Big Traffic Firesale - Digital Marketing Made Simple

Digital marketing is the trade name for every commercial activity that reaches a buyer through a screen, gathered under one heading because the work is bought, delivered and counted through the same few platforms rather than because the activities resemble one another.

SEO is the work of being retrievable and worth retrieving: legible to the systems that crawl, index and select sources, and useful enough at the moment of the query that somebody still opens the page instead of accepting the answer printed above it.

Marketing automation is software that sends a decided message when a contact does a decided thing, which makes it a delivery mechanism for judgements somebody has already formed rather than a way of avoiding them.

Data engineering is the discipline of moving records from the systems that produce them into a store where they can be queried, and of keeping that supply correct while the sources underneath keep changing.

SQL is the declarative language for asking questions of relational databases: you state which rows and columns you want and how tables relate, and the database engine works out how to retrieve them.

ETL is the pattern for moving data from the systems that produce it into the one place it is analysed: extract the records from each source, transform them into a common, cleaned shape, and load them into a warehouse; ELT keeps the same three steps and runs the transformation inside the warehouse after loading.