Zero Cost Marketing Strategies: Official Primer Course (NEW)

Pay-per-click is advertising bought by the click rather than by the impression: an advertiser bids on the searches or placements it wants to appear for, and pays only when someone clicks the ad, with each click priced by an auction run at the moment the page loads.

Keyword research is the work of finding out which queries people type when they want what a business offers, how many of them there are, what each query means and what competing for it costs, before any page is written or any ad is bought.

Conversion rate optimisation is the practice of raising the share of visitors who complete the action a page exists for, a purchase, a sign-up, an enquiry, by changing the page and the path to it on evidence rather than opinion.

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.

A data warehouse is a database built for analysis rather than for running the business: it holds copies of records from many operational systems, integrated under one set of definitions, kept as history rather than overwritten, and arranged so that questions across years and departments run fast.