Digital Media Acronyms

Can you imagine a business that doesn’t promote itself on social media? A company that doesn’t have its own website? Seems strange to imagine that, doesn’t it? Gone are the days when businesses followed traditional methods. In today’s digital world, even the smallest company has understood the importance of digital marketing.  

Talking about digital marketing, we’ve all heard terms like SEO, Adwords, PPC etc. but how many of us actually know what they mean? Here’s our list of important digital media acronyms that you should know. Because the next time someone says SEO – you can proudly say ‘Search Engine Optimization.’ 

Campaign Types:

  1. SEM: Search Engine Marketing: A type of internet marketing that involves paying for ads to increase website visibility, in turn making it search engine friendly is known as Search Engine Marketing
  2. PPC: Pay-Per-Click: Pay-Per-Click is an online marketing model wherein advertisers pay a fee every time their ad gets clicked on
  3. SEO (Search Engine Optimization): SEO is an online marketing necessity today as it helps websites rank on Page 1 of a search engine by adding relevant tags, titles, descriptions, headings etc.
  4. Content Marketing: A meaningful piece of information – copy, images, videos, infographics etc. In order to increase your ranking, it is important to have content that is crisp, clear and informative
  5. Social Organic: This refers to the number of people who come across your post organically without boosting the post
  6. Social Paid: This refers to the number of people who come across your post with the help of monetary distribution i.e. boosted post
  7. Programmatic Buy: Programmatic buying assists advertisers in RTB. This helps them bid a price and reach a large network of publishers
  8. Email Marketing: The act of sending out any information / communication about your brand / product or service through an email is known as email marketing.  

Performance Metrics:

  1. Impressions: Page impression is synonymous with page views. This term determines the number of views your page / post has received. Each time a page is viewed, it counts as a page impression
  2. Clicks: Clicks is another important metric in the digital world. When a person clicks on your ad, it is counted as a page click
  3. CTR (Click Through Rate): CTR is the total number of clicks divided by the total number of impressions. For example, if your last article appeared 1000 times on Google and was clicked 40 times, the CTR is 40/1000 – 0.04% i.e. 4%  
  4. Cost: This determines the efficiency of expenses incurred on a particular ad. Normally, businesses assess cost as the ratio of earned value over actual costs
  5. CPC (Cost Per Click): This term determines how much an advertiser pays each time an ad gets clicked
  6. CPM (Cost Per Mille): CPM is the cost an advertiser pays for one thousand views or clicks on an advertisement


  1. Conversions / Sales / Lead:  While building an SEO strategy, it is important to define your ultimate goal, which is also referred to as conversion. With reference to your website, conversion could mean an enquiry, a purchase etc. The more SEO friendly your website it, the better your ranking will be, which means the more people will convert
  2. Conversion Rate: The number of conversions divided by the total number of visitors determines the conversion rate. For example: If an ecommerce site receives 200 visitors in a month and has 50 sales, the conversion rate would be 50 by 200 i.e. 25%
  3. Cost Per Conversion: Another online pricing model, cost per conversion is when the advertiser pays for a specific acquisition – a click, sale, request etc.


  1. Reach: Organic reach refers to the total number of unique users your page / post reaches to
  2. CPM (Reach): CPM reach evaluates how much money it costs you to reach 1000 viewers 


  1. Engagement: Social media engagement evaluates the number of likes, views, comments and shares on a page / post
  2. Cost Per Engagement: When a user engages with an ad at a specific cost, it is known as cost per engagement
  3. Post Reactions: When a user reacts to a post by using various emoticons, it is known as a post reaction
  4. Post Comments: When a user interacts with the post by commenting on it, it is known as a post comment
  5. Post Shares: When a user shares a particular post on their account, it is known as page shares
  6. Page Likes: When a user likes a particular post, it is known as a page like


  1. Views: A video view determines the number of people who have watched the video
  2. Cost Per View: The process of charging for video advertisements based on the number of views / interactions it receives is known as CPV
  3. 03 Sec View: When a video is viewed on Facebook or Instagram for 3 seconds or more, it is counted as a view  
  4. 10 Sec Views: The number of times your video is played for atleast 10 seconds or for almost 10 seconds if the video is shorter than 10 seconds, it is counted as a view
  5. 25% View: When a video is played to 25% of its length, it is counted as a 25% view
  6. 50% View: The sum of any views that is atleast 50% for 2 seconds is counted as a view
  7. 75% View: The number of times your video was played for 75% of its length, including the beginning and the point where people skipped to 75% and started watching your video from there
  8. 100% View: A video that is viewed from start to finish counts as a 100% viewed video  


  1. Adwords: An online advertising service by Google, Adwords enables people to place ads on search results with the help of popular keywords
  2. Alt Text: Alt text means alternative text. Search engines cannot see or understand images like humans. So, alt text provides textual information about images to help search engines understand what’s on every picture
  3. Backlinks: Links that take you to your website from other websites are popularly known as backlinks
  4. Blog: A blog is nothing but an online diary, where articles are published on a timely basis
  5. Crawling: When a search engine bot enters your website’s page, reads up all its content and data and then stores this information in a massive index, it means your website has been crawled
  6. Domain: Any website link without a www is known as a domain name. For example, bruceclaymena.com is a domain name, whereas www.bruceclaymena.com is a URL.  
  7. Google Analytics: A Google-developed software that enables you to track every single piece of information – be it site traffic, visitor behavior, subscribers, bounce rate etc. It also helps you understand your websites growth and strengths
  8. Keyword: Words that are most commonly used on search engines by prospective clients to describe their stories / products / services are popularly known as keywords. Websites that use keywords relevant to their businesses drive more organic traffic.
  9. Keyword Stuffing: There are many websites out there that stuff their pages with popular keywords so as to manipulate their ranking on search engines. This act of overusing keywords results in negative user experience and is known as keyword stuffing
  10. KPI: Before running a campaign, it is important to determine goals and success measures that you plan to achieve. KPI’s are Key Performance Indicators that indicate your rate of success and motivate you to achieve your pre-decided campaign goals.
  11. Optimization: The process of strategizing your website in a way that is best suited for search engine crawlers is known as optimization. The main objective of optimizing a website is to ensure crawlers understand your web content and thus drive more traffic on your site.  
  12. SERP (Search Engine Results Page): This refers to the list of pages that shows up while searching for a particular keyword.  

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