Digital Marketing Glossary: 50 Terms To Know in 2027

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Which Terms Measure Paid, Owned, and Earned Media
Hold Your Agency to the Metrics That Match the Work
FAQ

Key Takeaways

Paid, owned, and earned media use different numbers. CPC, CPM, and ROAS measure ads, while brand mentions, backlinks, and share of voice measure coverage you earn.
Digital PR has its own vocabulary. Media pitch, embargo, exclusive, newsjacking, and syndication describe how a story moves from an inbox to a published article.
Bounce rate changed meaning in GA4. It’s now the share of sessions that weren’t engaged, not the share of visitors who left after one page.
One placement can become many. Syndication carried a single MetLife Pet Insurance story to PennLive and nine more regional news sites.
GEO is the newest term here. It dates to a November 2023 research paper on getting content cited in AI answers.

An agency report can put CPM, ROAS, and share of voice in the same paragraph, with each one measuring a different kind of work. If you can’t tell which numbers describe ads, which describe your site, and which describe coverage someone else gave you, it’s hard to judge whether a campaign worked.

I’ve defined 50 digital marketing terms you’re likely to run into on agency reports and in strategy decks, including the earned-media vocabulary behind digital PR. Each entry gives a short definition, how our team uses the term where it applies, and links to further reading.

A

A/B testing

A/B testing compares two versions of one thing, like a subject line, a landing page headline, or an ad, by showing each to a different group and keeping the one that performs better. Change one element at a time, or you won’t know which change made the difference.

We test pitch subject lines the same way. Across 108,429 pitches our team sent from January to July 2026, subject lines phrased as questions opened 82.5% of the time against a 71% average.

See also: Subject line tester for PR pitches.

B

Backlink

A backlink, also called an inbound link, is a hyperlink on another website that points to yours. Search engines read a backlink from a respected publication as a vote of confidence, so who links to you counts for more than how many links point to you.

Bounce rate

In Google Analytics 4, bounce rate is the share of sessions that weren’t engaged. GA4 counts a session as engaged when it lasts longer than 10 seconds, includes a key event, or has two or more page views, so a high bounce rate on a page that answers a quick question isn’t always a problem.

Brand awareness

Brand awareness is how many people in your target audience recognize your brand and know what it does. It’s hard to measure directly, so teams track proxies: branded search volume, direct traffic, brand mentions, and share of voice.

Brand mention

A brand mention is any time a publication, creator, or AI answer names your company, with or without a link. Mentions build recognition, and unlinked mentions still help search engines and AI tools connect your brand to a topic.

For Payless Power, our campaigns earned 1,208 press mentions, including 450 from high-authority publishers with a domain authority above 60.

C

Call to action (CTA)

A call to action (CTA) is the instruction that tells a reader what to do next, like “Get a quote” or “Download the report.”

Click-through rate (CTR)

Click-through rate (CTR) is the percentage of people who click a link after seeing it: clicks divided by impressions. You’ll see it for search results, ads, and emails.

Content marketing

Content marketing is publishing useful articles, research, tools, and video that the people you want to reach read and share, so they come to you instead of the other way around. It works best as part of an organic growth strategy that ties each piece to search, social, or press goals.

Our content development team plans every page around what it’s meant to earn: rankings, links, or leads.

Conversion rate

Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who complete the action you want, such as a purchase on an e-commerce site, a form fill, or a sign-up. Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the practice of raising it through testing and better user experience.

See also: Lead marketing and lead quality.

Cost per acquisition (CPA)

Cost per acquisition (CPA) is what you spend to win one customer: total campaign cost divided by the number of customers it brought in. Affiliate marketing programs often pay on a CPA basis, so you only pay when a sale happens.

See also: Organic search vs. paid search ROI.

Cost per click (CPC)

Cost per click (CPC) is what an advertiser pays each time someone clicks an ad. In pay-per-click auctions like Google Ads, the price depends on how many advertisers want the same keyword and how relevant the ad is.

Cost per lead (CPL)

Cost per lead (CPL) is campaign spend divided by the number of leads it produced. It’s only useful next to lead quality, since cheap leads that never buy cost more in the end.

See also: How much content marketing costs.

Cost per mille (CPM)

Cost per mille (CPM) is the price of 1,000 ad impressions, from the Latin word for thousand. CPM pricing is common in display advertising, banner ads, and digital advertising on social platforms.

Customer relationship management (CRM)

Customer relationship management (CRM) software stores every contact, deal, and conversation with a customer in one place. Connecting your CRM to analytics is how you tell which channel produced the leads that turned into revenue.

Customer journey

A customer journey is every step a person takes from first hearing about you to buying and coming back, across search, social, email, press, and sales conversations. Mapping it shows which content each stage needs.

D

Data journalism

Data journalism is building a story from original research, such as a survey, a public dataset, or search data, and pitching the findings to journalists. Publications can’t get the numbers anywhere else, so data stories can earn links from outlets that won’t cover product news.

For MetLife Pet Insurance, we analyzed a year of Google search activity across all 50 states and 55 metros to rank dog-loving and cat-loving states. The campaign logged 410 links, including a PennLive story.

Digital PR

Digital PR is earning coverage, brand mentions, and links from online publications by pitching stories journalists want to run. It overlaps with traditional PR but is measured in links, mentions, and search and AI visibility.

Domain authority

Domain authority (DA) is a score from 1 to 100 that Moz uses to predict how likely a site is to rank compared with competitors. It isn’t a Google ranking factor, but it’s a quick way to compare the strength of the sites linking to you.

We count links from publications at DA 70 or higher as double value. Across 2,002 placements we scored for nine client campaigns, about a quarter landed at that level.

E

Earned media

Earned media is coverage you don’t pay for and can’t publish yourself: articles, reviews, social posts, and AI answers where someone else chose to talk about you. Paid media (ads) and owned media (your site, email list, and profiles) are the other two types.

Email marketing

Email marketing is sending newsletters, offers, and updates to people who’ve opted in to hear from you. Marketing automation tools send messages based on what a subscriber does, like a welcome series after sign-up or a reminder after an abandoned cart.

Embargo

An embargo is an agreement that a journalist can see a story early but won’t publish before a set date and time. It gives reporters time to prepare, and breaking one can cost you that journalist’s trust.

If we offer an embargo, we say so up front in the pitch and honor it.

See also: How to write a media pitch.

Engagement rate

Engagement rate means two different things depending on the platform. In GA4 it’s the share of sessions that were engaged, the inverse of bounce rate; on social media it’s interactions (likes, comments, shares, and saves) divided by reach or followers.

Entity authority

Entity authority is how strongly search engines and AI tools associate your brand with a topic. It builds through consistent brand mentions, links, and structured information across trusted sources.

Exclusive

An exclusive gives one outlet the first right to publish a story, data set, or interview before anyone else gets it, so you can only promise it to one outlet at a time.

In our 2026 pitch data, subject lines tagged [Exclusive] opened at about the same rate as the average, so the offer does its work once the writer is reading.

G

Generative engine optimization (GEO)

Generative engine optimization (GEO) is improving how often AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity cite or recommend your brand in their answers. The term comes from a November 2023 research paper, whose authors found that GEO methods could raise a source’s visibility in AI answers by up to 40%.

I

Impressions

Impressions count how many times your content or ad was displayed, whether or not anyone noticed it. Ad impressions divided by reach gives you frequency, the average number of times one person saw it.

Influencer marketing

Influencer marketing is paying or partnering with creators to feature your product to their followers. It’s part of social media marketing.

K

Key performance indicator (KPI)

A key performance indicator (KPI) is one of the few numbers that tells you whether a campaign is meeting its goal. For digital PR, that’s usually placements, links, and brand mentions; for paid media, it’s often CPA or ROAS.

Keyword research

Keyword research is finding the words and questions people type into search engines, along with how often they search and how hard each term is to rank for. Long-tail keywords, longer and more specific phrases, get less traffic each but are usually easier to rank for and closer to a decision.

L

Landing page

A landing page is the page a visitor arrives on from an ad, email, or link, focused on one offer and one CTA. Its user interface and user experience, from load time to form length, decide how many visitors fill out the form or buy.

Lead generation

Lead generation is attracting people who might buy and capturing their contact details, usually through a form, a gated report, or a demo request. Leads then move into your CRM for follow-up.

See also: Lead marketing in 2026.

Link building

Link building is earning backlinks from other websites to raise your site’s authority in search. Tactics range from digital PR and resource pages to broken link building and guest posts.

M

Media list

A media list is the set of journalists you’ll pitch for a specific story, chosen by the topics they cover and what they’ve written recently. A tight list of the right writers beats a long list of general newsroom inboxes.

Our campaigns average about 125 pitches each.

Media pitch

A media pitch is a short, personalized email asking a journalist to cover a story, with the finding up top and one clear ask. Most coverage happens without a reply: a journalist who likes the story often just runs it.

Across our 2021 to 2026 campaigns, every 100 pitches produced about 50 placements and about 1.3 interested replies.

Meta description

A meta description is the short summary in a page’s HTML that can appear under its title tag in search results. Google sometimes uses it and sometimes writes its own snippet from the page, so write it as a pitch for the click.

We keep ours to 150 characters or fewer.

N

Newsjacking

Newsjacking is reacting to a breaking story with expert commentary or fast research while journalists are still covering it. A fast, simple response beats a polished one that arrives after the story has moved on.

For Levity, we pitched a registered dietitian’s warnings about a viral TikTok laxative trend, and the New York Post quoted her.

P

Pay-per-click (PPC)

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising charges you each time someone clicks your ad. Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising on Bing, and Facebook ads all offer it, and the cost per click rises with competition for the keyword or the people you’re targeting.

See also: Organic search vs. paid search.

Press release

A press release is a formal announcement written for broad distribution, often sent through a wire service. It reaches many outlets at once, so it works best as background for a personalized media pitch.

See also: Traditional PR vs. digital PR.

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Retargeting

Retargeting, also called remarketing, shows ads to people who’ve already visited your site or opened your emails. You can narrow it further by demographics or by the pages a person viewed.

Return on ad spend (ROAS)

Return on ad spend (ROAS) is revenue from an ad campaign divided by what the ads cost. A ROAS of 4 means $4 in revenue for every $1 spent, before product and labor costs.

Return on investment (ROI)

Return on investment (ROI) compares what a campaign earned with everything it cost, including people, tools, and media. Earned-media ROI is harder to pin down because links and mentions keep paying off after the campaign ends.

S

Schema markup

Schema markup is structured data added to a page’s code, usually with the schema.org vocabulary, so search engines can classify the content. It can make a page eligible for rich results.

Search engine marketing (SEM)

Search engine marketing (SEM) is paying for visibility in search results, mainly through PPC ads. Some teams use it as an umbrella term that includes SEO.

Search engine optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization (SEO) is improving your site so it ranks for the searches your customers run. It covers content, links, and technical work like making sure crawlers can reach your pages, redirects resolve correctly, and JavaScript doesn’t hide your content.

Search engine results page (SERP)

A search engine results page (SERP) is what Google, Bing, or Yahoo shows after a search: ads, organic links, AI Overviews, featured snippets, and People Also Ask boxes.

Share of voice

Share of voice is your brand’s portion of the conversation in your category compared with competitors, measured in press mentions, social mentions, ad impressions, or AI citations. Tracked over time, it shows whether you’re gaining ground on competitors.

Syndication

Syndication is when a story published by one outlet is republished by other outlets, often across a newspaper group or a news network. One placement can turn into many.

Our Great Pet Divide story for MetLife Pet Insurance ran on PennLive and nine more regional news sites, including NJ.com, MLive, and Cleveland.com.

T

Thought leadership

Thought leadership is a person or brand becoming a source journalists and customers seek out on a topic, through expert commentary, original research, and bylined articles. It’s earned over many placements.

For Payless Power, we placed the CEO’s commentary on why electric bills spike during the holidays in GoBankingRates.

U

User-generated content (UGC)

User-generated content (UGC) is anything your customers create about you: reviews, photos, videos, forum posts, and social posts under a branded hashtag. People often trust it more because the brand didn’t write it.

W

Website traffic

Website traffic is the number of visits your site gets, reported in Google Analytics as sessions, users, and page views. Where it comes from (organic search, paid, social, referral, or AI tools) tells you more than the total does.

Which Terms Measure Paid, Owned, and Earned Media

Sort the numbers in any agency report into three groups before you judge them:

Media type	How you get it	Terms that measure it
Paid media	You buy the placement: search ads, display ads, and social ads	CPC, CPM, CPA, CPL, CTR, ROAS, impressions
Owned media	You publish it on channels you control: your website, email list, and social profiles	website traffic, bounce rate, engagement rate, conversion rate, email performance
Earned media	A journalist, creator, or customer chooses to cover or recommend you	brand mentions, backlinks, share of voice, publication authority, syndicated pickups

A report that answers an earned-media goal with paid-media numbers, like impressions in place of placements and links, is measuring the wrong thing.

Marketing team meets in an office as a presenter beside a sticky-note board reviews campaign metrics with colleagues

Hold Your Agency to the Metrics That Match the Work

Before your next report review, ask which of these terms each number belongs to and what goal it answers. A digital marketing strategy that mixes paid, owned, and earned channels needs all three sets of numbers, read side by side.

At Fractl, we earn coverage that builds visibility in search results, on social media, and in AI answers, and we report it in brand mentions, links, and placements. If you want a team that measures digital PR by what it earns, reach out to us.

FAQ

What are the 10 most important terms in digital marketing?

Start with SEO, PPC, click-through rate, conversion rate, cost per click, ROI, KPI, earned media, backlink, and GEO. Together they cover how people find you, what it costs, and whether it worked.

What are the 7 types of digital marketing?

We’d group digital marketing into seven types: SEO, paid advertising, content marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, digital PR, and partner marketing through influencers and affiliates.

What are 10 common keywords used in digital marketing?

The acronyms you’ll see most in reports are SEO, SEM, PPC, CTR, CPC, CPM, CPA, CPL, ROAS, and KPI, and each one has its own entry in the glossary.

What are the 5 S’s of digital marketing?

Sell, Serve, Speak, Save, and Sizzle. PR Smith developed the 5 Ss around 2000 as a way to set goals for digital marketing beyond sales alone.

What’s the difference between digital PR and SEO?

SEO improves your own site so it ranks, while digital PR earns coverage and links from other publications. Those links and mentions are one of the strongest signals SEO depends on.

The Digital Marketing Glossary: 50 Terms Every In-House Marketer Should Know in 2027

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