So Many Acronyms: What do They all Mean?

By Neil Jones

As a newbie or freshmen in the Internet marketing world it can often become confusing when you hear people using strange acronyms. I know when I joined my first forum and started my first thread people on the forum began calling me the OP. OP? Huh! Who’s that? Well, I soon learnt that OP meant “opening post” or “original poster”.

In this article I am going to define all the commonly used acronyms in the IM world so as to assist you to not feel intimidated as a newbie when you hear these terms. By the way IM stands for internet marketing, but I bet you knew that one?

AM: Affiliate manager – the individual who manages and communicates with affiliates who are associated with his/her affiliate network/program.

CB: Clickbank – Affiliate Network that specializes in digital products.

CJ: Commission Junction – Affiliate network that has a host of tangible/physical products.

CPA: Cost per Action – amount paid by a program for specific action like filling out a form or entering an email address.

CPM: Cost per Thousand Impressions – the cost attributed to a 1000 impressions of an ad on a website or search engine (M is the Roman numeral for 1000).

CPC: Cost per Click – the average cost for each click on a banner or link.

CPS: Cost per Sale – amount paid to an affiliate for each sale generated.

CR: Conversion Ratio – the ratio of visitors that performed a certain action like subscribing to an email list.

CTR: Click Through Rate – the percentage of people who viewed an ad or sales letter and clicked on a relevant link.

EPC: earnings per click – (income earned from 100 clicks/100 = EPC).

IM: Instant Messaging/ Internet Marketing.

LSI: Latent Semantic Indexing – The sophisticated code used by search engines to distinguish the difference between similar terms that have different meanings.

PPA: Pay per Action – Payment made for a specific action like registering for a free trial.

PPC: Pay per Click – form advertising where an advertiser is charged each time someone clicks on the ad or link associated with the ad.

PPA: Pay per Performance – payment that is released only when meeting certain specific performance objectives.

PR: Page Rank – a number or score assigned by Google to a webpage. Higher page rank assumes authority and trust. PR could also mean press release or public relations.

PV: Page View – each time a webpage is downloaded to your monitor and viewed.

ROI: Return on Investment – Money gained or lost on an initial investment.

SE: Search Engine – Google, Yahoo and Bing are search engines.

SEM: Search Engine Marketing – involves marketing your website via PPC or organic results.

SEO: Search Engine Optimization – involves an on-page and off-page techniques that helps increase website ranking.

SERPs: Search Engine Results Page – the results generated when you search for a specific keyword.

SMM: Social Media Marketing – involves marketing your offering via platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

SMO: Social Media Optimization – optimizing advertising campaigns on social platforms.

TLD: Top Level Domain – domains like .com, .net, and .org are top level domains.

UV: Unique Visitors – a visor who visits your site for the first time.

WWW: no not the world wrestling federation but rather the “world wide web”.

The above forms a list of the acronyms that are most popular; there are certainly others in the programming sphere but a list of that size will have to be inserted into an entire dictionary.  Can you think of any other acronyms that I might have not listed here?

Author Information

Neil Jones specializes in launching ecommerce sites and is currently plying his trade as head of marketing for eMobileScan. With 18 websites based all around Europe, this company is on course to be one of Europe’s largest online retailers of Industrial handheld computers like the Datalogic Memor. Neil has been an online marketer for the past 6 years and in that time he has owned and run a range of sites all built around the ecommerce platform.