A glossary for website promotion terms

Promotion terms explained

Organic traffic

Visitors who arrive at a website by clicking a normal, unpaid result on a search engine such as Google. This is the number most business owners care about first, because it grows without paying per visitor, though it usually takes months of consistent work to build up.

Paid search

Adverts that appear on a search engine results page above or alongside the ordinary listings, bought through a platform such as Google Ads, where the advertiser is charged each time someone clicks. It starts to matter once organic traffic is too slow to reach and a business wants visibility for a term straight away, at a cost.

Cost per click (CPC)

The amount an advertiser pays each time someone clicks their paid advert, set by an auction between advertisers bidding on the same search term. Comparing CPC across a few keywords is usually the first step in working out whether a paid search campaign is affordable for a given budget.

Cost per thousand impressions (CPM)

The price of showing an advert 1,000 times, used mainly for display and banner adverts where the goal is being seen. It matters when comparing a brand-awareness campaign against a click-based one, because the two are priced on entirely different logic.

Click-through rate (CTR)

The proportion of people who see something, an advert, a search listing, an email subject line, who go on to click it. A page that ranks well but has a low click-through rate often has a meta description that isn't giving people a reason to click.

Conversion rate

The proportion of visitors to a site who go on to complete whatever action counts as success there, such as a purchase, a form submission, or a newsletter signup. This is the figure worth watching once traffic is arriving reliably, since it shows whether the site itself is doing its job.

Bounce rate

The proportion of visits where someone lands on a page and leaves without viewing a second page or taking any action on the site. A high bounce rate on a page that's meant to sell something usually points to a mismatch between what the visitor expected and what the page delivers.

Landing page

A page built or chosen as the destination for a specific piece of promotion, such as an advert or an email link, usually designed around one clear next step. Sending paid traffic to a general homepage is one of the more common ways a campaign underperforms.

Backlink

A link from another website pointing to yours, which search engines treat as a signal that other people consider your content worth linking to. Backlinks still carry weight in how a site ranks, though a handful from relevant, established sites tends to matter more than a large number from unrelated ones.

Domain authority (DA)

A score produced by a third-party tool that estimates how likely a website is to rank well, based largely on the number and quality of backlinks pointing to it. It's useful for comparing your own site's progress over time or sizing up a competitor, but it's an estimate.

SERP

Short for search engine results page, the page a search engine shows after someone runs a search, made up of paid adverts, organic listings, and often extra features such as maps or images. Where your site appears on the SERP for a given search term is what most people mean when they talk about a page's ranking.

Meta description

A short piece of text, written into a page's HTML, that summarises the page and often appears as the snippet beneath its title on a search results page. It doesn't affect ranking directly, but a well-written one can lift the click-through rate on a listing that's already ranking reasonably well.

Open rate

The proportion of people who receive an email who go on to open it, tracked by most email marketing tools. It's the first thing to check when an email campaign underperforms, since a low open rate points to the subject line.

Referral traffic

Visitors who arrive at a site by clicking a link on another website, one that isn't a search engine or a paid advert. A spike in referral traffic often means a piece of coverage or a mention on another site is sending people your way, worth checking which one.

UTM parameter

Extra text added to the end of a link that tells an analytics tool where a visitor came from, such as which email, advert, or social post they clicked. Without one, traffic from a specific campaign can end up lumped in with general referral or direct traffic, making it hard to tell what actually worked.

Retargeting

A form of paid advertising that shows adverts specifically to people who have already visited a website, following them across other sites or social platforms afterwards. It tends to work well for visitors who looked but didn't buy, since it's aimed at people already familiar with the site.

Google Search Console

A free tool from Google that shows how a website appears in search results, including which search terms bring it traffic and any technical problems Google has found while crawling it. It's usually the first tool worth setting up, because it shows real search behaviour that no other free tool provides in the same detail.

Analytics session

A single visit recorded by an analytics tool, grouping together the pages someone views and the actions they take during one continuous period on a site. Sessions and users aren't the same thing, one person can generate several sessions over a week, which matters when comparing traffic figures.