Basics of Digital Marketing to get you started in the field -- definitions, KPIs, tools, and more.
Are you brushing up on basics of digital marketing? Or are you an analyst looking for a job in the world of digital marketing? Digital marketing is vast and can be overwhelming with new concepts, words, and tools. What and how deep do you need to know about it if you want to become an analyst for a website? Regardless of the business model of the company (selling merchandise, blogs, lead generation, etc.) there are basic digital marketing concepts and words you need to be familiar with. Even if you don’t go deep in each concept, knowing these words and having the necessary understanding will help you impress the potential employers and also set you up for an easier learning curve to climb.
Table of Content
Key Metrics Definition
Impressions, Clicks, CTR, Sessions: traffic volume
Impressions: Impressions and clicks are related to paid search. Impressions go up every time someone gets exposed to a particular advertisement.
Clicks: Clicks go up every time someone actually clicks a particular advertisement.
Click Through Rate (CTR): # of clicks / # of impressions. This shows how many of the people who viewed an advertisement clicked it. This will let you know how effective your advertisement is. If CTR is not great, then you will want to check the keywords setting to make sure the advertisement is showing up for relevant search queries.
Sessions: each time a user visits a site, it’s a session. It depends on the tracking software you use, but usually if a user visits a site, leaves the site but then comes back within 30 minutes, the return visit also counts as the same session.
Usually when analysts say “session ID”, they are referring to a unique ID they created from Bigquery by concatenation full visitor ID (distinct user ID) and visit ID (each visit ID).
There are certain limitations on distinguishing users by full visitor ID -for instance, if a user uses a different device, the full visitor ID will not be the same. Also it is based on the cookies so if a user deletes cookies, then the next time the full visitor ID will be different. Incognito and private mode also affects this.
Landing Page, Channel, Sources/Mediums: where traffic came from
Landing page: the page a session “landed” on. This is the page your user used to get to your site. Optimized landing pages can bring more engagement and improve conversion rate.
Channels: the channels visitors used to get to the site like Organic Search, Paid Search, Display, Social, etc.
Sources & mediums: the sources and medium visitors used to get to the site. Channels are different groups of several sources and mediums. Sources can be specific origin of the visitor like “google”, “bing”, “facebook”, etc., and medium is the category of the traffic source such as organic, cpc, ppc, social, email, etc.
Bounces, Conversions, pageviews, Time on Site/Page: Engagement metric
Bounce: sessions that left the site without any interaction. Usually, a session with only one pageview (landing page) is considered a bounce. It can mean:
The site was shown for the non related keywords – keywords need to be optimized.
The landing page needs to be optimized to draw the readers’ interests and make them willing to stay in the site.
The visitor only wanted a simple answer which the landing page provided. For example, think of the times you googled today’s weather and clicked the first site that came up. If it showed today’s weather on the page you landed, then you probably closed the site because you got what you wanted.
Bounce rate: #of bounces / # of sessions during certain periods of time. Just looking at bounces will not show you how each landing page is performing; you have to see the % of the sessions on each landing page that bounce.
Conversion: conversion means different things for each site and business. No matter what action counts as a conversion, the action is what the business is trying to drive more. The conversion can vary from a visitor buying a merchandise to a visitor subscribing for an email program.
Conversion Rate (CVR): # of conversions / # of sessions during certain periods of time.
Page views: although when people say pageviews it usually refers to the number of pages a session viewed (# of pageviews / # of sessions), it can also mean how many times a page was loaded. The definition will depend on whether you are talking about session level data (then you are talking about how many pages a session viewed) or page level data (then you are talking about how many times a page was loaded).
Time on Site & Time on Page: time a session spent either on the site (session duration) or on a specific page. This is one of the engagement metrics along with pageviews and bounce rate.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
SEO is about optimizing sites on search engines, like google, bing, and yahoo. Great SEO will help you get traffic without paying money based on the contents of your site (organic channel). Think about it from google’s perspective. If you want more people to use your site (google) to search for results, what should you do? You will want the first result of any search query to be exactly what the searcher wants. So search engines created and regularly updates their algorithm. This algorithm determines the ranking of all the known sites based on a search query every time a user types and searches anything on google site. To site owners (companies), this means that they need to compete for the highest ranking possible and try to be on the first page. After all, according to Moz, 71% of search queries result in a site visit on the first page while the second page and third page of search result gets less than 6% of clicks.
Hence SEO becomes an important part of any digital marketing and the digital marketers study google’s algorithm and its update all the time. SEO is complex and ever changing. At the end of the day, however, what google ranks high is a quality content zeroing in specific keywords and queries in a well-built website. We can re-visit SEO in the future again, but this is a good overview.
SEM (Search Engine Marketing): Paid Search
SEM is different from SEO. Similar to SEO, the goal of SEM is to bring the most relevant, likely to convert visitors to your site. They do so by making your site’s ads the highest ranking ads possible for specific keywords (search queries).
Since the highest ranking sites get the most traffic, every site tries to become #1 for relevant keywords. Search engines use this to create revenue for themselves; they sell ads slots to companies. Here’s an example screenshot of google’s search engine result for “halloween costume for dogs”:
As you can see in the screenshot above, the shopping ads and text ads come before SEO ranking #1. This is a way to get your company’s presence out in the world even if your SEO ranking is not as great.
Does this mean a company with poor content and site functionality can pay much money to bring in traffic? Not exactly. Simply put, search engines let companies bid for ad slots for certain keywords. The bid amount will obviously have an effect, but so does the quality of your ads, keywords, and landing pages; Google calls this “Quality Score”. According to google, “higher quality ads can lead to lower prices and better ad positions” (read more at Google Ads Help). Why? For two reasons:
Most ads are designed so that businesses only pay for the actual click, not impression (called “Pay per Click” [PPC]). So if the ads that search engines put up for a keyword are irrelevant and therefore they get no clicks, then the search engines will not earn any money.
People will stop using the search engine if they keep getting irrelevant ads as their first search query results.
A/B testing - CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization)
Simply put, A/B testing is an experimentation of comparing A to B. Unlike the traditional market, A/B testing is easier and accessible in the digital world with many softwares that can help. Think of a banner for a site. When someone suggests changing a banner for a site, you can test which banner will perform better before making a permanent change. You can send random half of your visitors to the site with the current banner (option A) while sending the rest of the visitors to the site with the newly suggested banner (option B). After a certain amount of time, you can compare the behaviors of the users that had option A compared to B. Based on the result, you can decide which banner will better help your site achieve its goal.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is like a recommendation. When someone with authority in a certain field recommends a product, his or her followers are likely to trust the person’s judgment and go for the product. So companies work with who they believe to be people with authority in specific fields. They pay those influencers for the traffic they bring into their sites. The companies usually provide specific links to specific people and they provide the link to their followers.
One Tool You Want to Know: Google Analytics
Google Analytics is to learn where visitors to your site are coming from, to learn about them (interest, gender, age group, etc.), and to track visitors’ behaviors on the site. Many other software from google (such as Campaign Manager, Google Ads, and Google Optimize) can be linked to Google Analytics and you can view and analyze the data in Google Analytics.
Many businesses use Google Analytics. It is valuable to know how to use it as an analyst. Fortunately, Google created a few courses so you can learn Google Analytics for free. Here’s the link to the courses Google created. Take the courses and share the certificates on LinkedIn; it will be a great way to let others know you are familiar with it.
Conclusion
Being an analyst goes beyond coding and statistics; it requires the field knowledge. Without the field knowledge, one cannot know which metrics to look at and how to pull actionable insights. No matter what field you get into, I recommend brushing up the foundational knowledge and learning about their KPIs.
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