Term Meaning

AIDA Attention/Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action.

ASP Application Service Provider
API Application Programming Interface
A computer programming term meaning a series of rules. APIs allow an
application to extract information from a service and use that information in
their own application, or sometimes for data analysis. It's kind of like a phone
for applications to have conversations -- an API literally "calls" one
application and gets information to bring to you to use in your software. APIs
facilitate the data needed to provide solutions to customer problems.
B2B Business-to-Business
B2C Business-to-Consumer
BANT Budget, Authority, Need, Timeline
B = Budget: Determines whether your prospect has a budget for what you're
selling.
A = Authority: Determines whether your prospect has the authority to make a
purchasing decision.
N = Need: Determines whether there's a business need for what you're
selling.
T = Timeline: Determines the time frame for implementation.
BR Bounce Rate
Website bounce rate: The percentage of people who land on a page on your
website and then leave without clicking on anything else or navigating to any
other pages on your site. A high bounce rate generally leads to poor
conversion rates because no one is staying on your site long enough to read
your content or convert on a landing page (or for any other conversion event).

Email bounce rate: The rate at which an email was unable to be delivered to
a recipient's inbox. A high bounce rate generally means your lists are out-of-
date or purchased, or they include many invalid email addresses. In email, not
all bounces are bad, so it's important to distinguish between hard and soft
bounces before taking an email address off your list.
CAC Customer Acquisition Cost
This is your total Sales and Marketing cost. To calculate, follow these steps
for a given time period (month, quarter, or year):
• Add up program or advertising spend + salaries + commissions +
bonuses + overhead.
• Divide by the number of new customers in that time period.
For example, if you spend $500,000 on Sales and Marketing in a given month
and added 50 customers that same month, then your CAC was $10,000 that
month.
CAN-SPAM Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing
A U.S. law passed in 2003 that establishes the rules for commercial email and
commercial messages, it gives recipients the right to have a business stop
emailing them, and outlines the penalties incurred for those who violate the
law. For example, CAN-SPAM is the reason businesses are required to have
an "unsubscribe" option at the bottom of every email.
CASL Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation
CLV Customer Lifetime Value (Similar to LTV)
CLTV
CMO Chief Marketing Officer
CMS Content Management System
A web application designed to make it easy for non-technical users to create,
edit, and manage a website. Helps users with content editing and more
"behind-the-scenes" work like making content searchable and indexable,
automatically generating navigation elements, keeping track of users and
permissions, and more. COS (Content Optimization System) is better than
CMS.
CoCA Cost of Customer Acquisition (same as CAC)
COS Content Optimization System
Take a CMS (Content Management System), and optimize it to deliver
customers the most personalized web experience possible.
CPA Cost Per Action
An internet advertising model where the advertiser pays for each specified
action someone takes, like an impression, click, form submit, or sale. You
can decide if a given action is a lead or a sale. Marketers use it to figure out
spending for the desired action they are driving people toward.
CPC Cost Per Click (same as PPC)
CPL Cost Per Lead
The amount it costs for your marketing organization to acquire a lead. This
factors heavily into CAC/CoCA, and is a metric marketers should keep a
keen eye on.
CR Conversion Ratio
The percentage of people who completed a desired action on a single web
page, such as filling out a form. Pages with high conversion rates are
performing well, while pages with low conversion rates are performing
poorly.
CRM Customer Relationship Management
A set of software programs that let companies keep track of everything they
do with their existing and potential customers.
At the simplest level, CRM software lets you keep track of all the contact
information for these customers. But CRM systems can do lots of other
things, too, like tracking email, phone calls, faxes, and deals; sending
personalized emails; scheduling appointments; and logging every instance of
customer service and support. Some systems also incorporate feeds from
social media such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others.
The goal is to create a system in which Sales has lots of information at their
fingertips and can quickly pull up everything about a prospect or existing
customer.
CRO Conversion Rate Optimization
The process of improving your site conversion using design techniques, key
optimization principles, and testing. It involves creating an experience for
your website visitors that will convert them into customers. CRO is most
often applied to web page or landing page optimization, but it can also be
applied to social media, CTAs, and other parts of your marketing.
CSS Cascading Style Sheets
A language that manages the design and presentation of web pages: color,
look, feel, and so on. It works together with HTML (see HTML), which
handles the content of web pages. "HTML is the skeleton of your webpages,
while CSS is the clothing."
With CSS you can create rules to tell your website how you want it to display
information. And you can keep the commands for the style stuff -- fonts,
colors, and so on -- separate from the commands for the content. They’re
 called “cascading” because you can have multiple style sheets, with one style
sheet inheriting properties (or “cascading”) from others.
CTA Call To Action
A text link, button, image, or some other type of web link that encourages a
website visitor to take an action on that website, such as visiting a landing
page to download a piece of content.
The action you want people to take could be anything: Download an ebook,
sign up for a webinar, get a coupon, attend an event, and so on. A CTA can
be placed anywhere in your marketing -- on your website, in an ebook, in an
email, or even at the end of a blog post.
CTR Click-through Rate
The percentage of your audience that advances (or clicks through) from one
part of your website to the next step of your marketing campaign. As a
mathematic equation, it’s the total number of clicks that your page or CTA
receives divided by the number of opportunities that people had to click (ex:
number of pageviews, emails sent, etc).
CX Customer Experience (same as UX)
DM Direct Mail or Direct Message (Twitter)
Direct Mail: The delivery of advertising material to recipients of postal mail;
also called "junk mail" by its recipients. Direct mail is a dubious investment
for most businesses -- here's why.
Direct Message: A message on Twitter used to get in touch with a Twitter
follower directly and in private. DMs can only be sent to your followers.
DNS Domain Name Server: A server that translates a web address into one or more
IP addresses. (See IP Address.)
FB Facebook
FF Follow Friday
GA Google Analytics
A service by Google that generates detailed statistics about a website's traffic
and traffic sources, and measures conversions and sales. Marketers use it to
get to know their audience, trace their customers' paths, and make a visual
assessment of how visitors interact with their pages.
HTML Hypertext Markup Language
The language used to direct the architecture of your website, landing pages,
and emails. HTML lays out the structure of your website, from the title and
first header, to a bulleted list, to your footer. "HTML is the skeleton of your
webpages, while CSS is the clothing."
IP Address Internet Protocol Address
A numerical label assigned to each device participating in a computer
network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication.
ISP Internet Service Provider
An organization (commercial, community-owned, nonprofit, or otherwise
privately owned) that provides internet services.
KPI Key Performance Indicator
A type of performance measurement companies use to evaluate an
employee's or an activity's success. Marketers look at KPIs to track progress
toward marketing goals, and successful marketers constantly evaluate their
performance against industry standard metrics. Examples of KPIs include
CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost), blog traffic sources, and homepage views.
Choose KPIs that represent how your marketing and business are
performing.
LTV Lifetime Value
A prediction of the net profit attributed to the entire future relationship with a
customer. To calculate LTV, follow these steps for a given time period:
1. Take the revenue the customer paid you in that time period.
2. Subtract from that number the gross margin.
3. Divide by the estimated churn rate (aka cancellation rate) for that
customer.
For example, if a customer pays you $100,000 per year where your gross
margin on the revenue is 70%, and that customer type is predicted to cancel
at 16% per year, then the customer's LTV is $437,500.
LTV:CAC Lifetime Value to Customer Acquisition Cost
Once you have the LTV and the CAC, compute the ratio of the two. If it costs
you $100,000 to acquire a customer with an LTV of $437,500, then your
LTV:CAC is 4.4 to 1.
MoM Month on Month
MTD Month To Date
MRR Monthly Recurring Revenue
The amount of revenue a subscription-based business receives per month.
Includes MRR gained by new accounts (net new), MRR gained from upsells
(net positive), MRR lost from down-sells (net negative), and MRR lost from
cancellations (net loss).
NPS Net Promoter Score
A customer satisfaction metric that measures, on a scale of 0-10, the degree
to which people would recommend your company to others. The NPS is
derived from a simple survey designed to help you determine how loyal your
customers are to your business.
To calculate NPS, subtract the percentage of customers who would not
recommend you (detractors, or 0-6) from the percent of customers who would
(promoters, or 9-10).
Regularly determining your company’s NPS allows you to identify ways to
improve your products and services so you can increase the loyalty of your
customers
PPC Pay Per Click
The amount of money spent to get a digital advertisement clicked. Also an
internet advertising model where advertisers pay a publisher (usually a search
engine, social media site, or website owner) a certain amount of money every
time their ad is clicked. For search engines, PPC ads display an advertisement
when someone searches for a keyword that matches the advertiser's keyword
list, which they submit to the search engine ahead of time.
PPC ads are used to direct traffic to the advertiser's website, and PPC is used
to assess the cost effectiveness and profitability of your paid advertising
campaigns.
There are two ways to pay for PPC ads: 1) Flat rate, where the advertiser and
publisher agree on a fixed amount that will be paid for each click. Typically
this happens when publishers have a fixed rate for PPC in different areas on
their website. 2) Bid-based, where the advertiser competes against other
advertisers in an advertising network. In this case, each advertiser sets a
maximum spend to pay for a given ad spot, so the ad will stop appearing on a
given website once that amount of money is spent. It also means that the
more people that click on your ad, the lower PPC you'll pay and vice versa.
PV Page View
A request to load a single web page on the internet. Marketers use them to
 analyze their website and to see if any change on the webpage results in more
or fewer page views.
QoQ Quarter on Quarter
QR Code Quick Response Barcode
QTD Quarter To Date
ROI Return On Investment
A performance measure used to evaluate the efficiency and profitability of an
investment, or to compare the efficiency and profitability of multiple
investments. The formula for ROI is: (Gain from Investment minus Cost of
Investment), all divided by (Cost of Investment). The result is expressed as a
percentage or ratio. If ROI is negative, then that initiative is losing the
company money. The calculation can vary depending on what you input for
gains and costs.
Today, marketers want to measure the ROI on every tactic and channel they
use. Many facets of marketing have pretty straightforward ROI calculations
(like PPC), but others are more difficult
RSS Rich Site Summary
An RSS Feed is a web feed that publishes frequently updated information like
blog posts and news stories. They let publishers syndicate data automatically,
which is why they're sometimes known as "Really Simple Syndication."
When you subscribe to a website's RSS, you no longer need to check their
website for new content -- instead, your browser will automatically monitor
the site and give you timely updates.
RT Retweet
SaaS Software as a Service
Any software that is hosted by another company, which stores your
information in the cloud. Examples: HubSpot, Salesforce, IM clients, and
project management applications.
SEO Search Engine Optimization
Techniques that help your website rank higher in organic search results,
making your website more visible to people who are looking for your brand,
product, or service via search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
There are a ton of components to improving the SEO of your site pages.
Search engines look for elements including title tags, keywords, image tags,
internal link structure, and inbound links -- and that's just to name a few.
Search engines also look at site structure and design, visitor behavior, and
other external, off-site factors to determine how highly ranked your site
should be in the search engine results pages.
SLA Service Level Agreement
For marketers, an SLA is an agreement between a company's sales and
marketing teams that defines the expectations Sales has for Marketing and
vice versa. The Marketing SLA defines expectations Sales has for Marketing
with regards to lead quantity and lead quality, while the Sales SLA defines
the expectations Marketing has for Sales on how deeply and frequently Sales
will pursue each qualified lead.
SLAs exist to align sales and marketing. If the two departments are managed
as separate silos, the system fails. For companies to achieve growth and
become leaders in their industries, it is critical that these two groups be
properly integrated.
SMB Small-to-Medium Business
UI User Interface
URL Uniform Resource Locator
UV Unique Visitor
UX User Experience
The overall experience a customer has with a particular business, from their
discovery and awareness of the brand all the way through their interaction,
purchase, use, and even advocacy of that brand. To deliver an excellent
customer experience, you have to think like a customer, or better, think
about being the customer.
WOM Word Of Mouth
YoY Year on Year
YTD Year To Date