terminals, microprocessors and computers within nearby buildings.

Landing Page: The destination Web page for people responding to an advertisement, designed specifically for that campaign and audience. The campaign might be in any medium, but is typically driven by email, search or online ad. The key difference between a home page and landing page is that the former must be all things to all visitors, while the landing page should be very narrowly designed for the campaign, and perhaps for a segment of the audience responding to it.

Latency: In regards to search marketing and conversion, the likelihood of a conversion to take place after an initial visit. It is estimated that in some categories, 85% of conversions are latent.

Latent Conversions: See Deferred Conversions

Lead Development: The process of moving a qualified lead toward becoming a prospect (someone in the sales funnel).

Lifestage: In marketing, the division of life into stages based on age and family status, from ‘young singles’ to ‘empty nesters.’

Link farms: Subsets of sites where each member of the community must link to each other members’ sites. Because the links are required, the search engines generally place little value on these types of links.

Link Popularity: The part of a search engine’s ranking criteria that looks at how many (and the quality of) links a site has. Pages deemed to be popular are often given a boost in the search engine rankings for the keyword phrases related to it.

Linkrot: Term describing the process of links going bad over time, either because a Web site has shut down or a site has stopped supporting a unique landing page provided in an email promotion.

Local Area Networks: See LAN

Log File Analysis: Combing through Web site log files to discover which keywords visitors use frequently.

Machine-generated Pages: Pages that are created automatically to blanket the search engines with low-quality, high keyword-density pages in an attempt to dominate the search engine results. All search engines frown upon these types of pages. They often go by many different names and are sometimes said to be a “proprietary” system for gaining high rankings.

Manual Submission: Personally visiting a search engine’s “Add URL” form and pasting in the URL and other information asked for in order to let the search engine know about any given page.

Meta Search: A search that aggregates the results from a variety of search engines by submitting the query to them, and consolidating the results.

Meta Tags: HTML codes that are not visible to the average site visitor but that are intended for the search engines to help them better classify a site. The two tags important for search engine optimization include the Meta keyword tag and the Meta description tag.

Microsites: A cross between a landing page and a regular web site. They often have their own domain names and even brands separate from the organization’s brand. They are used when a marketer wants to offer a user an extended experience for branding or educational purposes. In fact, a site the visitor might even return to as a destination.

Mirror Pages: Duplicate pages intended to gain extra rankings in the search engines. Most search engines ignore all but one copy of any duplicate content.

Modality: Generally used as a synonym for ‘category,’ such as ‘Direct mail,’ is among the oldest modalities of offline marketing.

Multichannel Marketing: Marketing efforts that use multiple media to target unique prospects. For example, sending direct postal mail and email with complimentary messaging and offers to the same people with coordinated timing.

Multichannel: A differentiator of merchants that employ multiple sales channels, as opposed to being strictly one (brick and mortar) or the other (Web-only or “pureplay”).

Multi-variate Testing: Using a statistical model to allow the simultaneous testing of multiple variables. Contrast with A/B testing which can effectively examine only one variable at a time. Also known as the Taguchi Method.

Natural Results: See Organic Listings

Negative Matching: Allows you to input words that will stop the ad from being served to certain queries. For example, you might negative match “Oahu” in your “Hawaii surf” keyword group because your store is on Maui.

Nth Name: The act of segmenting a list for a test in which names are pulled from the main list for the test cell by number, such as every 5th name on the list

Offline Conversion: Sales or other conversion events which take place in the real world, typically in a brick-and-mortar store.

Organic Listings: The search page results that are provided free and are based on the search algorithms of the search engine. A site might have a high “organic” ranking without paying the search engine anything at all. Conversely, a high-spending advertiser in a keyword category might not appear anywhere near the top organic results. Also called Algorithmic Results, Natural Results, Free Listings, Editorial Listing

Paid Inclusion: See Direct Feed

Paid Placement: See Paid Search Advertising

Paid Search Advertising: Ad model where search engines return paid advertising when appropriate queries are used. Advertisers bid on specific keywords contained in search queries and attach specific text ads to them. Also called Paid Placement

Pass-along: An email recipient who got your message via forwarding from a subscriber. (Some emails offer “forward to a friend” in the creative, but the vast majority of pass-alongs happen using email clients). Pass-alongs can affect the formatting of the email, often stripping off HTML.

Pay per Click: A term from general online advertising indicating that the advertiser will pay for the ad by the click it receives (as opposed to by the money it makes, the views it gets or the time period it’s displayed.) Many search engine advertisers use the term PPC to describe their campaigns, not realizing it has a broader meaning. Also called PPC

Pay-for-Performance: A general term indicating how a media buy is being paid for, in this case by results only. Affiliate marketing is also sometimes known as pay-for-performance marketing.

Pay-per-call Advertising: Where an advertiser pays for an incoming metered toll-free number call from search engine visitors who see the ad. Sold in much the same way as more typical paid search ads, except advertisers pay for calls instead of clicks.

Penetration: In search, the percentage of the total potential search engine users who conduct a search on a given engine or site.

Permission: The explicit approval given when a person actively requests to have their email address added to a list.

Persona-Based Design: Personas are virtual customers, useful templates based on common customer types that can guide site design, offer testing, etc.

Personalization: A targeting method in which an email message appears to have been created only for a single recipient. Personalization techniques include adding the recipient’s name in the subject line or message body, or the message offer reflects a purchasing, link clicking, or transaction history.

Phrase Matching: A variation on broad matching that allows the search engine to return results that include your phrase. You’ve bid on “Hawaii surf” and the phrase-matched query “Hawaii surf shop” will return your ad, but won’t return “surf pros in Hawaii.”

Podcast: A way to publish audio content on the internet for download to multimedia players.

Position: The rank/order in which your ad appears in a list of ads on a page.

PPC: See Pay per Click

PPC: Pay-Per-Click is a search-engine marketing service where the advertisers must pay on a per-click basis to generate traffic for their Web site. The highest ‘bidder’ ranks the best.

Privacy Policy: A clear description of how your company uses the email addresses and other information it gathers via opt-in requests for newsletters, company information or third party offers and other functions. If you rent, sell or exchange your list to anyone outside your company, or if you add email addresses to opt-out messages, you should state so in the privacy policy. State laws may also compel you to explain your privacy policy, where to put the policy statement, so that people will see it, and even the form in which the policy should be displayed.

Product Imaging and Display: A number of different technologies which allow rich product displays online, for example, zoom, multiple images, 3D rotating images, videos, etc. Used to combat the Internet shoppers’ inability to hold a product in their hands.

Prospects: Leads that have progressed from the stage of qualified lead into the sales funnel. However, the term is often used as a synonym for qualified lead.

Purchase Phase: The final stage of the buying process, when consumers commit to a product and purchase it.

Qualified Lead: While the definition varies from marketer to marketer, a qualified lead is generally the next step up from inquiry — the lead fits some criteria to warrant lead development. It may be as simple as ‘anyone who searched for this term is qualified’ to ‘they only corresponded to 3 of 5 criteria from our registration form; they’re not qualified.’

Query: A word, phrase or string of words used to define the response from a search engine or database.

Ranking: A Web page’s position in search engine results for a particular keyword/search phrase. Higher rankings typically indicate better SEO, more traffic, and higher-quality traffic.

Really Simple Syndication: See RSS

Reciprocal Linking: Exchanging links with another site.

Recreational Shoppers: The approximately 40% of the population that reports that it “likes to shop” and considers shopping a hobby or fun activity.

Referrer: The address of the Web page from which a visitor arrived. Also called Referring URL

Referring URL: See Referrer

Relevancy: How a search engine determines where any given page’s ranking should be. Relevancy is based on a complicated mathematical formula called an algorithm, which takes hundreds of factors into consideration.

Research Phase: Initial stage of the buying process, when consumers are beginning to understand a product and its role in the market.

Results Page: The page displayed after a user enters a search query. Also known as search engine results page, or SERP.

Return on Investment: The amount of money made from a campaign (search engine marketing or otherwise), less the amount spent. See also ROI

Rich Media: Creative that includes video, animation, and/or sound. Rich-media emails often collect high open and click rates but require more bandwidth and are less compatible with different email clients than text or regular HTML email-format messages are. Some mailers also consider transactional email “rich.”

Robots.txt: A Web site command in HTML that tells search engine spiders to stop indexing a site or page.

ROI: See Return on Investment

RSS: XML-based content distribution method that powers many blogs and other types of content Web sites. RSS gathers “feeds” of information from user-designated sources. The “feeds” include clickable headlines and blurbs about full pieces of content. RSS is seen as an alternative to some types of email communication, but has yet to become an established marketing medium. Also called Really Simple Syndication

Sales Cycle: The time between first direct contact (may simply be a registration on a Web site) and ultimate sale. Sales cycle is a measure of efficiency of the sales organization.

Scraping: The process of gleaning keywords from competitor Web sites

Search Engine Marketing : Any form of marketing that includes the search engines. SEM encompasses paid search engine ads (PPC), as well as the optimization of pages in the organic search results (SEO). Also called SEM; Search Marketing

Search Engine Optimization Copywriting: Writing the visible text on pages so they use the targeted keyword phrases being optimized for in order to gain search engine visibility.

Search Engine Optimization: The process of altering a Web page’s copywriting and HTML coding to be relevant for specific, targeted keyword phrases that relate to the site in question. Also called SEO

Search Marketing: See Search Engine Marketing.

Searchjacking: Optimizing a page for highly sought-after search terms, even though the page doesn’t have anything to do with the subject matter. Used to generate much highly irrelevant traffic.

Second-Tier Search Engines: A fluid term that sometimes is used to refer to any search engine beyond Google, Yahoo!, MSN, AOL or Ask.com. Also used to refer to the countless low-priced search engines and networks, as distinct from name-brand search properties.

Segmenting Log Files: This process goes beyond simply correlating keywords by frequency with later conversion. Often keywords that occur infrequently can be top converters. The inverse is also true.

Select: A segment of a list determined by any number of attributes, such as source of name, job title, purchasing history, etc. CPM list renters pay an additional fee per thousand names for each select on top of the base list price.

Selections: Information about people, households, companies, etc. that is used to target direct marketing. Demographic selectors may include age, income, gender, hobbies, holding a credit card, etc. B-to-B selectors include role, title, purchasing history, etc.

Selective Unsubscribe: An unsubscribe mechanism that allows a consumer to determine which email newsletters they wish to continue receiving while stopping the sending of others.

SEM: See Search Engine Marketing

SEO: See Search Engine Optimization

SERP: Search Engine Results Page

Server: A program or computer system that stores and distributes email from one mailbox to another, or relays email from one server to another in a network.

Share of Wallet: A measure of how much business in a given category is owned by a merchant. Of everything that someone might be expected to spend on product X this year, how much are they spending with merchant Y?

Shopping Search Engines: See Comparison Shopping Sites

Social Filtering: See Collaborative Filtering

Spider: A small program that surfs the Web in order to index information for a search engine. Also called Bot; Crawler

Spidering: The process of surfing the web, storing URLs and indexing keywords, links and text. Because there is far too much information available to index it all, every search engine has unique (and highly proprietary) ways in which it saves time and space.

Stemming: An advanced search quality of some search engines that allows the engine to return results containing the same word stem as the keyword. Example: A ‘stemming’ return for “marketing” might return results for “marketer.”

Stop Word: Words which are so common they don’t affect search results, such as “a,” “the,” etc.

Submission: Letting a search engine or directory know the URL of a page in order for the page to be included in the engine’s database. Can be done through an add-URL page at a search engine/directory or through a paid inclusion program.

Test Cell: See Cell

Thank-You Page: Web page that appears after user has submitted an order or a form online. May be a receipt.

Throttling: The practice of regulating how many email messages a broadcaster sends to one ISP or mail server at a time. Some ISPs bounce email if it receives too many messages from one sending address at a time.

Title Tag: An HTML tag used by search engines and browsers to help describe what the page is about. The information provided in this tag is assumed to be highly relevant to the page, and therefore it is generally given a lot of weight in the search engine ranking algorithms when determining relevancy.

Trusted Feed: See Direct Feed

Uniform Resource Locator: See URL

Unique Visitor: A single visitor to a Web site determined by the number of unique IP addresses that hit the site.

Unsubscribe: To remove oneself from an email list, either via an emailed command to the list server or by filling in a Web form.

URL : The Web address for a page, always beginning with http:// (or https:// for a secure page) and followed by www. (or variations, although some URLs are set up not to include this information) and the domain name, e.g., http://www.marketingsherpa.com. Also called Uniform Resource Locator

Usability: The study of how people interact with their environment. In online marketing, a specialized form that focuses on Web page design.

Vendor: Any company that provides a service.

Verification: A program that determines an email came from the sender listed in the return path or Internet headers; designed to stop email from forged senders.

Version: See Cell

Vertical Creep: When non-paid, non-organic listings appear in search engine results pages. For instance, the results may be news stories or maps the search engine deems relevant to a query.

Viral: See Pass-along

Weblog: A style of internet publishing using content management software that allows for quick posting of journals, news and articles. Also called Blog

Weekpart: Division of the month into sections for the purposes of targeting marketing.

White Hat Practices: Ethical SEO practices. While there is far from a consensus on what constitutes white hat and black hat practices, Google’s Webmaster pages (http://www.google.com/support/webmasters) lay out some “quality guidelines” as a basis practices it considers ethical.

WOM: See Word of Mouth

Word of Mouth: An emerging area in marketing that attempts to measure and/or harness the power of personal recommendations. With the explosion of blog readership, WOM has become a hot topic in virtually every industry. Also called WOM

XML Feeds: A method of feeding page information to search engines using XML. Some feeds are paid on a CPC or subscription basis.

XML: Extensible Markup Language, a new language that promises more efficient data delivery over the Web. XML does nothing itself. It must be implemented using ‘parser’ software or XSL.

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