What Is Digital Marketing?

The American Marketing Association defines marketing as the activity, set of institutions and processes for creating, communicating, delivering and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners and society at large. Digital marketing is the same thing, limited to digital channels.

Digital marketing and online marketing are mostly used as synonyms. Those who separate them treat digital marketing as slightly broader, because it also covers channels that do not run through a browser, such as apps.

What sets it apart from traditional marketing is measurement. Whoever places an ad in a newspaper does not learn who read it. With an ad in Google Search, the platform counts impressions and clicks and, if tracking is set up, conversions too. That measurement has limits, covered further down.

Digital marketing is made up of channels that each have their own entry in this glossary. This section sums up what each one contributes.

- SEO improves visibility in the unpaid results of search engines. - SEA, usually through Google Ads, buys ad placements in search results; together with SEO it makes up SEM. - Content marketing produces the articles, videos and guides that are then spread through search, social networks and email. - Email marketing reaches contacts who have given consent, with no platform in between. - Social media marketing uses social networks, with the brand's own posts and with paid ads. - Affiliate marketing pays partners only for the sales, leads or clicks they bring in. - Retargeting shows ads to people who have already visited a website. - Web analytics measures what visitors do on the site and connects the channels to the outcome.

The channels rarely work alone. A content marketing article ranks through SEO, gets shared on social networks and goes out in the newsletter. Someone who visits the page without buying later sees a retargeting ad. Inbound marketing is a methodology that combines several of these channels to attract customers with content instead of interrupting them with ads.

Audiences are online. According to Eurostat, in 2025 93.8% of people aged 16 to 74 in the EU had used the internet in the previous three months, and 62.4% had bought something online in that time.

Ad budgets have followed. IAB Europe puts digital advertising spend across 30 European markets at 131 billion euros for 2025, up 10.5% on the year before. Even so, Eurostat found that in 2024 only 32.6% of EU enterprises with ten or more employees paid to advertise on the internet.

Measurement has legal and technical limits. Under Article 5(3) of the ePrivacy Directive 2002/58/EC, storing or reading information on a user's device, for example through cookies, generally requires that user's consent. Anyone who declines is missing from reports that rely on cookies. For marketing email, Article 13 of the same directive generally requires prior consent. On top of that, each ad platform only measures what happens on its own turf, so Google Ads and a social network can each claim the same sale. Data-driven attribution in Google Analytics therefore splits the credit for a conversion across touchpoints, based on the account's own data.

• Set the goal and the metric first, then choose the channels.
• Choose channels by where the audience is: people already searching come through search; people who do not yet see the problem are more likely reached through content and social networks.
• Define conversions once and measure them the same way in every channel.
• Collect and document consent for cookies and for marketing email.
• Check the numbers reported by ad platforms against your own analytics and against sales recorded in the shop or CRM.
• Plan paid and organic channels together: SEA returns search-term data quickly, SEO builds visibility with no cost per click.

• Equating digital marketing with a single channel, such as social media or Google Ads.
• Adding up the results each platform reports and counting the same sale several times.
• Reporting reach and clicks as results when the goal was sales or leads.
• Setting cookies or sending newsletters without consent.
• Posting the same content unchanged in every channel instead of adapting it to format and audience.
• Funding only what is easy to measure and cutting channels with indirect effects as a result.