The current marketing industry hosts a wide range of different disciplines, and includes not just your social media mavens but also your data researchers and analysts, your event managers, and your retargeting and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) specialists. Not only that, marketing dovetails right into other design and communications industries such as advertising and public relations.

As a result, it can be difficult for clients to adjust to new terms and quantifiers that arise when they begin working with a marketing agency. Never fear! Study up on our quick and easy marketing vocabulary primer below – terms that we’re commonly asked about.

Brand Activation – As opposed to more data-driven, automated activation, brand activations are part of the events, sponsorship, and partnership wheelhouse, and offer brands an opportunity to really engage and make real-time impressions upon their target audience. Brand activations can also be sources of good feedback regarding a brand or service, and can help identify critical weak points in marketing and branding strategies that need to be addressed.

Circulation – This public relations and advertising term refers specifically to print materials, and identifies the number of print copies that a publisher creates and distributes.

Call to Action (CTA) – Most commonly used when making design and pathway decisions in digital campaigns, a call-to-action is text, imagery, or buttons that entice and prompt the viewer to take action or engage with the campaign in some way. Common CTAs include “Purchase Passes Now”, “Download White Paper”, and “Learn More”.

Clickthrough Rate (CTR) – When examining the results of digital advertising campaigns, the clickthrough rate is an essential metric point that helps identify your return on investment. The click through rate indicates what percentage of your viewership audience has actually followed through on your call-to-action to the next step of your campaign – say, “clicking through” a digital ad, or newsletter link. How do you calculate CTR? Clicks / Impressions = CTR.

Content Management System (CMS) – A CMS is a front-end computer application that allows users, even those with limited technical abilities, to make changes to the basic content of a website. Popular CMS platforms include WordPress, Joomla, and Drupla.

Impressions – Often confused with reach, impressions indicate the number of time that your content has been served to an audience. Impressions are most often used in reference to social media analytics, or for online and digital advertising, describing how often an ad or post has been displayed, and quantifies the potential audience pool.

Lead – A lead is a potential customer who is currently in the sales funnel, who is interested in your service or company. A successful lead becomes a consumer or client.

Out-of-Home (OOH) – An advertising term used to describe large-scale advertising options that are not found in the household, such as a advertising on billboards, at bus shelters, in subway and metro stations, etc.

Open Rate – An important email marketing metric, the openrate indicates what percentage of your mailing list has opened the email material distributed.

Pageviews – This web traffic metric describes the number of times that a webpage has been viewed.

Pay-per-Click (PPC) – A digital advertising model intended to direct web traffic to specific websites, where the advertiser pays a publisher each time their ad is clicked. PPC campaigns usually come in two forms, a flat fee model where there is mutually agreed price paid to the publisher each time the ad is clicked, or a bid-based model where advertisers compete against each other for an ad spot in an auction held by an advertising network. The advertiser can set up the maximum bid they are willing to pay when setting up the advertising contract. The primary advantage of PPC campaigns is being able to see how cost-effective and successful your ad campaigns really are, since clicks reflect audience interest. The higher interest in your campaign, the lower your PPC. Calculate your PPC: Advertising cost ($) / # ads clicked = PPC.

Reach – In contrast with impressions, the reach describes the definitive number of people who have seen your content, social post, ad, or otherwise.

Unique Visitors – The preferred audience metric for web traffic – whereas pageviews does tell you the number of times a specific page has been viewed, it does not necessarily convey how many of those views are from the same person. In comparison, the unique visitors metric only counts the singular moment a viewer lands on a site, so even if they view one page 10 times, they are considered a single visitor. As such, unique visitors is a more accurate reflection of the amount of traffic a website receives. The abbreviation uv/m, unique visitors per month, is a common metric to measure digital traffic.