The world of marketing is an array of complicated, technical terms and acronyms. It can be daunting for anyone new to marketing or approaching an agency with a project. So, that’s where we come in.

Over the next few months, we will be publishing a series of plain-speaking, jargon busting blogs that break down the complicated languages you can be faced with, and explain what the terms mean.

The first area we will be focusing on, is possibly the most technical – websites.

Website terminology deciphered


Have you ever been asked what CMS you are using? This means the ‘Content Management System’. It’s another way of saying the type of software that your website is built around. It can be open-sourced CMS systems, like WordPress, Drupal or Umbraco. This means that it is a free to use template which a developer can then take and interpret, coding it to provide the functionality and visual identity that your brand requires. You can also get bespoke CMS systems, which are built directly by the developer purposefully for your needs.


CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, this is the system that you use for managing your contacts, data and potentially your email and direct marketing. CRM systems can be huge, they can integrate with your email marketing client and your website to provide a full picture of your marketing funnel, leads and opportunities.


It’s well-known now that search engines such as Google and Bing now require your website to be mobile optimised, ideally built with mobile use in mind first over the desktop experience. This is because more and more people are browsing the internet on their phones over a desktop or laptop. If your site isn’t performing well enough on mobile, your entire search engine rank will now be affected.

Landing page

A landing page is the web page that you are wanting people to hit first when they click through from an advert, search engine result, social media campaign or a referral. The landing page needs to be clear, consistent with the tone of voice that your campaign had, and have a call to action. It also needs to be trackable, so you know how visitors got to the landing page, and how many of them have clicked on the call to action (otherwise known as a conversion).

Google Analytics

This is a free to use platform that is integrated into most websites, providing insights and analysis into user behaviours on your website. It provides facts and figures such as how many people are going to your site, how many people stay there and browse, and what pages are they interacting with. You can set up goals and objectives to monitor your website performance against your marketing goals.


Cookies are not as scary as the news may make out. They are small text files that capture information about website users, their unique user ID and the site name that they are on. They can then track the websites that you visit, which is how when you are browsing the internet it knows which sites you have already been on, remember your passwords and can add things to a cart whilst you are still shopping. Everyone who has a website needs to have a clear cookie policy, and let people know that they use cookies.

Search engine optimisation

We will post a separate blog about the world of SEO as there is quite a lot of terminology around this that is useful to understand. SEO is the practice of getting your website discoverable through search engines such as Google and Bing – so that when people are looking for the content that your website provides, they are presented with your website. It’s a huge way of getting website visitors, and SEO is getting more and more important as it also has an impact on any paid advertising that you may do through Google or Bing. SEO is a constantly changing practice, as Google updates their algorithms regularly determining what factors your site should hit in order to score well – so it’s something that you need to consider when running a website.