abandonment rate
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The percentage of people who don’t finish a process on a website, over a set period of time.
For example, the number of people who do NOT view a “property detail page” on your website divided by the total number of people who visit your website in a set period of time.
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Measuring this over time on your website can help you spot and address problems to help you increase the number of leads you generate.
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advertising impressions
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The number of times an advert is displayed on a website in a set period of time.
If you visit a website and look at five pages each with two adverts on them, the website will have served 10 advertising impressions.
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A metric often used when you buy display (banner) campaigns. It is important when calculating cost per thousand which helps you compare the cost of advertising on different websites.
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click-through rate (CTR)
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The number of times an object on a web page (for example, an advert on Google Adwords) is clicked divided by the number of times it is displayed.
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Your click-through rate indicates how popular or relevant your advert is. Increasing your CTR can save you money by increasing your quality score on Google Adwords.
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conversion rate
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The percentage of people who finish a process on your website, over a set period of time.
For example, the number of people who complete an enquiry form on your website divided by the total number of people who visit your website in a set period of time.
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This is one of your most important KPI’s.
If you can increase this percentage you can increase the number of leads you generate or reduce your marketing costs or both. If you could convert 100% of the people coming to your website, you probably wouldn’t need to spend much on marketing. Pay close attention to this metric!
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cookie
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Not a form of biscuit popular in America!
Data sent to and from your PC by a website to track your behaviour.
For example, your computer might have cookies that hold your login details to speed up access to your most-visited websites.
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CPC
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Cost Per Click – An advertising model where advertisers pay every time a person clicks on their advert. Google Adwords is the most popular media owner using this model.
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Assuming that everyone who clicks an advert reaches your website, if you know your average CPC (e.g. £1) and your conversion rate (e.g. 50%), you can calculate your average cost per lead (e.g £0.50).
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CPM
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Cost Per Thousand(M) – the cost of delivering 1,000 advertising impressions.
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A standard to compare the costs of advertising on different websites.
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crawler
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Please refer to the definition of spider.
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CSS
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Cascading Style Sheets – a programming code that defines the appearance of a web page in terms of fonts, colours, headings, paragraphs etc.
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Very useful to ensure that your website design is applied consistently on all pages. Can save considerable time and effort when used correctly.
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GIF
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Graphic Interchange Format – a standard file format for web-based images.
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Common file format for logos. Enables quick re-sizing but is less useful for photographs as it only allows 256 colours. JPEGs are better for photographs.
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Google Adwords
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Google’s proprietory system for online advertising. Google Adwords is one method of Paid Search Marketing
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Google takes a 76% share of UK-based searches on the internet. Advertising on Google Adwords guarantees you presence in the SERPs (at a price)
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hits
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A measurement used by website owners to inflate their figures.
It measures total server requests which could be 20 images on one page. Page views and users are much more meaningful.
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Virtually useless information. Don’t use it.
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| HTML | HyperText Markup Language – a coding language used to create web pages.
| I like to think of HTML and CSS as languages that make web pages look pretty. Other languages, such as PHP and ASP.NET, are needed to create more complicated property search functions. |
| ISP | Internet Service Provider – an organistion that provides access to the Internet. | |
| JPEG/JPG | Joint Photographic Experts Group – a standard file format for photographic images on websites. | |
| keyword | A word or phrase used to focus an online search and to target advertising. Keywords are also used to focus web pages as part of search engine optimisation (SEO). | Advertisers can purchase keywords on search engines to guarantee that their website information is displayed prominently through paid search marketing.
Website owners can also place keywords on their websites and in their links to help natural search engine rankings.
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keyword research
| The process through which you discover and prioritise keywords to use in your paid search marketing and SEO. | This is fundamental to all search marketing. You need to know the phrases your potential customers use to find property in order to target these phrases in your paid search marketing and SEO.
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keyword strategy
| A statement or series of statements about which keyword phrases you would like your website to rank naturally for.
| This is important to focus your SEO efforts. Without a clear strategy, you will waste time and money.
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| KPI | Key Performance Indicator – a statistic to measure your website performance over time. There will usually be a number of KPIs for any website, for example, conversion rate, cost per click (CPC), number of unique visitors per month etc.
Refer to our Benchmarks Guide
| Without establishing clear KPIs it is impossible to assess improvements (or the opposite) in the success of your website and online marketing activity.
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MPEG
| Moving Picture Experts Group – a standard file format for video. | |
natural search
| Natural search is often used to describe the process of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) |
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natural search results
| Search engine results pages (SERP’s) contain two sets of results,
natural and paid. Natural search results are pulled from a search
engines index of the web, based on complex formulas that determine
relevancy.
| Websites listed high in the natural search results take the biggest
share of traffic. Take notice of the websites that occupy top positions
for competitive terms. |
organic search results
| See natural search results
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page view
| A page view occurs when a person looks at one page on a website. If that person looks at the same page more than once, each occasion is considered a new page view. | A useful measure if you are comparing two similar websites over the same time period. You should also look at users, which measures the number of people independently of what they do.
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PageRank (see also TrustRank)
| An outdated and often misunderstood measure of the importance of a web page to Google.
Google gives every page on the web a score of between 0 and 10 based on the volume of inbound links the page receives and the volume of links linking to each linking page. It is a measure of link quantity not quality.
| One way of determining the suitability of a web partner. However, Google is now using an algorithm commonly called TrustRank which is becoming more important to how a page ranks. |
paid search results
| Search engine results pages (SERP’s) contain two sets of results, natural and paid. Paid search results are usually displayed on the right of the screen but can also be displayed at the top depending on the search engine and nature of the search query. | |
| PDF | Portable Document Format – a standard file format that allows all the elements of a printed document, such as fonts, graphics, images and layout, to be transferred, viewed and printed regardless of which program was used to create the file. | The ideal way to make brochures and other marketing materials available to visitors to your website. To view, use the free Adobe Acrobat Reader.
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referrer
| A website that directs traffic to another website. Analytics software like Google Analytics will tell you which referrers are sending you traffic.
| Useful for evaluating the effectiveness of buying links and online advertising. |
robot
| Please refer to the definition of spider. | |
SEO
| Search Engine Optimization - broadly defined as any attempt to influence a website's position in the search engine results pages (SERP’s).
See Introduction to SEO.
| Applying the right techniques will help you achieve high natural search rankings and drive relevant traffic to your website.
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search engine results pages (SERPs)
| The pages that a search engine like Google displays to users after they perform a search. It is the technical name for the pages that you see every time you use a search engine.
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| session | Please refer to the definition of visit.
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spider
| Spiders or crawlers are used by search engines to crawl the web, following links to find and update their index of web pages.
Also called robots.
| Crawlers are drawn to new content, so updating your website regularly attracts them which in turn helps your search engine rankings.
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stickiness
| A term used to refer to how likely visitors are to stay on a website once they arrive. A site's “stickiness” is closely related to the quality and presentation of its content. | |
TrustRank
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TrustRank is an algorithm that assigns trust to a set of a few hundred seed sites such as BBC, DMOZ and Wikipedia. Google biases search results towards sites that are “close” to these trusted sources. Link to SEOBook here. |
This has huge implications for link building. Go after quality sites that are edited by humans and are useful to users as they more likely to be referenced from sites that Google trusts.
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unique user
| Please see definition of visitor. Users and visitors are two different words for the same thing | |
| user | Please see definition of visitor. A user or visitor is the same as a unique user or visitor if measured over the same time period.
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URL
| Uniform Resource Locator – the full address of your website. World Wide Web URLs begin with http:// followed by the www. domain name. | |
user session
| Please see definition of visit.
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visibility
| Visibility refers to how a website performs in the natural search rankings (usually Google). A “visible” website is one that ranks highly for competitive search phrases. | |
visit
| A visit is defined as a period of activity when a person is continuously using a website. If the person takes a break of 30 minutes or more, then returns to your website, this will count as another visit.
Not to be confused with a visitor, who can return at any time within the time period and will only be counted once.
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visitor
(same thing as users, unique user and unique visitor)
| A visitor is a single person who visits a website in a given time period. If a website has 1000 visitors per month then 1000 individuals have been to that website. Some of them may have visited more than once hence the number of visits will be higher than the number of visitors in any given time period. | If you are evaluating a website to advertise on, the number and the relevance of visitors they receive are the most important considerations to take into account. |
web analytics software
| Computer software that allows the study of people’s behaviour on a website. Examples include Google Analytics and ClickTracks. | Critical for measuring the success and failure of online marketing activity.
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