6 Digital Marketing Acronyms You Should Know

Why Are These Acronyms Useful?

Digital marketing is a complex field full of professionals in constant conversation. Without knowing the lingo these professionals may use in any given discussion, you’ll quickly fall behind in the conversation and risk looking uneducated.

Our List (in no order)

CPM — Cost Per Mille

B2B/B2C — Business To Business/Business To Consumer/Community

CTR — Click Through Rate

ROI — Return On Investment

SMM — Social Media Marketing

SEO/SEM— Search Engine Optimization/Search Engine Marketing

Cost Per Mille

Cost Per Mille is usually referring to sponsorships. When pricing out a sponsorship, creators and companies will come to a mutually agreed-upon CPM which translates to Cost Per Thousand.

A CPM of a sponsorship dictates how much the creator gets paid per one thousand of something. For example, if a sponsorship deal with a YouTuber is set to $25 CPM, for every one thousand views, that YouTuber will be paid $25

Business To Business And Business to Consumer

B2B and B2C are often used when discussing types of companies. There are the business-to-business companies, in which their product or services are sold to other businesses. There are also business-to-consumer companies, which sell their products or services to the average consumers.

BONUS

A similar concept to B2C is DTC, Direct To Consumer, which is a company that skips the middle man and sells their own product to their consumers. For example, a shoe company only sells their shoes on their website instead of selling their shoes to stores that sell their shoes to the consumer.

Click-Through-Rate

CTR is a common acronym used in email marketing and social media marketing. Click-Through-Rate describes a metric of the percent of people who clicked on your Google Ad versus how many people viewed it.

Formula

Clicks on your ad ÷ Impressions on your ad.

Return On Investment

An ad campaign’s ROI is how much money the company made off of the campaign. So if a company spends $40,000 on an ad for their new line of watches and they get 200 people to click on that ad who spend $238,934 on the company’s website. Their Return On Investment would be $198,934. ROI is the total revenue made from the ad campaign, minus the cost of the ad campaign.

Formula

Revenue of the ad − Cost of the ad.

Social Media Marketing

SMM stands for Social Media Marketing, which is an avenue of marketing some companies use to bring awareness to their brand or product. Social Media Marketing takes the form of ads on different social media platforms. Most social media platforms have an ads system. Facebook, for example, has one of the most extensive and widely used ad platforms. However, Pinterest and Snapchat also have their own ad platforms.

Quick Tip: There are many different uses for each platform's advertising systems. One ad that works on Snapchat, may not work on Facebook or Instagram.

Search Engine Optimization And Search Engine Marketing

Believe it or not, these are two different things. Search Engine Optimization is used on a company’s website. SEO is the method of implementing keywords into a website’s content to boost the website’s position on certain search results.

SEM or Search Engine Marketing usually refers to ads on search engines. Google Ads is a great example of this. With Google’s in-depth ad suite, they allow you to create ad campaigns that will boost your website to the top of search results based on certain keywords in the campaign.

Learn More About These Subjects

As always, we encourage you to keep learning any of these subjects that interest you. While we only went over the acronyms and what they fundamentally represent, there’s a whole world to each of them!