Lesson 4

Basic Concepts And Terminology

For many tour business owners, it has become a more or less regular occupation to watch various webinars and attend conferences. It would be nice, however, as many admit, it is often not clear what is at stake. Moreover, confusing and stylized terminology is used by low-skilled Internet marketers who promise small businesses golden mountains, while covering gaps in their knowledge and skills with words incomprehensible to the customer.

Therefore, before studying Internet marketing, you should understand the terminology very well. This is the language that Internet marketers speak, and it is essential for a business leader to understand this language. Below are the most common terms that you will inevitably come across when communicating with marketers or when working independently in Internet marketing.

Traffic is the flow or number of visitors to a website or social network page in a given period of time.

A traffic source is anything that brings visitors to a website.

Offline traffic sources – business cards, posters, QR codes, etc.

Online traffic sources – search ads, online banners, social networks, etc.

Organic traffic – visitors who found your site in any search engine without additional advertising. In social networks, these are visitors who came to your page without additional promotion, that is, through a social network search, a hashtag, or your subscribers.

Website analytics is a digital and graphic display of the quantitative and qualitative characteristics of website visitors using special services like Google Analytics. For example, how many visitors came from a particular social network, at what time they went to the site, how many visitors came to your site from search, how many and what pages visitors read, etc.

End-to-end analytics is a quantitative measurement of the effectiveness of Internet marketing, which allows you to track not only traffic and its sources, but also the entire chain of consumer actions. For example, going from a social network to a website – viewing a certain position – filling out an application – making a purchase.

Internet channels – online advertising channels for transmitting information to tourists. These are the tools through which a business can communicate information to customers. It can be a website, advertisements in search, social networks, electronic cards, etc.

Offline channels – business cards, souvenirs, TV, radio, newspapers, posters, billboards, etc.

Search advertising – advertising in Yandex or Google search engines, when your advertisement is shown to users along with search results for certain queries. When a user enters your assigned keywords in a search, only then will your ad be shown to that particular user.

Targeted advertising – advertisements or posts that are not shown to everyone in a row, but only to certain groups of people or audiences, selected by interests, location, online behavior and other parameters.

Display advertising – your ads that appear on certain sites or ad networks in accordance with your terms. For example, displaying banners on news sites.

Remarketing, retargeting – technologies that allow you to re-show ads to people who have already seen your ad or performed some action with it. They allow you to remind about certain offers, return the user to your site, make a repeat sale, etc.

Conversion is the ratio of the number of useful actions of visitors on a website or social network to the total number of visitors. For example, “0.1 or 10% conversion to site requests” means that out of 100 visitors, only 10 make a request. There can be different types of conversions, such as from visitors to queries, from visitors to purchases, from visitors to repeat purchases, etc.

A sales funnel is a quantitative measurement of customer interactions with a company at different stages. Typically, the funnel describes the number of customers by actions at 4 stages of the sale, for example: attention, interest, desire, purchase. More details in chapter 5 of part 2.

Social media metrics are quantitative indicators of the performance of your social media page. Any social network has built-in statistics showing how many users have seen a particular post, how many have responded, which posts are popular, which are not.

Reach is the total number of visitors who saw your ad or post.

The organic reach of a post is the number of people who saw the post without additional advertising and without any payment.

Share of organic reach to the number of subscribers – the ratio of the number of people who saw the post to the total number of subscribers without additional advertising. Usually measured as a percentage. For example, a post’s organic reach of 3% means that only 3% of your followers saw the post.

Paid reach is the number of people that a social network or media system showed an advertising post or ad for payment from an advertiser.

Social Media Profile Visits or Views – The number of visitors who, after seeing your post or finding it in a search, were interested in the general information of your page and went to your profile description.

Actions in the social network – any activity of the reader of your post (like, repost, comment).

Engagement is the ratio of visitor activity to reach. The higher the user activity, the higher the engagement. One of the most important parameters by which a social network or search engine ranks a page or site and understands how interesting your content is to visitors. Usually measured as a percentage. For example, a certain post was seen by 100 people. This is the scope of the post. Liked, commented or reposted by 7 people. These are posting activities. Then, respectively, the involvement will be 7%.

An audience is any group of people selected according to certain characteristics. For example, by interests, location, age, gender, social media activity, etc.

Target audience – an audience where people are selected according to the main feature: they can become your customers, that is, they want or can make a purchase from you. The target audience can be selected by interests, online activities, place of residence and many other parameters.

Online reputation is what is written about your company on the Internet and what impression your company makes on potential buyers based on reviews, comments, etc.

Influence marketing is the placement of advertising posts by media people on their pages in social networks or blogs for a certain fee.

Content marketing is marketing based on super useful and timely content for users. Content marketing solves several problems: increasing the credibility of the company, increasing the authority of the company, stimulating the desire of customers to share information, improving customer loyalty due to the relevance and usefulness of the content.

Landing Page – a simple one-page site set up to sell or receive leads from potential customers

Lead – any contact of an interested buyer, for example, a phone or email.

Contextual advertising is the display of advertising to users based on the context of their requests, behavior or intentions.

Display Network – a network of Google partner sites that display one or another advertisement from advertisers. For example, if a news site is part of the Google Display Network, then any advertiser can set up contextual advertising through Google Ads so that the ad is displayed in a sports or some other section or is shown to certain audiences.

Key phrases or words are phrases that users use to find a site in search, or phrases that trigger ads in search when entering a keyword by a user triggers an ad.

Profile – usually in social networks and other services this is a description of the company, its type of activity, contact details, a link to the site.

Hashtag – from hash (pound sign #) and tag – label. Keyword preceded by #. This is a tag or bookmark associated with the topic of the hashtag. For example, #smarttourism allows you to find publications on the topic of smart tourism, unless, of course, those who posted the post included such a hashtag in their publication. And the hashtag #centersmarttourism will help you find a company. Used for promotion on search in social networks.

Benchmarking – comparing your company with competitors.

Meta tag is a part of the web page code that contains short texts (metadata) about the content of this page. For example, the Title meta tag tells about the title of the page, the Description meta tag about its content. Properly filled meta tags improve the page’s search ranking.

Snippet – an inscription that is displayed on the search page about the found site. Includes URL, Title, Description meta tags. It is also possible to display the logo and various additional information in the search. In fact, the result of a Google search is a selection of snippets of the sites found.

An advertising campaign is a pre-planned action in a social network or advertising system to promote a group of goods or services. Campaign settings typically set parameters such as the overall budget, payment limits by amount or time, the duration of the campaign, and its marketing goal.

It is worth noting that this list is far from complete and periodically the terminology of Internet marketing is replenished, however, it is not difficult to find the meaning of a particular term on the Internet. The main thing in the process of working online is to understand what this or that term means, because misunderstanding can negatively affect the results of your work.

Author: Dmitriy Tin – founder of Center Smart Tourism GmbH
Editing and translation into English: Leonid Andrianov