your digital dictionary: g-h

Welcome, one and all, to the MARS A-Z of Digital Shopper Marketing. Now, the world of digital is always brimming with new and confusing terminology, and it can be difficult to stay up-to-date. Our weekly glossary will keep you right on top of the key terms that you need to

know, and this week we cover the big, bad digi-buzzwords beginning with G-H…

The compatibility of a website with newer browsers and older browsers. It also applies to ensuring that if one small part of the site doesn’t work on a browser, the whole site doesn’t crash, too.

Graceful Degradation

Graphics Interchange Format. A GIF is an 8-bit-per-pixel bitmap image format using a palette of up to 256 distinct colors. GIFs allow images to be reduced without degrading their quality.

GIF

A Geographic Information Systems image. An information type that bridges the gap between physical terrain and a fully integrated digital map of the chosen area - a digital overlay to a satellite image.

GIS Image

Also known as geo-locating. It is used to allow you to see where your visitors come from and to give them specific information that is relevant to them based on their location.

Geo-targeting

A hit (digital, not physical) is often mistaken for a measure of popularity, but it is a request from a user’s browser/server to view a certain page, file or image.

Hit

A data visualization tool that shows levels of activity on a web page in different colors. Reds and yellows show the areas of the most activity, and blues and violets show the least.

Heat Mapping

Keywords are the same color as the page’s background, so they are invisible. Search engines aren’t fooled by this sneaky technique, though, and sites are penalized for it.

Hidden Text

The term hard bounce describes an e-mail communication failure or“bounce” due to an undeviating reason like a non-existent address, for example.

Hard Bounce

A hyperlink is a reference or navigation element in a document, usually like this, to another section of the same document or to another document that may be on or part of a (different) domain, i.e., a URL for a website.

Hyperlink

Hypertext Markup Language. This is the “language” read by web browsers. Certain HTML “tags” are used to structure information and features within a web page. HTML e-mails usually contain graphics.

HTML

Hypertext Transfer Protocol is a communications protocol for the transfer of information on the Internet. It provides a way for us to publish and retrieve URLs or hypertext pages over the Internet.

HTTP

An Internet hosting service or “host,” is a service that runs Internet servers, allowing us to offer our content to the Internet. There are various levels of service and various kinds of services offered.

Host