Northern Illinois University

College of Business - NIU

Northern Illinois University Internet Marketing Course Glossary



Banner– an online advertisement in the form of a graphic image on a web page that links to a location of the advertiser's choice.

Banner advertising – a form of online advertising that entails embedding an advertisement into a web page.

B2B business that sells products or provides services to other businesses.

B2C business that sells products or provides services to the end-user consumers.

The CAN-SPAM (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act) Act of 2003 established the United States' first national standards for the sending of commercial e-mail.

Click Stream tracking – how many visitors or email recipients clicked through to a particular page or took a particular action.

Click-through rate (CTR) the average number of click-throughs per hundred ad impressions, expressed as a percentage.

Cookie information stored on a user's computer by a web site so preferences are remembered on future requests.

Cost-per-click (CPC) – the cost each time a company pays when a user clicks on an ad.

Domain name – location of an entity on the Internet example: "here.com".

Double opt-in process – subscribers receive an e-mail asking them to confirm their registration by clicking a link, and only then are they added to a distribution list.

Email marketing – the promotion of products or services via email.

E-Mail Newsletter – a periodically published document or message, containing news and announcements on a subject and delivered through electronic mail.

Entry Page – where people are entering your site, could be home page or other.

Hyperlink (or link) – a reference or navigation element in a website that leads to another page on yours or another site.

Interstitial ad – an advertisement that loads between two content pages, like a pop-up.

Keyword density – keywords as a percentage of indexable text words. For example, if a keyword is used 5 times in page with 100 indexable text words, the page has a keyword density of 5%.

Keyword Effectiveness Index – compares the number of searches for a keyword with the number of search results to pinpoint which keywords are most effective for a campaign.

Message board – a script on a website with a submission form that allows visitors to post messages (called "threads" or "posts") for others to read.

Meta tag – HTML element used to provide structured metadata about a web page. Meta tags are placed in the head section of an HTML document. They provide information about a given webpage, most often to help search engines categorize them correctly, and are inserted into the HTML, but are not visible to a user looking at the site.

Natural search – natural listing that a search engine provides, as opposed to paid inclusion or paid placement.

One-to-many – the act of publishing or broadcasting from one sender to many receivers.

Online community – a specific reference to Web sites where people congregate online to discuss a subject or to introduce themselves.

Page hit – the retrieval of any item, like a page or a graphic, from a Web server. For example, when a visitor calls up a Web page with four graphics, that's five hits, one for the page and four for the graphics. Not a relevant interactive marketing metric.

Paid inclusion – provides a guarantee that the website is included in the search engine's natural listings.

Paid placement – the process of paying a search portal or another web site to display your advertisement or link.

Pay-per-click – a marketing system on the Web in which the advertiser pays when the user clicks on its advertisement and goes to its site.

Real Simple Syndication (RSS) – a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated digital content, such as blogs, news feeds or podcasts.

ROI – measures the effectiveness of the investment by calculating the number of times the net benefits (benefits minus costs) recover the original investment.

Search engine – an information retrieval system designed to help find information stored on a computer system, such as on the World Wide Web, inside a corporate or proprietary network, or in a personal computer.

Search engine marketing (SEM) – is a set of marketing methods to increase the visibility of a website in search engine results pages.

Search engine optimization – attempts to improve rankings for relevant keywords in search results by improving a web site's structure, content, and relevant backlink count.

Spamming – the abuse of electronic messaging systems to send unsolicited bulk messages, which are almost universally undesired.

URL – an Internet address usually consisting of the access protocol (http), the domain name (www.here.com), and optionally the path to a file or resource residing on that server.

URL redirection (or URL forwarding) – a technique on the World Wide Web for making a web page available under many URLs.

Web analytics – the measurement of the behavior of visitors to a website.

Web crawler – a computer program that gathers and categorizes information on the Internet.