Digital Marketing Foundation for Beginners

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 quality is the degree to which a dataset is fit for the purpose it is used for, assessed along named dimensions, whether the records are complete, unique, consistent, timely, valid and accurate, and measured against the requirements of the decision the data supports rather than against an absolute standard.

Data modelling is the design of how data is structured for a given use: which entities are recorded, which attributes describe them, how the tables relate through keys, and, for analytical use, which table holds the measurements and which hold the context, decided before the data is loaded so that the questions the model must answer run correctly and fast.

Hypothesis testing is the statistical procedure for deciding whether an observed difference, between two groups, two periods or a sample and a claimed value, is larger than chance variation would produce if there were no real difference, by computing how probable a result at least that extreme would be under that assumption.