Digital Marketing Glossary
Lead Generation
Cost per Lead: Your total ad spend divided by the number of leads generated.
Paid tracked leads: Refers to tracked leads attributed to paid campaigns via CyberMark’s Lead Tracking Portal and may not reflect the full total of leads received, especially if using a non-tracking phone number in ads. Ad platforms may report different results depending on what metrics they can track, different attribution settings, etc. For the most accurate reporting, call tracking is recommended.
Advertising Terms
Ad Spend: This is how much you spent on the ad platforms during this time period (last month or last 30 days). For more information, click here to learn about Facebook ads billing or here for Google Ads billing.
Conversions: Actions people take in the sales funnel to engage with your business, such as form submissions, phone calls, clicks on the “book now” button, or even booked appointments/sales. The specific conversions we are measuring for your business are indicated on the second page of each advertising platform’s performance in your report and in the reporting dashboard.
Common Conversions
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- Phone calls: phone calls made to a call tracking number of 30 seconds or greater
- Clicks to call: in cases where we aren’t using a tracking number, we can measure the number of times people click to call you on a mobile device
- Form submissions: leads that submit their contact information via a form on your website or via a Facebook lead form
- On-Click Event: the number of times a certain button on your website is clicked. This is most commonly implemented on a “book now” or “buy now” type of button that takes the user to your online booking system. These conversions are only used in cases where the online POS does not allow tracking through to a completed sale or booking. (note that many CRMs/booking systems are unable to report this data back to web analytics platforms used in CyberMark reporting. Examples include MindBodyOnline, ClubReady and SalonUltimate, along with most proprietary POS platforms). (Note: many CRMs/booking systems are unable to report this data back to web analytics platforms used in CyberMark reporting. Examples include MindBodyOnline, ClubReady and SalonUltimate, along with most proprietary POS platforms).
- Booked appointment: some booking systems allow us to track actual bookings.
- Purchases: some online CRMs/POS platforms allow us to track actual purchases.
Cost per Conversion: Your total ad spend divided by the total number of conversions generated.
Conversion Rate: The total number of conversions divided by the number of people who clicked on your ads. For example, if your goal is to generate leads via a form submission on your website, and you have 100 website visitors, but only 10 of those people fill out a form, your conversion rate is 10%. Click here for a breakdown of results by industry to compare your brand to.
Clicks: The total number of times an ad was clicked.
Click-Through Rate (CTR): The total number of clicks divided by the total number of impressions. In other words, this is the percentage of times your ad was clicked out of all the times the ad showed up.
Cost-Per-Click (CPC): How much it costs, on average, for someone to click your ad. On Google, you pay for each click. The lower the cost per click, the more clicks you can get for your budget, which can lead to more opportunities for conversions. This rate is determined by a number of factors, including competition, ad quality score, bid adjustments, landing page experience, expected CTR, and more. Here’s a more in-depth explanation from Google.
Impressions: The number of times your ad showed on a screen. Also called “ad views.”
Cost Per 1000 Impressions (CPM): The average cost to show your ad 1000 times. On Facebook, this is how you are charged for ad delivery (instead of paying per click). Factors that go into the CPM include: objective and optimization (conversions/leads generally cost the most), competition, market supply and demand, seasonality, placements, audience targeting, creative quality and relevance, and more. Here’s a more in-depth explanation from Facebook.
Website Performance
USER METRICS
To understand how users engage with your site after arriving via a channel, Google provides a number of metrics. Here are the metrics with definitions that you will see in your report:
Sessions: A session is a group of user interactions with your website or app that take place within a given time frame. In Analytics, a session initiates when a user views a page or screen and no session is currently active (e.g. their previous session has timed out).
Engaged Session: An engaged session is a session that lasts longer than 10 seconds, has a conversion event, or has at least 2 pageviews. This is considered meaningful traffic.
Engagement Rate: Engagement rate is simply the percentage of engaged sessions compared to sessions. This is basically the inverse of the Bounce Rate metric from the previous version of Analytics.
Total Users: A user is a person who interacts with an app or site whose activities you measure with Google Analytics. Users are different from sessions in that if a user visits your site three times, it is considered three sessions but only one user.
New Users: New users are people who are interacting with your site for the first time. Comparing users to new users can help understand how much return traffic your site receives.
Pageviews (or Views): The total number of times that pages on your website were viewed. This will usually be higher than the total number of website visits as users navigate to different pages on your website during their visit.
Conversions: Actions people take in the sales funnel to engage with your business, such as form submissions, phone calls, clicks on the “book now” button, or even booked appointments/sales (note that many CRMs/booking systems are unable to report this data back to web analytics platforms used in CyberMark reporting. Examples include MindBodyOnline, ClubReady and SalonUltimate, along with most proprietary POS platforms). The conversions we are measuring for your business are indicated on the page preceding the website performance overview in your report, or in the conversions tab of your report dashboard.
Conversion Rate: The total number of conversions divided by the number of people who visited your website. For example, if your goal is to generate leads via a form submission on your website, and you have 100 website visitors, but only 10 of those people fill out a form, your conversion rate is 10%.
Why are these important?
The more traffic a site receives and the more a user engages with the site, the higher the likelihood of conversions or leads. By measuring performance by these metrics show what channel is delivering the most traffic, then how users are engaging once they arrive at the site. Questions to ask:
- Am I receiving more traffic? Look at overall Sessions and Users.
- Is the traffic meaningful? Check Engaged Sessions, Engagement Rate and number of Conversions.
- Are users returning to my site? Compare Total Users to New Users.
- Are users crawling through my site? Look for increases in Views (pageviews) and User Engagement rates.
Traffic Channels:
Traffic to websites can arrive from many different sources. Google created channel groups to help understand where your traffic is coming from. Here’s a list of channels and descriptions that you will see in your report.
| Channel | Description |
| Direct | Direct is the channel by which users arrive at your site/app via a saved link or by entering your URL. |
| Display | Display is the channel by which users arrive at your site/app via display ads, including ads on the Google Display Network. |
| Organic Search | Organic Search is the channel by which users arrive at your site/app via non-ad links in organic-search results. |
| Organic Social | Organic Social is the channel by which users arrive at your site/app via non-ad links on social sites like Facebook or Twitter. |
| Organic Video | Organic Video is the channel by which users arrive at your site/app via non-ad links on video sites like YouTube, TikTok, or Vimeo. |
| Paid Search | Paid Search is the channel by which users arrive at your site/app via ads on search-engine sites like Bing, Baidu, or Google. |
| Paid Shopping | Paid Shopping is the channel by which users arrive at your site/app via paid ads on shopping sites like Amazon or ebay or on individual retailer sites. |
| Paid Social | Paid Social is the channel by which users arrive at your site/app via ads on social sites like Facebook and Twitter. |
| Paid Video | Paid Video is the channel by which users arrive at your site/app via ads on video sites like TikTok, Vimeo, and YouTube. |
| Referral | Referral is the channel by which users arrive at your site via non-ad links on other sites/apps (e.g., blogs, news sites). |
Organic Search
Google Search Console is another platform that provides data on websites for performance, technical issues, page indexing, mobile friendliness, and more. An important distinction regarding performance is that Search Console is only reporting on traffic from their search engine. There are four basic performance metrics that Search Console provides:
- URL Clicks: The number of clicks on your website URLs from a Google Search results page, not including clicks on paid Google Ads search results.
- Impressions: The number of times any URL from your site appeared in search results viewed by a user, not including paid Google Ads search impressions.
- Click-Through Rate (CTR): CTR is the amount of clicks divided / impressions * 100
- Average Position: The average ranking position of your website URLs for the query or queries. For example, if your site’s URL appeared at position 3 for one query and position 7 for another query, the average position would be 5 ((3+7)/2).
USING THESE METRICS
There are two primary ways we break down this data in our SEO reports, search queries and pages.
- Search Queries: These are the terms that users searched for before arriving at your site. Ultimately, we want to improve all performance metrics, but clicks are the most important. In addition to analyzing performance via the metrics above, it is also important to look at the search term relevancy to the topic of the site. If the site is receiving traffic is receiving from irrelevant or unrelated terms, it’s a good indication Google does not understand the context of the site.
- Pages: Looking at performance data from a page-level can help determine which pages are showing up in search engine results and drive the most traffic (CTR) when they appear in SERPs.
Why are these important?
Improving site performance in search engine results is a primary goal of SEO. Here are a few questions to ask:
- Is the overall performance improving in search engine results? Looking at all the metrics will help answer this question but clicks should be considered the most important. For example, an increase in impressions but not clicks can indicate the site is being served in SERPs for irrelevant terms or terms that don’t have the proper intent to result in a conversion.
- Are the top-performing queries relevant to the subject of the site? Analyzing the search terms helps to understand how Google views the context of the site.
- Are any SEO pages under-performing? Looking at page impressions can help determine if important SEO pages are not showing up in SERPs.
- How are click-through rates? URLs and search terms with high impressions but low clicks may not have compelling enough information in snippets that appear in search results.
Keyword Rankings
One of the most important elements of SEO performance is keyword rankings. The beginning of any SEO strategy starts with keyword research to determine the most valuable search terms to track based on relevancy, intent, and search volume.
Why is this important?
The higher a website appears in search engine results, the more likely it is to be visited by users. A recent study found that position 1 results have a click-though rate of 34.2%. That number drops to 2.6% for position 10 rankings, even though both are considered page 1 rankings.
Tracking keyword rankings helps determine opportunities to increase traffic to a site via new or revised content, blog posts, backlinks, or other SEO focused projects.
Questions about a report metric? Email marketing@cybermark.com.