Digital marketing glossary

A/B testing is showing two versions of a page or element to two random halves of your visitors and measuring which one brings the most conversions. You could, for example, test the button text "Order now" against "Get a quote". The test has to run until you have enough visits that the difference cannot be put down to chance.

Above the fold is the part of a web page that is visible before you scroll. The expression comes from newspapers, where the most important stories sat above the fold. The headline, what you offer and the main button belong there, and how much fits varies with the screen.

Accessibility is building websites that everyone can use, including people who are blind, use a keyboard instead of a mouse or have impaired hearing. WCAG is the international standard and sets requirements for contrast, text alternatives for images and keyboard navigation, among other things. In Norway, WCAG is a legal requirement for websites aimed at the general public.

Account-based marketing is a B2B method where sales and marketing pick specific companies and build campaigns aimed at each of them. A software vendor might, for example, select 50 target accounts and create separate landing pages and ads for each industry among them.

Ad extensions are extra details you can add to a search ad, such as a phone number, address, links to subpages and prices. Google now calls them assets. They make the ad larger in the search results without raising the cost per click.

Ad Rank is the value Google Ads calculates in each auction to decide whether your ad shows and in which position. It is based on your bid, the quality of the ad and landing page, the context of the search and the expected effect of your assets. An ad with high quality can therefore beat a competitor who bids more.

AEO, answer engine optimisation, is shaping content so that it is picked as the direct answer to a question, in featured snippets, "People also ask", voice search and AI answers. In practice you put the question in a heading and answer it in the first two sentences below.

AI automation is letting artificial intelligence carry out tasks that need some judgment and therefore cannot be handled by fixed rules alone. Sorting incoming email by topic, drafting replies and summarising the week’s campaign figures in a report are examples.

In social media, an algorithm is the set of rules that decides which posts each user sees and in which order. Platforms weigh things like how much engagement a post gets, how recent it is, and what the user has reacted to before. A post that gets many comments in its first hour is therefore often shown to more people.

Alt text is a short description of an image, placed in the alt attribute in the HTML. Screen readers read it aloud to blind and partially sighted users, and search engines use it to understand the image. "Red wool sweater with a round neck" is better than "image1" or a string of keywords.

Anchor text is the visible, clickable text of a link. It tells both the reader and the search engine what the linked page is about, so "roofing price list" says more than "click here". If many external links point to you with exactly the same keyword, it can look manipulated.

Artificial intelligence is computer systems that solve tasks we usually associate with human thinking, such as understanding language, recognising images and making decisions. The recommendations in a streaming service and automatic video captions are everyday examples.

An attribution model is the rule that splits the credit for a conversion between the channels the customer touched along the way. With last click, the final channel gets everything. With data-driven attribution, the default in GA4, credit is shared according to how much each channel appears to have contributed. The choice of model changes which channels look profitable.

Audience targeting is choosing who sees your ads, based on things like age, location, interests, earlier visits or your own customer lists. A gym chain can show ads only to people aged 25 to 45 who live within ten kilometres of one of its gyms.

B2B, business-to-business, is sales and marketing from one company to another. Purchases are usually larger, take longer and involve more decision-makers than in the consumer market. A company that sells payroll systems to other companies is a B2B company.

B2C, business-to-consumer, is sales and marketing directly to private individuals. The buying decision is often made quickly and by one person, and price, availability and brand weigh heavily. An online clothing store is a B2C company.

A backlink is a link from another website to yours. Google treats these links as a sign of trust, so one link from a well-known trade publication counts for more than a hundred from obscure directories.

A bidding strategy is the rule that decides how much you bid in the ad auctions. You can set bids yourself (manual CPC) or let the platform steer towards a goal, such as the most conversions possible or a set cost per conversion. Which one fits depends on your goal and how much conversion data the account has.

Bounce rate is the share of visits where the user leaves the site without doing anything more. In GA4 it is the share of sessions that do not count as engaged: sessions under ten seconds, with no conversion and only one page view. A high bounce rate on a landing page often means the page does not deliver what the ad or search promised.

Bounce rate optimisation is work to get fewer visitors to leave the site without doing anything. The most common measures are faster loading, a headline that matches the ad or search, and a clear next action. If 80 percent leave a campaign page, it is often because the page is about something other than what the ad promised.

Brand awareness is how well your target audience knows your brand. It is usually measured with surveys in two forms: unaided ("which electricity suppliers can you name?") and aided ("have you heard of these?"). Searches for your brand name in Google are a simple indicator between surveys.

Breadcrumbs are a row of links that show where on the site you are, for example Home > Services > SEO. They make it easy to go up one level and show search engines how the site is organised. With structured data, the trail can also appear in the search result.

Broad match is the Google Ads match type that lets your ad show for searches related to your keyword, including synonyms and searches that do not contain your words. The keyword "running shoes" can trigger the ad for "women’s jogging trainers". It gives the most impressions, but you need to watch the search terms and add negative keywords.

A canonical URL is the address you ask search engines to treat as the main version when the same content exists at several addresses. It is set with rel="canonical". An online store where one product can be reached through several categories uses it to gather the link equity on one page.

A chatbot is a program that holds a written conversation with the user. Older chatbots follow fixed menus, while newer ones use language models and can answer freely worded questions. An online store can let a chatbot answer questions about delivery and returns and pass the rest to customer service.

Churn rate is the share of customers who stop being customers during a period. If you have 1,000 subscribers at the start of the month and 30 cancel, monthly churn is 3 percent. For subscription businesses, the figure decides how many new sales are needed just to stand still.

A cohort analysis follows groups of users who have something in common, usually when they became customers, and compares how the groups behave over time. If 40 percent of those who became customers in January are still active after three months, against 25 percent of the March customers, you know something changed.

Community management is the daily work of replying, moderating and keeping the conversation going in a brand’s channels. It includes answering comments and messages, removing spam and passing complaints on to customer service. A company that answers questions in the comments within an hour is doing community management.

Computer vision is the part of artificial intelligence that interprets images and video. A phone that recognises faces in your photo library and an online store that lets you search with a picture instead of text both use computer vision.

A content calendar is a plan that shows what will be published, in which channel, when and by whom. It can be a spreadsheet with one row per post: date, channel, topic, format, owner and status. With the calendar you can see well in advance whether content is missing for a campaign or a holiday.

Content marketing is creating and publishing content your audience finds useful, to attract customers over time. Articles, guides, videos, newsletters and calculators are common formats. A bank that publishes a guide to buying a first home gets found by people long before they apply for a mortgage.

Conversion rate is the share of visitors who do what you want them to, for example buy, submit a form or sign up for a newsletter. 25 purchases from 1,000 visits gives a conversion rate of 2.5 percent.

Conversion tracking is recording when a visitor completes an action you have defined as valuable, such as a purchase, a submitted form or a phone call. Without it you know how many people clicked an ad, but not whether any of them became customers.

Core Web Vitals are Google’s three measures of how a page feels to use: LCP measures how quickly the main content appears, INP how quickly the page responds to a click, and CLS how much the content shifts while loading. Google counts an LCP under 2.5 seconds, an INP under 200 milliseconds and a CLS under 0.1 as good.

CPC, cost per click, is the price you pay each time someone clicks your ad. If you spend 5,000 kroner and get 500 clicks, your CPC is 10 kroner. The price is set in an auction and varies widely between industries and keywords.

CPM, cost per mille, is the price of a thousand impressions of an ad. At a CPM of 50 kroner, 100,000 impressions cost 5,000 kroner. The pricing model is used mostly in display advertising and social media, where the aim is to be seen, not necessarily to get clicks.

Crawling is when a search engine sends a bot to fetch and read the pages of a website. The bot follows links from page to page, so a page that nothing links to is often never found.

The creator economy is the market of individuals who make a living from content they publish themselves, through ad revenue, sponsorships, subscriptions and their own products. A YouTuber who earns money from ads and a paid membership is part of it.

CRO, conversion rate optimisation, is systematic work to get more of your visitors to complete a desired action. You find where people drop off, form a hypothesis about why, and test a change. If the conversion rate goes from 2 to 2.5 percent, you have 25 percent more customers from the same traffic.

A CTA, call to action, is the button or link that asks the visitor to take the next step. "Book a free audit" and "Add to cart" are examples. A good CTA says what happens when you click, and there should be one main action per page.

CTR, click-through rate, is the share of people who see an ad or a search result and click it. 50 clicks on 1,000 impressions gives a CTR of 5 percent. A low CTR suggests the text does not match what people were looking for.

Customer acquisition cost is what it costs on average to win one new customer: all sales and marketing costs in a period divided by the number of new customers in the same period. If you spend 100,000 kroner and gain 50 new customers, your CAC is 2,000 kroner. It has to be clearly lower than customer lifetime value for the numbers to work.

Customer lifetime value is what a customer spends with you, on average, over the whole relationship. A customer who buys for 800 kroner four times a year for three years has a CLV of 9,600 kroner. The figure tells you how much you can spend to win a new customer.

Dark social is the sharing of links in private channels such as Messenger, WhatsApp, text messages and email, where analytics tools cannot see where the visit came from. When someone copies a link to an article and sends it to a colleague on Teams, the visit is recorded as "direct traffic".

The data layer is a JavaScript object on the page that holds information your tracking tools need, such as order value, product ID and login status. Google Tag Manager reads the values from there instead of scraping them from the visible page. That way tracking does not break when the design changes.

Deep learning is machine learning with neural networks that have many layers, where each layer learns more complex patterns than the one before. The technique is behind image recognition, speech recognition and the large language models.

A design system is a shared set of colours, typography, components and rules for using them that both designers and developers build with. When the button is defined in one place, it looks the same on every page, and a change is made once. Google’s Material Design is a well-known example.

To disavow is to ask Google to ignore specific links pointing to your site by uploading a list in Search Console. It is relevant if you have received a manual action for unnatural links. Google itself says most sites never need the tool.

A display network is a collection of websites, apps and video services that show image or video ads on behalf of an ad platform. The best known is the Google Display Network. Display ads reach many people and suit brand building and remarketing, but get fewer clicks per impression than search ads.

Domain Authority is a score from 1 to 100 from the SEO tool Moz that estimates how well a domain can be expected to rank, based on the links pointing to it. Google does not use the score. It is useful for comparing yourself with competitors, not as a goal in itself.

E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. These are the criteria Google’s quality raters use to judge content, and they weigh most for topics like health and finance. An article about tax signed by a named accountant stands stronger than an anonymous text.

Employee advocacy is when employees share and talk about their employer’s content in their own social channels, and the company makes that easy. A consultancy can, for example, give its staff ready-made suggestions for LinkedIn posts about a new report. The sharing has to be voluntary to be credible.

Engagement rate is the share of people who see a post and react to it with a like, comment, share, save or click. A post that reaches 2,000 people and gets 100 interactions has an engagement rate of 5 percent. Some calculate it from follower count instead of reach, so check which method was used before you compare figures.

Event tracking is measuring individual actions on a web page, such as a click on a button, a video play, a PDF download or a scroll to the bottom. In GA4 everything is an event, and the events you consider most important are marked as key events.

Exact match is the Google Ads match type where your ad only shows for searches that mean the same as your keyword. The keyword [women’s running shoes] can show for "running shoes women", but not for "men’s running shoes". You get fewer impressions but more control over what you pay for.

A featured snippet is a box at the top of Google’s search results that answers the question directly, with text taken from a web page. Search for "how long to boil an egg" and you will often find the answer there. Short, precise answers placed right under a heading phrased as the question improve the odds of being chosen.

Fine-tuning is training a ready-made AI model further on your own examples so that it gets better at one specific task. A company can fine-tune a language model on past customer replies so that it matches the tone and terminology. It takes more data and work than giving the model examples directly in the prompt.

Frequency capping is a limit on how many times the same person sees your ad in a given period, for example three times a week. Without a cap, the budget can go to showing the same ad over and over to people who have already made up their minds.

A funnel analysis shows how many people move on from each step towards a conversion, and where they drop off. If 1,000 visit a product page, 200 add the item to the cart and 40 pay, you lose the most between product page and cart, and that is where to start.

GA4 is the current version of Google Analytics, Google’s tool for measuring traffic and behaviour on websites and in apps. GA4 records everything as events, for example page view, scroll, click and purchase. It replaced Universal Analytics, which stopped collecting data in 2023.

Generative AI is artificial intelligence that creates new content, such as text, images, audio, video and code, from an instruction. ChatGPT writing a first draft of a product description and Midjourney making an image from a text description are examples.

GEO, generative engine optimisation, is the work of getting mentioned and cited in answers from AI services such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews. If someone asks ChatGPT for "the best accounting software for small businesses", the goal is for your product to be among those named. Clear definitions, specific figures and coverage in sources the models trust improve the odds.

A Google penalty is when a site loses visibility in search because it breaks Google’s guidelines, for example with bought links or hidden text. A manual action is issued by a person and shown in Search Console, where you can request a review once the problem is fixed. A drop after an algorithm update comes with no notice.

Google Search Console is Google’s free tool that shows how your site performs in search. It shows which searches bring impressions and clicks, which pages are indexed, and whether Google has found technical errors. It is also where you submit a sitemap and request indexing of new pages.

GPT stands for generative pre-trained transformer and is a family of large language models from OpenAI. These are the models that power ChatGPT. The name describes how it works: the model generates text, is pre-trained on large amounts of text and is built on the transformer architecture.

Growth hacking is a way of working where a team runs many small, fast experiments to find what brings growth, and drops the rest. The expression comes from the startup world. A well-known example is Dropbox, which gave extra storage space to users who referred friends.

A hallucination is when an AI model presents something made up as fact. It may invent a source, a legal provision or a figure that looks credible. That is why facts in AI-generated text have to be checked against a source before the text is published.

A heatmap is a colour-coded view of where visitors click, how far they scroll and where they move the mouse on a page. Warm colours mean a lot of activity. If the map shows that only one in five visitors scrolls down to the order button, the button should move up.

Hreflang is an attribute that tells search engines which language and country a page is made for, and where the other language versions are. A site with Norwegian and English editions uses hreflang="nb" and hreflang="en", so Norwegian users get the Norwegian page in search.

Impression share is the portion of the available impressions your ads received. 80 percent means the ad was shown in 8 of the 10 auctions it was eligible for. Google Ads also shows whether the rest was lost to budget or to low Ad Rank.

Impressions are the number of times your content or ad has been shown on a screen, whether or not anyone clicked. 10,000 impressions and a reach of 4,000 means each person saw the content 2.5 times on average.

Inbound marketing is letting customers come to you through content they are looking for themselves, instead of interrupting them with advertising. Search engine optimisation, blogging, newsletters and downloadable guides are typical methods. The opposite is outbound, such as cold calls and ads people have not asked for.

Index bloat is when a search engine has indexed many pages from a site that should not be there, such as filter pages, internal search results and empty tag pages. An online store with 500 products and 20,000 indexed addresses has the problem. It is cleaned up with noindex, canonical URLs and deletion.

Indexing is when a search engine stores a page in its database after crawling it. Only indexed pages can appear in search results. Google Search Console shows which of your pages are indexed and why others were left out.

Influencer marketing is paying or otherwise compensating people with a large following to feature a product in their channels. A skincare brand may send products to an influencer and pay for three posts. In Norway such posts must be clearly marked as advertising.

Information architecture is how the content on a site is organised, named and connected so that people can find their way. Menu structure, categories, page titles and search are all part of it. If customers look for "pricing" and the page sits under "About us", the information architecture is what is failing.

Internal linking is links between pages on the same website. They show search engines how the pages relate and which ones matter most. A blog post about heat pumps that links to the installation service page helps both the reader and that service page’s ranking.

Keyword cannibalisation is when several pages on the same site compete for the same keyword, so the search engine does not know which one to show. If you have three blog posts on "SEO tips", they tend to take turns ranking and none reaches the top. The fix is usually to merge them into one page.

Keyword density is the share of the words on a page that are a given keyword. If "plumber Oslo" appears 10 times in a 500-word text, the density is 2 percent. There is no ideal percentage, and a text that repeats the keyword unnaturally often can be treated as spam.

A landing page is the page a visitor arrives at after clicking an ad or a search result. A good landing page repeats the promise in the ad, loads quickly and has one clear action. An ad for "winter tyre deals" should lead to the winter tyres, not to the home page.

Lazy loading is waiting to load images, video and other heavy content until the user gets close to it on the page. In HTML, loading="lazy" on the image is often enough. The page appears faster because the browser does not have to fetch everything at once, but the image at the top of the page should load immediately.

Lead generation is collecting contact details from people who have shown interest in what you sell, so that you can follow up with them. An accounting firm that offers a free year-end checklist in exchange for a name and email address is doing lead generation. If you want to send email marketing afterwards, you need consent.

Link equity is the ranking strength a page passes on to the pages it links to. A page with many good inbound links has more to pass on. That is why you link from the home page and other strong pages to the pages you most want to rank.

An LLM, large language model, is an AI model trained on very large amounts of text that can write, summarise, translate and answer questions. OpenAI’s GPT models, Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini are examples. The model calculates which word is most likely to come next, which is why it can be wrong with great confidence.

A long-tail keyword is a long, specific search phrase with low search volume. "Accountant for sole traders in Bergen" gets fewer searches than "accountant", but the searcher knows what they want and fewer sites compete for the position.

A lookalike audience is an audience the ad platform builds from people who resemble the customers you already have. You upload, say, a list of your best customers to Meta, and the platform finds other users with similar traits and behaviour.

Machine learning is a branch of artificial intelligence where a program learns patterns from examples instead of following rules written by a person. A spam filter that has seen millions of emails labelled spam or not spam learns to tell them apart by itself. In marketing, machine learning runs the automated bidding in ad platforms, among other things.

Marketing automation is software that sends communication automatically when a set condition is met. A welcome email series for new subscribers and a reminder to customers who abandoned their cart are the most common examples. Tools such as HubSpot, Klaviyo and Mailchimp are used for this.

A marketing funnel is a model of the path from first contact with a company to purchase, where fewer people remain at each step. It is usually split into three: awareness, consideration and decision. Of 10,000 people who see an ad, perhaps 300 click, 30 ask for a quote and 6 become customers.

The meta description is a short text in the HTML that sums up what the page is about, usually 150 to 160 characters. It does not affect ranking directly, but it often appears under the title in the search result and helps decide whether people click. Google sometimes rewrites it.

An MQL, marketing qualified lead, is a potential customer who has shown enough interest that marketing considers them worth following up, but who is not ready for a sales meeting. The company sets the criteria itself, for example that the person has downloaded a guide and visited the pricing page twice.

Multi-channel attribution is giving several channels a share of the credit for a conversion, not only the last one. A customer may see an ad on Instagram, read a blog post from a Google search and finally buy through a newsletter. With last click, the newsletter gets all the credit and the first two channels look worthless.

Negative keywords are words you add so that your ad does not show for certain searches. If you sell new kitchens, you can add "used" and "free" as negative keywords, so you do not pay for clicks from people looking for something else.

A neural network is a mathematical model loosely inspired by the brain, built from layers of connected nodes. Each connection has a weight that is adjusted during training until the network gives correct answers for the examples it is shown. Such networks are the basis of deep learning.

NLP, natural language processing, is the field that gets computers to interpret and produce human language. Machine translation, spell checking, voice control and chatbots are built on it. Search engines use NLP to understand what a search means, not only which words it contains.

Nofollow is a link attribute, rel="nofollow", that asks search engines not to pass link equity to the page being linked to. It is used on links in comment sections, among other places. Paid links should be marked rel="sponsored". Google treats both as hints, not commands.

NPS is a measure of customer loyalty based on one question: "How likely are you to recommend us to others?" on a scale from 0 to 10. The share who answer 0 to 6 is subtracted from the share who answer 9 or 10. If 50 percent answer 9 or 10 and 20 percent answer 0 to 6, the NPS is 30.

Omnichannel means all of a company’s sales and communication channels are connected, so the customer can switch between them without starting over. You can, for example, put an item in the cart on your phone, pay on your laptop and pick it up in store the same day.

An orphan page is a page that no other page on the site links to. Neither visitors nor search engines find it easily, and it receives no link equity. An old campaign page that was removed from the menu but is still live is a common example.

Page value is a Universal Analytics metric that shows how much revenue a page contributed to on average: the value of the sessions where the page was viewed before a conversion, divided by its unique page views. GA4 does not include the metric by default, but it can be calculated in a custom report.

PageRank is Google’s original algorithm for measuring how important a page is, based on how many links point to it and how important those linking pages are themselves. It is named after Larry Page. Google no longer shows the score publicly, but links are still part of ranking.

Performance Max is a Google Ads campaign type where you supply the goal, budget, text, images and video, and Google itself spreads the ads across Search, YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail and Maps. You get less insight and control than in ordinary search campaigns, so good conversion tracking is a requirement.

Phrase match is the Google Ads match type where your ad shows for searches that include the meaning of your keyword, often with extra words before or after. The keyword "women’s running shoes" can show for "cheap running shoes for women", but not for "women’s shoes for hiking". Its reach sits between broad and exact match.

Predictive analytics is using historical data and statistical models to estimate what is likely to happen. A subscription company can calculate which customers are most likely to cancel next month and contact them before they do.

Prompt engineering is wording the instruction to an AI model so that the answer comes out the way you want. If you state who the reader is, the format you want and an example of good text, you get a more usable answer than if you only write "write an ad".

A PWA, progressive web app, is a website that behaves like an app: it can be added to the home screen, work offline and send notifications. The user does not need to download it from an app store, and you maintain one codebase instead of separate apps for iOS and Android.

Quality Score is Google Ads’ rating of each keyword on a scale from 1 to 10. It is based on expected click-through rate, how relevant the ad is to the search, and the landing page experience. A higher score usually means a lower cost per click and a better position.

RAG, retrieval-augmented generation, is a technique where the AI model first retrieves relevant documents from a knowledge base and then writes its answer from them. A customer service bot with RAG looks things up in the company’s own help articles before it replies. The result is fewer hallucinations and answers that can point to a source.

Reach is the number of unique people who have seen your content. If the same person sees a post three times, that counts as one in reach and three in impressions.

Real-time analytics shows what is happening on the site right now. The real-time report in GA4 covers the last 30 minutes. It is useful for checking that tracking works after a change, and for following traffic right after a campaign or newsletter goes out.

A redirect automatically sends visitors and search engines from one address to another. A 301 means the move is permanent, and the link equity follows to the new address. A 302 means temporary. If you change domain or URL structure, every old address should have a 301 to its new one.

Remarketing is showing ads to people who have already visited your website or used your app. An online store can, for example, show an ad for the shoes you put in the cart but did not buy. In the EEA it requires cookie consent.

Responsive design means the same web page adapts its layout to the screen size. Three columns on a desktop become one on a phone, and the menu moves behind a button. Google evaluates the mobile version of a page when it indexes, so a page that works badly on mobile also loses out in search.

A responsive search ad is the standard format for text ads in Google Ads. You write up to 15 headlines and 4 descriptions, and Google combines them in different ways and most often shows the combinations that perform best. Each headline therefore has to work alongside all the others.

A retainer is an agreement where the client pays a fixed monthly amount for ongoing work from an agency or consultant. It differs from project work, which has an agreed deliverable and an end date. A company might, for example, have an SEO retainer that covers an agreed number of hours each month.

A rich snippet is a search result that shows more than title, address and description, for example star ratings, price, stock status or cooking time. The details come from schema markup on the page. Google decides whether to show them.

ROAS, return on ad spend, is the revenue from your ads divided by what the ads cost. If you spend 10,000 kroner and sell for 50,000, your ROAS is 5, or 500 percent. The figure ignores cost of goods and other expenses, so a high ROAS does not always mean the campaign is profitable.

Robots.txt is a text file at the root of a site that tells search bots which parts not to crawl, for example /admin/ or internal search pages. The file prevents crawling, not indexing: a blocked address can still end up in search if others link to it. To keep a page out of the index, use noindex.

ROI, return on investment, is how much you are left with relative to what you invested: revenue minus cost, divided by cost. If a campaign costs 20,000 kroner and brings in 50,000, the ROI is 150 percent. Unlike ROAS, all costs should be included, not only the ad spend.

Schema markup is code, usually in JSON-LD format, that tells search engines what the content on a page is: a product, a recipe, an event or a business. An online store that marks up price and stock status can have them shown directly in the search result.

Search intent is what the user wants to achieve with a search. It is usually split into four: learn something, find a specific website, compare options or buy. Someone searching "what is a heat pump" wants an explanation, while "heat pump price installation" suggests a purchase is close.

Segmentation is dividing visitors or customers into groups with shared traits, such as device, traffic source, location or purchase history, and looking at each group separately. An overall conversion rate of 2 percent can hide that it is 4 percent on desktop and 1 percent on mobile.

Sentiment analysis is automatically judging whether a text expresses something positive, negative or neutral. A hotel can run a thousand guest reviews through such an analysis and see that breakfast is mentioned positively and the wait at reception negatively.

SERP stands for search engine results page, the page of results you get after a search. Besides the organic listings it can contain ads, maps, featured snippets, "People also ask" and AI answers, and each of them takes space from the ordinary results.

Session duration is how long a visit to the site lasts. GA4 reports average engagement time instead, which only counts the time the page is open and visible in the browser. A long time is good for an article, but on a contact page it can mean people are searching in vain.

Shopping ads are product ads in Google that show image, price and store name right in the search results. The details come from a product feed in Google Merchant Center, not from keywords you choose. The quality of titles, images and prices in the feed therefore decides which searches you appear for.

A sitemap is a list of the pages on a website. It usually means an XML file made for search engines, but it can also be an ordinary page of links for visitors. A sitemap is most useful for large sites and for new pages that few others link to yet.

Smart Bidding is the set of automated bid strategies in Google Ads, where machine learning sets a separate bid in each auction based on how likely a conversion is. Target CPA, target ROAS, maximise conversions and maximise conversion value belong here. The system learns from your conversions, so errors in tracking produce wrong bids.

Social listening is systematically following what is written about your brand, your competitors and your industry in social media, forums and reviews. An airline that picks up a wave of complaints about a new baggage rule the same day can respond before the issue grows.

Social proof is evidence that others have chosen a product and are happy with it, which people rely on when they are unsure themselves. Customer reviews, star ratings, client logos and case studies are the most common forms. The reviews have to be real: fabricated reviews are illegal under Norwegian marketing law.

An SPA, single-page application, is a web application that loads one HTML page and then swaps the content with JavaScript instead of fetching new pages from the server. Gmail works this way. Navigation is fast, but the content should also be rendered on the server for search engines to read it reliably.

An SQL, sales qualified lead, is a potential customer the sales team has judged ready for an actual sales process. Usually the person has a need, a budget and the authority to decide. An MQL becomes an SQL when a salesperson has spoken to them and confirmed there is a basis for a quote.

A tag manager is a tool that lets you add and control tracking code on a website from one place, without changing the source code for every new tag. The most widely used is Google Tag Manager. The marketing team can then add a Meta pixel or a conversion tag without waiting for a developer.

Target CPA is an automated bid strategy where you state what a conversion may cost on average, and Google Ads sets bids to get as many conversions as possible at that price. With a target CPA of 300 kroner, some conversions will cost more and others less. The strategy works best when the account has a steady supply of conversion data.

Target ROAS is an automated bid strategy where you state how much revenue you want back per unit of ad spend, and Google Ads bids higher on searches that look likely to bring high-value purchases. With a target of 400 percent, the system aims for 4 kroner in revenue per krone spent. It requires that you track the value of each conversion.

Technical SEO is the work of making sure search engines can crawl, understand and index a website. It covers speed, mobile usability, HTTPS, redirects, canonical URLs and structured data, among other things. If the technical side is broken, good content does little.

Thin content is pages that give the reader little or nothing, such as near-empty category pages, text copied from the supplier or machine-made pages with no insight of their own. Many such pages can pull the whole site down in search. They then need to be improved, merged or removed.

The title tag is the HTML <title> element, which gives a page its name. It appears as the clickable headline in the search result and in the browser tab. Put the main keyword early and keep the title to around 60 characters so it is not cut off.

A token is the piece of text a language model reads and writes, usually a short word or part of a longer one. Models have a limit on how many tokens they can handle at once, and providers charge per token. Long prompts and long answers therefore cost more.

Topical authority is how thoroughly a site covers a subject, as search engines perceive it. A site with thirty good articles about heat pumps that link to each other ranks more easily for a new heat pump search than a site with one article.

Training data is the set of examples an AI model learns from. A model meant to recognise invoices is trained on thousands of invoices where the fields are labelled. If the data is skewed or full of errors, the model will be too.

Transfer learning is reusing what a model has learned on one task as the starting point for another. An image model trained on millions of ordinary pictures can be adapted to spot product defects with a few hundred examples instead of several million. Fine-tuning is the most common form.

UGC, user-generated content, is content that customers and users make themselves, such as reviews, photos of the product in use and videos. A furniture store that shows customers’ own photos of the sofa in their living room is using UGC. You need permission from the person who made the content before using it in marketing.

UI, user interface, is what the user sees and presses: buttons, menus, forms, colours and typography. UX is about the whole experience of using the service, while UI is the visible part. A button that looks clickable and is big enough to hit with a thumb is good UI work.

UTM parameters are codes you add to the end of a link so that your analytics tool knows where the visit came from. The link yourcompany.com/offer?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=autumn-sale tells GA4 the visit came from the autumn sale newsletter. Without tagging, much email and social traffic ends up as "direct".

UX, user experience, is what it feels like to use a website or an app: whether you find what you are looking for, understand what to do and finish without getting annoyed. An online store where you can pay without creating an account has removed a common obstacle.

A vector database stores text, images and other content as lists of numbers (vectors) that represent meaning, and finds the content closest in meaning to a query. Search for "how do I cancel my subscription" and it finds the article "End your membership", even though the words differ. It is often used as the knowledge base in RAG setups.

Viral marketing is marketing designed to be passed on by the audience, so that it spreads without paid distribution. A funny video shared by hundreds of thousands of people within a few days is the classic example. It cannot be ordered, and most attempts do not go viral.

Web Vitals is Google’s collection of metrics for how a web page performs for the user. The three most important are called Core Web Vitals (LCP, INP and CLS). There are also supporting metrics such as TTFB, the time until the server starts responding, and FCP, the time until the first content appears. You can measure them in PageSpeed Insights.

An XML sitemap is a file that lists the addresses you want search engines to know about, often with the date each was last changed. It usually lives at /sitemap.xml and is submitted in Google Search Console. The file does not guarantee that pages get indexed, but it helps Google find them.

A zero-click search is a search where the user gets the answer on the results page itself and does not click through. The weather forecast, an exchange rate and a shop’s opening hours are typical examples. For businesses it means that visibility in snippets, maps and AI answers can count even when the visit never happens.