Marketing terms, in plain English
Real definitions written by people who actually do this work. Each entry opens with a one-sentence definition you can quote, then expands into context, common mistakes, and how the term shows up in practice.
Email marketing
A/B Testing (Email)
A/B testing in email is the practice of sending two variants of a campaign to small subsets of your list, measuring which performs better, then sending the winner to the remainder.
Abandoned Cart Email
An abandoned cart email is an automated message sent to a shopper who added items to their cart but left the site without completing checkout, designed to recover the sale.
Bounce Rate (Email)
Bounce rate is the percentage of sent emails that could not be delivered, split between hard bounces (permanent failures) and soft bounces (temporary failures).
Click-Through Rate (CTR)
Click-through rate is the percentage of delivered emails that received at least one click on any link inside the email body.
Deliverability
Deliverability is the rate at which sent emails reach the recipient's inbox rather than the spam folder, bouncing, or being silently dropped by the receiving server.
DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail)
DKIM is an email-authentication method that cryptographically signs messages, letting receivers verify the sending domain and that the mail was not altered.
DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance)
DMARC is a policy built on SPF and DKIM that tells receivers how to handle mail failing authentication and reports who is sending as your domain.
Double Opt-In
Double opt-in is the practice of requiring a new email subscriber to confirm their address by clicking a link in a verification email before they are added to your active sending list.
Drip Campaign
A drip campaign is a sequence of pre-written emails sent automatically over a fixed schedule after a trigger event such as a sign-up, purchase, or behavioural milestone.
Email Automation
Email automation is the use of triggered, rule-driven sequences to send the right email to the right contact at the right time, without manual scheduling.
Open Rate
Open rate is the percentage of delivered emails that were opened by recipients, calculated as opens divided by successful deliveries.
Sender Reputation
Sender reputation is the score that inbox providers assign to a sending domain and IP, used to decide whether new mail from that source goes to the inbox, the spam folder, or is rejected outright.
SPF (Sender Policy Framework)
SPF is an email-authentication standard that lists in DNS which mail servers may send for a domain, so receivers can detect and reject spoofed messages.
SEO
Alt Text
Alt text is the `alt` attribute on an HTML `<img>` tag that describes the image's content, used by screen readers for accessibility and by search engines to understand the image.
Anchor Text
Anchor text is the visible, clickable text of a hyperlink, used by search engines as a signal about the topic of the linked page.
Canonical URL
A canonical URL is the preferred version of a page, declared via the `<link rel='canonical'>` tag, that tells search engines which URL to index when the same content is reachable at multiple URLs.
Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals are three Google-defined page experience metrics — Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Interaction to Next Paint (INP), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) — that measure loading, interactivity, and visual stability.
Internal Linking
Internal linking is the practice of linking from one page on your site to another, used to distribute ranking authority across your site, guide users between related content, and help search engines discover and prioritise pages.
Meta Description
A meta description is a short HTML attribute that summarises a web page's content and is displayed in search engine results below the page title and URL.
Orphaned Page
An orphaned page is a page on your site that has zero internal links pointing to it, making it nearly impossible for search engines to discover during normal crawling and resulting in minimal organic traffic.
robots.txt
robots.txt is a text file placed at the root of a website that gives crawling instructions to bots, specifying which paths they may or may not request.
Schema Markup
Schema markup is structured data added to a web page in JSON-LD, Microdata, or RDFa format that describes the page's content using the schema.org vocabulary, helping search engines understand and display the page.
XML Sitemap
An XML sitemap is a file (typically `sitemap.xml`) that lists the URLs on your site you want search engines to crawl and index, along with metadata like last-modified date and update frequency.
Ecommerce
Abandoned Cart
An abandoned cart is an ecommerce session where the shopper added one or more products to their cart but left the site before completing the purchase.
Average Order Value (AOV)
Average order value is the average revenue per order, calculated as total revenue divided by the number of orders over a given period.
Conversion Rate
Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors to a page or funnel who complete a desired action, calculated as conversions divided by total visitors.
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV / LTV)
Customer lifetime value is the total revenue a customer generates over their entire relationship with your business, used as the upper bound on what you can afford to spend to acquire each customer.
Gross Merchandise Value (GMV)
Gross merchandise value is the total monetary value of goods sold through a platform over a given period, before deductions for refunds, discounts, shipping, taxes, or platform fees.
Product Attribute
A product attribute is a named property of a product (color, size, material, weight, etc.) used to differentiate variants, populate product feeds, drive filtering on category pages, and feed into structured data.
Product Feed
A product feed is a structured data file (typically XML, CSV, or JSON) that lists the products on your ecommerce site with their attributes, used to syndicate inventory to Google Shopping, Meta, marketplaces, and comparison shopping engines.
Product Variant
A product variant is a specific purchasable version of a parent product, distinguished by one or more attribute values such as a red, size-large shirt.
Refund Rate
Refund rate is the percentage of orders refunded to the customer over a given period, used as a proxy for product quality, fulfilment accuracy, and customer expectation alignment.
SKU (Stock Keeping Unit)
A SKU is a unique alphanumeric identifier assigned by a retailer to each distinct purchasable item, used internally for inventory, ordering, and fulfilment.
Content marketing
AI Overviews
AI Overviews are AI-generated summary answers that appear at the top of Google search results, synthesising information from multiple ranking pages and citing them as sources.
Content Audit
A content audit is a systematic review of every published page on a site to assess performance, identify opportunities to update, consolidate, or remove pages, and align the existing content with current strategy.
Content Gap
A content gap is a topic or query for which your audience or competitors have content and you do not, representing a missed opportunity to capture organic traffic.
Dwell Time
Dwell time is the duration a user spends on a page after clicking through from a search result, before returning to the search results page — used as a proxy for content relevance and quality.
E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness)
E-E-A-T is Google's framework for evaluating content quality, standing for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness — used by human quality raters and incorporated into search ranking signals.
Editorial Calendar
An editorial calendar is a planned schedule of upcoming content with topics, owners, target publish dates, and (usually) target distribution channels, used to coordinate a content team and align publishing with marketing campaigns.
Evergreen Content
Evergreen content is content that remains relevant, accurate, and useful over a long period — usually years — without requiring frequent updates, in contrast to time-sensitive news, trends, or product announcements.
Pillar Page
A pillar page is a long-form, comprehensive page on a broad topic that links out to and is linked from a network of shorter, related 'cluster' pages, used to signal topical authority to search engines.
Structured Data
Structured data is information embedded in a web page in a machine-readable format (usually JSON-LD using the schema.org vocabulary) that describes the content's meaning, type, and relationships to help search engines and AI systems understand the page.
Topic Cluster
A topic cluster is a group of interlinked pages organised around a central pillar page, structured to demonstrate topical authority on a broad subject to search engines.
Social marketing
Attribution
Attribution is the methodology used to assign credit for a conversion to the marketing touchpoints (ads, emails, organic visits, referrals) that contributed to it.
Call to Action (CTA)
A call to action is an instruction in marketing content directing the audience to take a specific next step — buy now, sign up, download, contact, learn more — typically rendered as a prominent button or link.
Click-Through Rate (Social / Paid)
Click-through rate for social and paid media is the percentage of impressions that resulted in a click, used as the primary creative-performance metric for ads and link-driving posts.
Engagement Rate
Engagement rate is the percentage of a post's audience that interacted with it through likes, comments, shares, saves, or clicks, used as the primary content-performance metric on social platforms.
Hashtag
A hashtag is a word or unspaced phrase prefixed with the `#` symbol, used on social platforms to categorise content and make it discoverable to users searching or following that tag.
Impressions
Impressions is the total number of times a piece of content was displayed on a screen, including multiple views by the same user.
Marketing Funnel
A marketing funnel is a model of the customer journey from initial awareness through to purchase and beyond, used to align marketing activities and metrics to specific journey stages.
Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)
A marketing qualified lead is a lead that has demonstrated enough engagement with marketing material — content downloads, form submissions, repeat visits — to be considered worth handing to sales for further qualification.
Reach
Reach is the number of unique users who saw a piece of content at least once over a given period, in contrast to impressions which count total displays including repeats.
Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)
A sales qualified lead is a marketing-passed lead that has been further validated by the sales team — usually through a discovery call — as having budget, authority, need, and timeline to potentially purchase.
User-Generated Content (UGC)
User-generated content is any content (photos, videos, reviews, posts) created by customers or fans about a brand, rather than produced by the brand itself, used as social proof and as low-cost content fuel.