Ultimate Guide to Digital Marketing Acronyms
In marketing, perhaps more than any other industry, you can Die From Acronym Overload (DFAO). Even after a decade in the industry, there are still moments where I either forget an acronym I knew years ago, or I’m working in a industry that uses something new I just haven’t come across before. So whether you’re new to marketing or you’re super experienced but don’t want to admit you had to Google what SERP stands for, here’s your ultimate guide to digital marketing acronyms.
And please, if you have others to contribute that I’ve missed, please comment below, email me, or message me on LinkedIn. The more obscure, convoluted or just plain stupid the better!
CMO: Chief Marketing Officer
Your Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) is the person who oversees all of your marketing activity. They’re at the top of the marketing org and in a bigger organization there might be many layers underneath them before getting to the people actually doing the hands-on work. Your budget and overall goals ultimately come from the CMO.
For each of the acronyms below, listed in alphabetical order, I’ll give an example of how a good CMO might use them, and how a bad one might.
API: Application Programming Interface
Starting with a pretty technical one here. An Application Programming Interface (API) is a set of rules and tools that allows different software applications to communicate with each other. Depending on your digital marketing role, you might never need to know what an API is, but without knowing it you’re probably using APIs with various tools, especially Zapier (more about the usefulness of Zapier here).
Used in a sentence by a good CMO: Let’s look for tools with open APIs we can use to solve our user journey problems and make sure we’re automating everything we can to save us time and money.
Used in a sentence by a bad CMO: I don’t care what an API is, it doesn’t take long to manually download a list of all our leads, sort them, upload them to our email provider and send out a welcome email to new customers. YES I want to do that every day!
B2B: Business to Business
Business to Business (B2B) refers to transactions and relationships between businesses, where products or services are sold from one business to another rather than directly to consumers.
Used in a sentence by a good CMO: Our B2B activity has a lower than expected conversion rate, we need to review current trends and figure out what happened and how we can fix it.
Used in a sentence by a bad CMO: B2B is easy, at my last company we just looked up businesses in the Yellow Pages and cold-called them.
B2C: Business to Consumer
Business to Consumer (B2C) signifies transactions and interactions between a business and individual consumers, involving the direct sale of products or services to end-users.
Used in a sentence by a good CMO: We’re going to launch our first B2C product next quarter, I need you to plan out a go-to-market strategy for it. Here’s a really big budget and let me know what additional resource you need.
Used in a sentence by a bad CMO: Next week we’re going to switch our entire business to a B2C model, so go and figure out how to get people to buy our product without us spending money on ads.
B2B2C: Business to Business to Consumer
B2B2C is a business model that involves a business selling to another business in order to reach consumers, for example an education company working with schools in order to reach parents.
Used in a sentence by a good CMO: After the research you already put together, I think B2B2C could be a good model for us to hit revenue goals. Can you create a plan to test without affecting our current business?
Used in a sentence by a bad CMO: I know B2B2C, it didn’t work at my last company and it won’t work here. No, I don’t care what your research says.
CAC: Customer Acquisition Cost
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is the total cost a business incurs to acquire a new customer, typically calculated by dividing the total acquisition expenses by the number of new customers gained. It’s a super useful metric to assess whether you have a healthy business. If you pay more on ads for a customer to purchase than the amount the customer actually pays, you have a problem.
Used in a sentence by a good CMO: We have to report on CAC by channel every month to make sure the investment we’re putting in for each channel is worth it. If not, we have to see if we can take steps to improve results for that channel, or shift investment to other channels.
Used in a sentence by a bad CMO: I don’t care about CAC, I only care about the number of purchases we’re getting. Just double the ads budget if you have to.
CMS: Content Management System
A Content Management System (CMS) is a software application that enables users to create, manage, and modify digital content on a website without requiring technical expertise.
Used in a sentence by a good CMO: It seems like our CMS is super untidy and hard to maintain, let’s revisit our workflows and make sure we’re following a consistent naming convention and process for adding new content to the site, especially across languages.
Used in a sentence by a bad CMO: Let’s just get the content live, if the CMS ends up messy that’s a problem for the future.
CPA: Cost Per Acquisition
Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) is a marketing metric that measures the average cost incurred by a business to acquire a new customer or lead. It differs from CAC in that CAC refers to a paying customer, whereas CPA can be a paying customer or an initial lead.
Used in a sentence by a good CMO: Having looked at the CAC, conversion rate and overall quality of leads, we need to achieve this specific CPA to maintain a healthy funnel, and we’ll continually look at ways to improve both CPA and our lower funnel conversion rates.
Used in a sentence by a bad CMO: Probably we need about $10 CPA, so figure out how to get there. I don’t care if the leads are really bad quality, that’s the sales team’s problem.
CPC: Cost Per Click
Cost Per Click (CPC) is a digital advertising metric that calculates the cost an advertiser pays for each click on their online advertisement.
Used in a sentence by a good CMO: We’ll take a look at CPC in some of our reports to keep an eye on it, but ultimately we’re focused on CPA and CAC, and CPC is just an indicator, not a critical metric.
Used in a sentence by a bad CMO: If we have a cheap CPC we must be getting more website traffic and therefore more leads and more sales, so let’s put CPC at the top of all reports.
CPL: Cost Per Lead
Cost Per Lead (CPL) is a marketing metric that measures the cost incurred by a business for acquiring a new lead or potential customer. It can be used interchangeably with CPA depending on your business.
CPM: Cost Per Mille
Cost Per Mille (CPM) is a digital advertising metric that represents the cost of one thousand impressions of an advertisement. It can be affected by the number of people in bidding auctions (i.e. more competition = higher CPMs), target audience size and relevance, your campaign objective, and your ad creative.
Used in a sentence by a good CMO: Our CPM is really high month over month, can we take a look at what might be causing it? Is it something we changed or an external factor like seasonality? If so, maybe we need to revisit our creative to try a more compelling offer, or redistribute budget to channels with lower CPMs.
Used in a sentence by a bad CMO: Our CPM is high all of a sudden so we should immediately pause campaigns, wait a week then relaunch, because it must be seasonality.
CPV: Cost Per View
Cost Per View (CPV) is a digital advertising metric that measures the cost an advertiser incurs each time their video ad is viewed by a user.
Used in a sentence by a good CMO: Our CPV is expectedly low, but it’s not leading to many leads. How about we set up an audience of people who viewed our videos and retarget them with a lower-funnel ad?
Used in a sentence by a bad CMO: Wooooo, our CPV is less than a cent, I love YouTube ads, let’s increase budget!
CRM: Customer Relationship Management
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) refers to the strategies, technologies, and practices businesses use to manage and analyze customer interactions throughout the customer lifecycle.
Used in a sentence by a good CMO: Once we choose a CRM tool it’s extremely difficult to switch it later, so let’s map out our user journeys and marketing flows as best as possible before making a decision.
Used in a sentence by a bad CMO: CRMs are expensive, can we just use Google Sheets?
CRO: Conversion Rate Optimization
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) involves strategies and techniques aimed at improving the percentage of website visitors who take a desired action, such as making a purchase. Adding customer reviews to your landing page could be one CRO strategy, building trust and increasing the likelihood of a purchase.
Used in a sentence by a good CMO: We’re getting a lot of visitors to the landing page, but not many conversions. Let’s focus on CRO and run some tests on the landing page to see what impact various changes will make.
Used in a sentence by a bad CMO: Tons of visitors but not many conversions, we need to focus on CRO, so let’s rebuild the landing page and do everything differently this time.
CTR: Click-Through Rate
Click-Through Rate (CTR) is a digital marketing metric that calculates the percentage of users who click on a specific link out of the total number of users who view a page, email, or advertisement. There are various different definitions of “click” depending on what platform you’re using. On Meta, you have clicks (all), link clicks, and clicks (unique).
Clicks (all): all clicks on any part of the ad, including to your landing page, liking, or leaving a comment
Link clicks: number of people who click to the landing page experience you specified
Clicks (unique): number of unique people who clicked any part of the ad
Unless you have a very good reason to do otherwise, always use link clicks.
Used in a sentence by a good CMO: This CTR metric looks suspiciously high, make sure we’re using it based on link clicks to get the most accurate picture of how effective our ads are in driving the action we specified.
Used in a sentence by a bad CMO: This CTR is great, we must be doing something right!
CVR: Conversion Rate
Conversion Rate (CVR) is the percentage of people from a specific point who complete a desired goal, for example number of website visitors who complete a purchase.
Used in a sentence by a good CMO: Our lead to purchase conversion rate could use some improvement. Are there ways we can improve the website experience, like adding customer reviews front and center? Let’s try running a few tests and see what changes have the most impact.
Used in a sentence by a bad CMO: We need to improve our CVR, go ahead and try whatever you think best all at once and make that CVR better as soon as possible.
DAM: Digital Asset Management
Digital Asset Management (DAM) involves the organization, storage, and retrieval of digital files, including images, videos, and documents, in a centralized system.
Used in a sentence by a good CMO: We’re going to invest in a DAM tool to manage all of our creatives in one place, with consistent naming conventions, tagging, and a logical structure, so everyone on the team and all our stakeholders can easily access any specific file.
Used in a sentence by a bad CMO: A dedicated DAM is just a waste of money, let’s just try and be organized in Google Drive.
DMCA: Digital Millennium Copyright Act
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a U.S. copyright law that criminalizes the production and dissemination of technology, devices, or services intended to circumvent measures that control access to copyrighted works.
Used in a sentence by a good CMO: Make sure we have the correct rights to use all of our creative assets on all channels, we don’t want to get into any problems with DMCA rules.
Used in a sentence by a bad CMO: We’re a small company, there’s only a tiny chance anyone will submit a DMCA takedown request, let alone anything more severe. Use whatever images and videos you find online and do whatever you want with them.
DMP: Data Management Platform
A Data Management Platform (DMP) is a centralized system that collects, organizes, and activates data from various sources for marketing and advertising purposes. It can be used to segment your users and serve personalized, targeted marketing messages to have the most impact.
Used in a sentence by a good CMO: For our next email campaign, let’s try a more segmented approach. Connect data from our DMP to our email tool and offer a 10% discount on annual plans to our most active users, and a 20% discount on monthly plans to new users.
Used in a sentence by a bad CMO: What’s the point of a DMP? Just send a 20% discount coupon to all users. Everyone loves discounts.
ESP: Email Service Provider
An Email Service Provider (ESP) is a company that offers email marketing services, including sending and managing email campaigns.
Used in a sentence by a good CMO: Do some research into ESPs and find the most value-for-money option that will let us scale and use advanced segmentation, personalization and automation.
Used in a sentence by a bad CMO: I used Mailchimp as my ESP at my last company. I can’t think of anything better, even for this Fortune 500 company.
GA: Google Analytics
Google Analytics (GA) is a web analytics service provided by Google that tracks and reports website traffic, providing insights into user behavior and website performance. It’s arguably the single most important tool in a digital marketer’s toolkit. It used to be UA (Universal Analytics) but you should be migrated to GA4 (Google Analytics 4) now.
Used in a sentence by a good CMO: Do we have GA set up? No? WHY NOT? DROP EVERYTHING AND GET ON THAT AS SOON AS POSSIBLE!
Used in a sentence by a bad CMO: GA is pretty complicated. We can see the number of clicks in the ads platforms and the number of leads and purchases in our database, we don’t need anything else.
GBP/GMB: Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business)
Google Business Profile (GBP) is the name of what used to be Google My Business (GMB), for extra confusion.
Used in a sentence by a good CMO: Can you take a look at our GBP setup and see if there are any improvements we can make to get more foot traffic?
Used in a sentence by a bad CMO: Can we pay to get 100 fake reviews on our GBP profile?
GDPR: General Data Protection Regulation
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a European Union regulation that governs the protection of personal data and privacy of individuals within the EU and the European Economic Area.
Used in a sentence by a good CMO: We really have to make sure all our marketing activity adheres to GDPR rules. Let’s set up a team to work through that next quarter.
Used in a sentence by a bad CMO: GDP what now? I don’t care. Let’s just source a list of emails from any random site you can find and cold email everyone. We’ve gotta get more leads somehow.
GMV: Gross Merchandise Value
Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) is a metric used in e-commerce and retail businesses to measure the total value of merchandise sold through a particular marketplace or platform over a specific period, before any deductions for fees, taxes, or refunds. GMV provides insights into the scale and growth of a business's sales volume, serving as a key performance indicator for e-commerce platforms and marketplaces. It’s different to revenue in that revenue includes discounts and refunds, so GMV will always be higher than revenue.
Used in a sentence by a good CMO: Our customer acquisition cost is where we want it to be, now let’s come up with strategies for increasing GMV and therefore increase the overall finances of the business.
Used in a sentence by a bad CMO: GMV isn’t as important as just getting purchases, so let’s just focus on getting customers to purchase as cheap as possible, regardless of what they’re buying.
GTM: Go To Market
Go-To-Market (GTM) refers to the strategy and process a company uses to bring its products or services to market, including identifying target customers, defining distribution channels, setting pricing strategies, and creating marketing campaigns. A well-executed GTM strategy ensures that a company effectively reaches its target audience and achieves its business objectives.
Used in a sentence by a good CMO: Let’s spend the next two quarters developing a really strong GTM plan to figure out how we’re going to launch our product in this new market to have the best chance of success.
Used in a sentence by a bad CMO: We don’t need a GTM plan; it’s a new market and we’ve never been present there, how will we know what will work? Let’s just start running ads there as soon as possible and see what happens.
KOL: Key Opinion Leader
Key Opinion Leader (KOL) is an influential individual in a specific industry or niche who has a significant impact on the opinions and behaviors of their audience. Just think of them as influencers.
Used in a sentence by a good CMO: Let’s research KOLs to see if we can find some with a relevant audience that makes for a cost-effective way to reach our target audience.
Used in a sentence by a bad CMO: KOLs are stupid and expensive, let’s just build our own audience by tripling the amount of content we post on Facebook.
KPI: Key Performance Indicator
A Key Performance Indicator (KPI) is a measurable value that indicates the overall performance of marketing activity. A lot of the acronyms listed above and below are good examples of KPIs.
Used in a sentence by a good CMO: We need to carefully select a few specific KPIs for each channel to measure its effectiveness without us getting bogged down in data.
Used in a sentence by a bad CMO: I love KPIs! I’m a huge data nerd and a big believer in big data to make decisions so let’s make a huge spreadsheet with tons of metrics and monitor the trend of everything.
LTV: Customer Lifetime Value
Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) represents the total revenue a business can expect to earn from a customer throughout their entire relationship.
Used in a sentence by a good CMO: We’re not effectively tracking our LTV so I’m assigning a data team to work on that, then we’ll use that data in our marketing activity to target the most high-value customers.
Used in a sentence by a bad CMO: Once we get the customer in the door I don’t care what their LTV is, the sales team can figure that out and do stuff with it.
OKR: Objectives and Key Results
Objectives and Key Results (OKR) is a goal-setting framework that defines company objectives and the key results needed to achieve them. It’s not specific to digital marketing but it’s a useful tool to make sure everyone is aware of what other people in the team (and outside of it) are working on, and how they relate to overall business goals. OKRs are typically set every quarter.
Used in a sentence by a good CMO: This week we’re going to review our OKRs to see if we’re on track for the quarter and if we’re not, do some deep-diving into why and if we need to review our OKR setting for next quarter.
Used in a sentence by a bad CMO: I don’t care what OKRs we set last week, I really think we should abandon all that and just redesign our website asap.
P&L: Profit & Loss
A profit and loss (P&L) statement, also known as an income statement, is a financial report that summarizes a company's revenues, expenses, and profits (or losses) over a specific period. It provides insights into a company's financial performance by detailing its ability to generate profits from its operations. You can make one specific to marketing to track the financial health of marketing activity. Get a free marketing P&L template here.
Used in a sentence by a good CMO: At the beginning of every month, make sure to update our marketing P&L with the most accurate data and let everyone on the team know so we have good transparency into the health of the business.
Used in a sentence by a bad CMO: The finance team knows if we have money or not, we don’t need to maintain or even look at a P&L ourselves.
PMF: Product Market Fit
Product-Market Fit (PMF) is a term used to describe the degree to which a product satisfies the needs and demands of a specific market segment. Achieving PMF indicates that a product resonates with its target audience, leading to strong demand, customer satisfaction, and ultimately, sustainable growth. It is a critical milestone for startups and businesses to validate their product's viability and potential for success in the market.
Used in a sentence by a good CMO: We need to achieve PMF to establish ourselves in this market before we start considering scaling up, but we have time and resource to be able to do it.
Used in a sentence by a bad CMO: We have somewhere between 2-5 months to achieve PMF, depending on how much we spend, so start running stuff as cheap as possible and see what works.
PPC: Pay Per Click
Pay Per Click (PPC) is an online advertising model where advertisers pay a fee each time their ad is clicked. Examples of PPC advertising include Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Meta Ads.
Used in a sentence by a good CMO: Let’s increase our investment in PPC since it’s an effective way to get purchases than other forms of advertising.
Used in a sentence by a bad CMO: Let’s cut all our PPC budget and shift it all towards awareness. The more impressions we get the better, probably purchases will come after that.
PR: Public Relations
Public Relations (PR) involves managing and building relationships between a company or individual and the public to enhance reputation and promote a positive image.
Used in a sentence by a good CMO: We should be considerate about our PR approach to make sure we’re getting our business known and trusted among our target demographics.
Used in a sentence by a bad CMO: I know we sell niche equipment to farmers in Northern California, but let’s build relationships with any random websites across North America; anyone who wants to mention us in any type of content is great!
PR: Page Rank
Page Rank (PR) is an algorithm used by Google to rank websites in its search engine results, assessing the importance of web pages based on the number and quality of links. For example, you
Used in a sentence by a good CMO: We need a thoughtful approach to increasing our PR, spend some time researching keywords, related questions, and level of competition, then let’s create some unique and engaging content go with it.
Used in a sentence by a bad CMO: Let’s hire a PR agency to improve our PR on Google; find the cheapest ones and get started right away.
ROAS: Return on Ad Spend
Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) is a metric that measures the revenue generated for every dollar spent on advertising.
Used in a sentence by a good CMO: Based on the past quarter’s trend, our search ads have a much stronger ROAS than our KOL activations, so let’s shift budget to search and look into how we improve our KOL messaging.
Used in a sentence by a bad CMO: I don’t care what the ROAS says, our CPA and CAC are improving so we must be doing something right.
ROI: Return on Investment
Return on Investment (ROI) is a financial metric that calculates the profitability of an investment by comparing the gain or loss to the cost of the investment.
Used in a sentence by a good CMO: ROAS is looking good, but our ROI is less healthy, maybe because we started offering more 50% off coupons which ate into our profit. Can you take a look?
Used in a sentence by a bad CMO: ROI is for the finance team; you finally convinced me to look at ROAS and ads are by far our biggest costs in marketing so that’s all I care about.
SaaS: Software as a Service
Software as a Service (SaaS) is a software distribution model where applications are hosted by a third-party provider and made available to customers over the internet. Read about some of the essential digital marketing SaaS tools here.
Used in a sentence by a good CMO: I’ve noticed we still do a lot of work manually, can you spend some time looking at SaaS tools to see where we can streamline our operations?
Used in a sentence by a bad CMO: I don’t trust SaaS tools, I like working with people, that’s why we have agencies to run our ads, manage our social accounts, send out our emails, and everything else.
SEM: Search Engine Marketing
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) involves the promotion of websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages through paid advertising.
Used in a sentence by a good CMO: SEM ads have a huge opportunity to reach users with the right message based on their search intent, to show someone looking to purchase a new tool a bottom-funnel conversion ad, and someone who’s just looking for a solution to their problem some information on our blog that will solve their problem, and build awareness and credibility of our company.
Used in a sentence by a bad CMO: I love seeing our name at the top of Google search, let’s make sure we’re spending enough that I always see us at the top.
SEO: Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of optimizing a website to improve its visibility and ranking on search engines.
Used in a sentence by a good CMO: I understand SEO can be a long game, especially for high-competition, high-value keywords, but let’s put together a strategy to work towards improving page rank for those, as well as long-tail keywords that might have lower volume and value, but be easier to rank for.
Used in a sentence by a bad CMO: I know we’re a new company and we have hundreds of competitors, but you’re supposed to be an SEO pro, get us to the front page by next Friday.
SERP: Search Engine Results Page
A Search Engine Results Page (SERP) is the page displayed by a search engine in response to a user's query, showing a list of relevant websites.
Used in a sentence by a good CMO: To optimize our SERP appearance, let’s do a technical audit of our website and landing pages to make sure we have the right setup to appear in a useful way.
Used in a sentence by a bad CMO: I want to be a featured snippet on the SERP. I don’t care what the content is, just make it happen.
SMM: Social Media Marketing
Social Media Marketing (SMM) involves using social media platforms to promote products or services and engage with the target audience.
Used in a sentence by a good CMO: We should take a considered approach to our SMM strategy. Do an audit of our current channels to see what the opportunity lies, do some research about what social media platforms our ideal customers spend time on, then develop engaging and appropriate content for each channel.
Used in a sentence by a bad CMO: The goal of our SMM is to go viral, so do that. The only way I’ll measure success on social media is the number of likes and views we get.
SMMA: Social Media Marketing Agency
A Social Media Marketing Agency (SMMA) is a company that specializes in providing social media marketing services to other businesses.
Used in a sentence by a good CMO: I appreciate that social media marketing isn’t an easy job and there’s no way you can do it on top of running our ads, working on an SEO strategy, and managing our offline activations, so we’re going to hire an SMMA to support.
Used in a sentence by a bad CMO: What do you mean, posting on our accounts is hard? You just type something and post, maybe add a stock photo to it. No, we can’t hire an SMMA, we’ll get an unpaid intern and they can do it.
SOV: Share of Voice
Share of Voice (SOV) is the percentage of total advertising presence within a market that a brand or advertiser owns.
Used in a sentence by a good CMO: Look into some competitor analysis and social listening tools to help support the measurement of SOV. We should stay on top of share of voice as a useful gauge as to how our business is doing in terms of awareness.
Used in a sentence by a bad CMO: We can’t measure SOV, it’s hard and ultimately pointless.
UGC: User-Generated Content
User-Generated Content (UGC) refers to content created by the audience or users of a product or service, often shared on social media or other online platforms.
Used in a sentence by a good CMO: What do you think about running a giveaway on our social channels to help generate UGC we can use in other promotional materials?
Used in a sentence by a bad CMO: It’s not complicated. Just aggressively and repeatedly spam all of our customers across email, text, and social media begging for UGC. Then we’ll figure out what to do with the content once we get it.
DMAs: Digital Marketing Acronyms
That wraps up this list of digital marketing acronyms. As a fun bonus, let’s try and use as many acronyms as possible in a roleplay scenario with a bad CMO.
CMO: Our P&L shows that all our main KPIs including CPC, CPL, CVR, and CAC are worse this month. How do we fix it?
Tired Marketer: Our OKRs are to focus on UGC to get content to improve content for SEO, test out a few KOLs, and increase investment in SEM since ROI is improving after sending LTV data to Google Ads and shifting to a target ROAS bid strategy.
CMO: Oh, I think we’re going to need to change those OKRs, because this morning I also realized we’re not active enough on Facebook, which is super super important. Can you revisit our SMM strategy?
Tired Marketer: Can we hire an SMMA for that? I’m also working on finding a new ESP and connecting it to our DSP and DAM so we can automate some user journeys, all without getting in trouble with GDPR or DMCA issues.
CMO: Maybe de-prioritize that project. The CEO is worried we’re not finding PMF in this market at all, so wants us to create a GTM plan to launch in this other market. Can you handle that?
Tired Marketer: But using SaaS tools like Mailchimp as our ESP improves our overall processes and makes launching in any new market easier.
CMO: I don’t really know what you mean but sure, do that if you want. I will also need that GTM plan by this Friday though. If you have to stay late this week you can expense some dinner and a cab home. How’s that sound?
Tired Marketer: Terrific. Thanks.
