Digital Marketing Glossary
Digital marketing terms can be very specific to our community which means the lingo can be intimidating even for seasoned digital marketers – let alone beginners! With abbreviations, slang and acronyms slung around right, left and centre, the team at DesignerNest decided to create a definitive list of the most common digital marketing terms. Here you will find useful explanations for most, if not all, of the jargon used in the world of digital marketing.
This content was written by one of our copywriters, who had to bug the web development team quite a lot in order to figure out what most of these words meant. As a result, the terms should be very easy to read – even if you’ve never used the internet before.
This is the ultimate guide for all things digital marketing. Whether you’re new to our industry or simply need a quick refresh, we’ve compiled all the terms, definitions, slang words and platforms you need to navigate the digital world.
From A/B testing to Zoho CRM, our jargon-busting guide will help you to find your way through the fast-moving digital landscape.
Can’t find what you’re after? Drop the team a message!
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A/B Testing
A/B testing (sometimes known as ‘split testing’) is the experimentation phase in your digital marketing campaign. It is often used for websites and PPC advertising, where specific components of your website or advertising campaign will be changed to see which elements have the most impact on consumers.
Your web designer or PPC executive will change two or more elements on a web page or within an advertising campaign and run both versions simultaneously. Both versions are shown to consumers at random to determine which version has a lasting impact and drives your chosen metrics.
For instance, if you run a website which allows customers to shop and pay online, but you are finding that you’re losing conversions through an abandoned cart, you may want to have your shopping cart process redesigned to figure out at which point in the process customers are abandoning their purchase.
A web designer may change some elements on the website before randomised testing to determine an effective new layout that minimises instances of an abandoned cart and increases conversions for your business.
In PPC campaigns, a phase of A/B testing may be used to run two campaigns at the same time to determine which elements in the campaign are most powerful. A PPC executive may change one element, such as a slogan or an image (or even audience demographic information) before settling on a campaign which delivers on your chosen metrics.
Above the Fold
Above the fold refers to the content that displays when a user first visits a website and includes everything they see on the screen before they have to scroll down. It is considered the most important part of a web page as should immediately grab the interest of the reader.
Accessibility (WCAG)
Web accessibility means designing and building websites so that everyone can use them, including people with visual, hearing, motor or cognitive disabilities. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) provide a shared standard for measuring how accessible a site is, with three conformance levels: A, AA and AAA. Most organisations aim for AA as a practical baseline.
Getting accessibility right is not just a legal consideration under the Equality Act 2010. It also improves usability for all visitors, supports SEO through better-structured content, and opens your site to a wider audience. Features like proper heading hierarchy, keyboard navigation and sufficient colour contrast benefit everyone.
If you are unsure where your site stands, a professional website accessibility audit can identify gaps and provide a clear remediation plan.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is a software suite used by digital marketing professionals to influence and monitor ongoing SEO strategies.
Using Ahrefs, we can measure the quality of backlinks on your website, determine keywords, track competitors and determine your rank status in order to create a data-driven digital marketing strategy which influences creative decisions.
AI Agent
An AI agent is an autonomous system that performs tasks on behalf of a user, such as researching, comparing information or summarising content. AI agents increasingly act as intermediaries between users and websites, changing how content is discovered.
AI Overviews
AI Overviews are AI-generated summaries that appear at the top of search results, providing direct answers to user queries. They synthesise information from multiple sources and can significantly reduce the need for users to click through to individual websites.
AI Search
AI search refers to search experiences powered by artificial intelligence models. Start Your Project