Category
A segment is a group defined by shared measurable characteristics. A persona is a narrative representation of a typical person within a segment. They serve different purposes, and substituting one
A core update is a broad change to Google's ranking systems, rolled out several times a year and announced in advance. They are not penalties, and understanding that distinction determines how you
E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust. It comes from Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines, the document given to the human contractors who assess search result
A content audit is a systematic inventory and assessment of everything published on a site, evaluating each page against performance data and business purpose, then deciding what to keep, improve,
Programmatic advertising is the automated buying and selling of ad inventory through software, replacing the negotiated deals that dominated media buying historically. Real-time bidding (RTB) is the
Performance marketing aims to produce a measurable action now. Brand marketing aims to build memory and preference that makes future actions more likely and cheaper. Performance marketing is search
Churn is the rate at which customers stop paying you over a period. It is the counterweight to acquisition, and it determines whether growth compounds or leaks away. Two measures, and the difference
Customer acquisition cost (CAC) is what it costs, on average, to acquire one paying customer. Payback period is how long that customer takes to earn the money back. Calculating CAC. Total sales and
Keyword cannibalisation is when several pages on the same site compete for the same query, so instead of one strong page you have two or three weaker ones splitting whatever authority and relevance
Search intent is what someone is actually trying to accomplish when they type a query. It matters more than search volume because a page that ranks for a high-volume keyword while misreading the
A nofollow link carries an HTML attribute (rel="nofollow") telling search engines not to pass ranking credit through it. It was introduced in 2005 to combat comment spam, and became the standard
They are four ways of expressing what advertising costs and returns, measured at different points in the chain. CPM — cost per mille (thousand impressions). What you pay to have your ad shown a
Because most ad platforms put a campaign into a learning phase after a significant edit, and during it performance is genuinely unstable and usually worse. What the learning phase is. Delivery is
A lookalike audience (Google calls its equivalent similar segments) is a group of people an ad platform assembles because they resemble an existing group you supplied — your customers, your website
Click-through rate (CTR) is clicks divided by impressions. It measures how compelling something looked — not whether the click was worth having. A high CTR paired with poor downstream results usually
They are three different mechanisms for the same job — recognising visitors and recording what they did — operating at different layers. A cookie is a small file a website stores in your browser.
Attribution is the process of deciding which marketing touchpoints deserve credit for a conversion. It sounds administrative and it is one of the hardest problems in the discipline. Why the numbers
Organic reach is the number of people who see your content without you paying for the distribution. Paid reach is the number who see it because you bought the impressions. The distinction matters
An A/B test shows two versions of something to comparable groups at the same time and measures which performs better against a defined goal. Running versions sequentially instead is not a valid test,
Deliverability rests on three things: proving you are who you claim to be, having a good sending reputation, and sending content people want. Failing any one is enough. Authentication is the
UTM parameters are values added to the end of a URL that tell your analytics where a visitor came from. Without them, analytics can only infer the source from the referring page, and that inference
Impressions count how many times content was displayed. Reach counts how many distinct people saw it. If one person sees an advertisement five times, that is five impressions and a reach of one. The
Bounce rate is the proportion of sessions in which someone viewed a single page and left without any further interaction recorded. The important word is recorded, because that is where most
SEO means earning visibility in unpaid search results by making a site more relevant and authoritative. SEM, as the term is now commonly used, means buying visibility through paid search advertising.