Website Marketing Terminology

This is possibly one of the most important terminology sections that I would recommend you read and UNDERSTAND. In my experience, many companies are made aware of things that are not relevant to them or that will not benefit them, but will sound good. I will explain in more detail as I go along.

Unique Visitors

This is the MOST IMPORTANT term that you need to pay attention to when a website owner quotes you on their stats. As you continue to read the terms further down, you will understand better.

Unique visitors, sometimes also referred to as Unique Views, are counted by how many UNIQUE VISITORS have visited your site within a particular time period.

Let’s say you read this article and then decided you couldn’t leave this site without reading everything I had ever written, plus fill in every form on the site and refreshed every page 100 times – only ONE unique visitor would be counted.

If someone from another house visited Momtrepreneur and ready only 1 article, an additional unique visitor would be calculated.

If however, you and your work colleague or fellow Mamma are on the same network at your home / office and you visit every page on the site and she visits 5 pages on the site, only 1 unique visitor would be calculated given you were recorded as being on the same connection and network (IP Address).

Page Views

Each time a page on a website is loaded, an additional page view is counted. So, let’s say you did the following on Momtrepreneur:

• You are currently viewing this article on Marketing Terms (1 Page View complete)
• Then, you go to the About page (1 Page View)
• Then, you go back to the Home Page (1 Page View)
• Finally, you come back to this Marketing Terms page (1 Page View)

That would be equal to 4 page views. If you refreshed this particular page, an additional page view would be added to your page view count.

So, when you hear that a website has 800 page views, it’s how many times pages on the website have been displayed.

Hits

Every time a particular file, image or HTML is loaded, it gets counted as a hit. So, let’s take this page for example, I have the following images on the page:

• My logo
• Top banner with the pretty lady
• 5 adverts on the right-hand side
• The lovely photo at the top of this article
• Files I call in the code itself; for example, my stylesheet, JavaScript files, etc…

The logo counts as 1 hit. The banner counts as another. Plus the 5 ads and the photo at the top of the article and you already have 8 hits before we even think about the files loaded in the background that you, as a visitor or non-developer, don’t know about.

IMPORTANT: Be very careful about choosing to advertise on a site just because it has a large number of hits. If I created a page with 1000 images on it – that would be 1000 hits already for viewing that page just once. Now, I refresh the page and that’s another 1000. Always check Page Views and Unique Visitors to get an idea of how long a visitor stays on the site and how many unique visitors visit the website.

CPC – Cost Per Click

CPC is the amount of money an advertiser pays to a search engine (such as Google or Bing) or website for a single click on their advert, which sends the visitor to the advertiser’s website.

CPM

This is the cost per 1000 page views. So, if your cost is R1 per page view; 1000 page views will cost R1000. The purpose of having CPM rates is to allow the advertising agencies, for example, to market the cost of an ad per 1000 page views.

PPC – Pay Per Click
This is an advertising option / model whereby advertisers only pay when their advert has been click. You will often hear about this when PPC campaigns are implemented / discussed relating to search engines such as Google.