I come from an era where DM's had nothing to do with direct marketing and I often find myself in long meetings wondering what a wide range of digital agency acronym's actually mean. If we're not deciding on KPI's then we're worried about CRM or how much to spend on PPC. I've been in the online world for long enough to really know better, but it often feels like they are made up on the spot to confuse clients and the meanings differ wildly from agency to agency.
It's quite tricky not to look like a bit of a plum when you have to stop a meeting and ask what something means that seemingly everyone else knows in the room. It's like forgetting someone's name who you've met before – the longer the conversation goes on the worse it gets and the harder it is to ask the question.
I did a bit of a Google search and to help you out, as stolen from this site, here's a list of 60 common digital agency acronyms ... feel free to mail me any ones I've missed off or make up any ones I can use in meetings to sound clever.
AIDA: Attention/Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action
ASP: Application Service Provider
API: Application Programming Interface
B2B: Business-to-Business
B2C: Business-to-Consumer
BANT: Budget, Authority, Need, Timeline
BR: Bounce Rate
CAC: Customer Acquisition Cost
CAN-SPAM: Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing
CASL: Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation
CLV: Customer Lifetime Value (See LTV)
CLTV: Customer Lifetime Value (See LTV)
CMO: Chief Marketing Officer
CMS: Content Management System
CoCA: Cost of Customer Acquisition (See CAC)
COS: Content Optimization System
CPA: Cost-per-Action
CPC: Cost-per-Click (See PPC)
CPL: Cost-per-Lead
CR: Conversion Rate
CRM: Customer Relationship Management
CRO: Conversion Rate Optimization
CSS: Cascading Style Sheets
CTA: Call-to-Action
CTR: Clickthrough Rate
CX: Customer Experience (See UX)
DM: Direct Mail, or Direct Message (Twitter)
DNS: Domain Name Server
FB: Facebook
FF: Follow Friday
GA: Google Analytics
HTML: Hyper-Text Markup Language
IP Address: Internet Protocol Address
ISP: Internet Service Provider
KPI: Key Performance Indicator
LTV: Lifetime Value
LTV:CAC: Ratio of Lifetime Value to Customer Acquisition Cost
MoM: Month-over-Month
MTD: Month-to-Date
MRR: Monthly Recurring Revenue
NPS: Net Promoter Score
PPC: Pay-per-Click
PV: Page View
QoQ: Quarter-over-Quarter
QR Code: Quick Response Barcode
QTD: Quarter-to-Date
ROI: Return On Investment
RSS: Rich Site Summary
RT: Retweet
SaaS: Software-as-a-Service
SEO: Search Engine Optimization
SLA: Service Level Agreement
SMB: Small-to-Medium Business
UI: User Interface
URL: Uniform Resource Locator
UV: Unique Visitor
UX: User Experience
WOM: Word-of-Mouth.
YoY: Year-over-Year
YTD: Year-to-Date