Quirk's eMarketing Glossary

The process of analyzing large amounts of data for patterns. This process can be used to predict buying habits, credit card purchases and cross sale capabilities.

In Email Marketing, the database is the list of prospects to whom emails are sent and can contain additional pertinent information.

A link to a page that no longer exists. Search engine spiders check these types of links and eventually eliminate them from search engine results. Also see Link Rot.

Deep linking exists when a user clicks on a link and is taken to a page that is not the homepage, but another page that exists within the site's structure. The landing page where the user is taken to is usually one that is not easily found within the site.

The term used by Jeff Jarvis when his Dell computer malfunctioned and he had a hard time getting appropriate customer service.
 

Like a systems administrator, the Desktop Support team manage technical errors from broken printers to network glitches.

The automated process of sorting traffic depending on the device used for access.

Available in electronic form; able to be manipulated and read by a computer.
 

Marketing methods, such as mobile, which directly reaches the individual in the target audience.

Directory websites provide an ordered listing of registered websites in different categories. They are similar to an e-version of Yellow Pages. Yahoo! and Excite are the best known examples of directories.

An alphabetical or classified listing of websites, blogs, products and services and other data for a particular industry i.e. eMarketing directory of suppliers.

Domain Name System. DNS resolves a domain name into an IP address.
 

Document Object Model. A web standards approach to representing HTML and XML documents as objects.
 

The name of a server that distinguishes it from other systems on the World Wide Web. Quirk's domain name is quirk.biz.

An email authentication system designed to verify the DNS domain of an email sender and the message integrity.
 

These are specially assembled pages that feature keywords for particular product searches. These often redirect visitors to a home page.

Disk Operating System. A disk manager and program that allows the user to interact with the computer and supervise and control the running of programmes.
 

Denial of Service Attack is an activity where millions of computers attempt to repeatedly contact a single computer (victim). Due to the volume of activity the victim's computer is unable to cope and subsequently crashes..
 

An enterprise that only conducts business online. These enterprises do not have physical stores - the products/services they offer are only sold online. Compare Clicks and Mortar.

The act of getting subscribers to confirm their initial subscription via a follow up email asking them to validate their address and hence opt-in again.  

Transferring files from one computer to another. When you are online you are downloading files from a website server to your PC.

In paid search advertising, this allows keywords used in searches to be inserted into advert copy.
 

The elements of a URL that are dynamically generated.
 

Content such as text, image and form fields on a web page that change according to each user's needs and information.