Quirk's eMarketing Glossary

In search, ranking is used to describe the relative position of a web page in the SERPs.
 

Rating is the process of tagging  information onto each mention about your brand. This includes the media origin, sentiment and credibility amongst other things. This process allows for the automated reporting to take place.

An interpretation of data captured. A ratio can be between counts and ratios or a ratio and a count metric.
 

The number of unique users who’ve viewed an online advertisement.

This is when a site agrees to link to another site providing that the other site links back to it in return.

When an 3rd party site/blog/individual recommend a site, product or service provider to a second individual or company.

The URL of the web page that a user was on before reaching yours. The server's logs capture referral URLs and store them in their log files. Furthermore, if a user used a search engine to find your website, the key phrases they used to find your site will be embedded in the referring URL. Intelligent log analysers can then use this data to track how many visitors originate from each key phrase.

When conducting ORM, marking a mention as Relevant (during the sorting phase) means that it is related to the brand, of interest to yourself and will be included in your statistics.
 

A unique visitor with two or more visits within the time period being analysed.
 

This is the single, quantifiable number, generated by BrandsEye - Quirk’s Online Reputation Management software. It is derived from an algorithm that takes into account all the relevant mentions of a brand and the significance that the user has attached to them. This significance is ascertained through the process of tagging each mention to rank across a number of weighted criteria that include sentiment and credibility. This score provides a benchmark against the brand’s reputation as it fluctuates over time and also allows comparison between a brand and its competitors.

A unique visitor who is not a new visitor to the site.
 

Yield of income from a particular source.
 

Commission structure where the affiliate earns a percentage of a sale.
 

Return on Advertising Spend. Indicates the amount of revenue garnered from each referrer. It is calculated by dividing the total amount of revenue garnered by the total amount of revenue spent on the advertising campaign.

A file written and stored in the root directory of a website that restricts the search engine spiders from indexing certain pages of the website.

See spiders.

A protocol used to indicate to search engine robots which pages should not be indexed.
 

Return on Investment. The ratio of cost to profit. An example of this is advertising spend as a percentage of the revenue that it generates.

A Root Category is essentially a base level category. For example, if you were tracking Google and wanted to compare it to Yahoo! Then both would be Root Categories. Within each root category is a number of sub-categories which contain the actual search phrases.
 

Really Simple Syndication. RSS allows you to receive/ syndicate information without having to constantly open new pages in your browser.

This is how you read your RSS Feeds. These desktop news readers or aggregators display new content from the RSS feeds that you have signed up to. Also known as RSS Aggregator.