Category
A signal telling search engines which version of a page is the preferred one when the same or very similar content is reachable at several URLs — so that ranking signals consolidate on one address
The idea that covering a subject comprehensively makes a site more likely to rank for queries within it — because depth across a topic signals expertise in a way that a single page cannot. The
A database that links the many different identifiers belonging to the same person or household — cookies, device IDs, email addresses, phone numbers, account logins — so that a fragmented set of
Less well than the industry's reliance on it suggests. Demographic categories are weak predictors of purchasing behaviour, and the evidence for this has been accumulating for years without changing
The situations, needs and moments that prompt someone to think of a category at all — and the argument, from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, is that brands are chosen by being mentally available at
A single measure a whole organisation aligns around — chosen because it captures the value customers actually receive, so that improving it necessarily means the business is working. The problem it
A mechanism by which analytics and advertising tags adjust their behaviour according to whether a user has consented — sending limited, non-identifying signals rather than either full tracking or
A secure environment where two parties can analyse their combined data without either seeing the other's raw records — developed because privacy regulation and the loss of third-party tracking made
Measuring whether advertising changed what people think — awareness, recall, consideration, favourability — rather than what they immediately bought. It exists because a great deal of advertising
Limiting how many times the same person is shown the same advertisement within a period — and it matters because advertising effect does not rise indefinitely with repetition; it rises, plateaus, and
Who collected it and from whom — a distinction that became central as third-party tracking was restricted. First-party data. Collected by you, directly from your own customers and visitors, through
Measuring whether marketing actually caused additional sales — as opposed to taking credit for sales that would have happened anyway, which is what most attribution does. The problem it solves.
Three systems that hold different data for different purposes, and the acronyms are confused constantly in procurement conversations. CMS — Content Management System. Manages content: web pages, blog
Share of voice (SOV) is your brand's proportion of the total presence in a market — measured across advertising, organic search, social conversation or media coverage, depending on the version used.
A vanity metric is a number that looks impressive and does not inform a decision. The term was popularised by Eric Ries in the lean startup literature, and the distinction he drew is between metrics
Dark social is sharing that happens through private channels — messaging apps, email, SMS — where no referrer information is passed. The traffic is real and its source is invisible, so analytics
Because list hygiene — removing inactive and invalid addresses — improves deliverability for everyone remaining, and a large list full of people who never open is actively harmful. Why a big list
A value proposition is a clear statement of what you offer, who it is for, and why it is better than the alternatives — including the alternative of doing nothing. The three components it must
Yes, and it is among the better-evidenced principles in the field — with important conditions on which social proof works and when it backfires. The underlying psychology. Robert Cialdini's work
A homepage serves everyone. A landing page serves one campaign, one audience and one action — and that difference in purpose determines everything about how each should be built. The homepage is the
A call to action (CTA) is the instruction telling someone what to do next. It is one of the highest-leverage elements on a page, and most CTAs fail for identifiable reasons. What the research and
A customer journey map is a visual representation of the stages a person goes through when interacting with a business — what they do, think and feel at each point, across every channel. What a map
Structured data is standardised markup added to a page's HTML describing what its content means — that this string is a price, that one is an author, this is a recipe's cooking time. The vocabulary
Marketing mix modelling (MMM) is a statistical technique estimating how different marketing activities contribute to sales, using aggregate historical data rather than tracking individuals. How it