Definition

The visible portion of a webpage or email before users have to scroll down. The prime real estate where your most important content lives or dies.

Example Usage

Put the CTA above the fold—nobody's scrolling through your 2,000-word manifesto about why they should click a button.

Origin

Newspaper terminology referring to the fold in a broadsheet paper

Fun Fact

The concept dates to newspaper front pages where above-the-fold stories were visible on newsstands, making them more valuable for attracting readers.

Source: Web design and email marketing terminology

Related Terms

Beginner

Call to Action

A button or phrase designed to make someone do something immediately, like a digital drill sergeant screaming BUY NOW at your eyeballs. The entire internet is just an arms race of increasingly desperate calls to action.

📣 Marketing / Advertising
Intermediate

CPM

Cost Per Mille, meaning cost per thousand impressions, because apparently saying per thousand wasn't pretentious enough so they used Latin. You pay for a thousand eyeballs to theoretically see your ad while actually staring at their phone during a meeting.

📣 Marketing / Advertising
Beginner

Touchpoint

Any interaction a customer has with your brand, from seeing an ad to calling customer service to rage-tweeting about your product. Marketers love counting touchpoints because it makes a seven-touch sale sound strategic instead of exhausting.

📣 Marketing / Advertising
Intermediate

brand architecture

The organizational structure of a company's brands, products, and services—whether they're independent siblings, a parent-child hierarchy, or one big happy endorsed family. It's the family tree that determines who gets what inheritance.

📣 Marketing / Advertising
Intermediate

social listening

Monitoring social media channels for mentions, conversations, and trends related to your brand, competitors, or industry. It's definitely not eavesdropping when it's for business purposes—it's 'market intelligence.'

📣 Marketing / Advertising
Intermediate

lookalike modeling

An algorithmic process that identifies new prospects who share characteristics with your existing customers, based on the bold assumption that people who look similar on paper will buy similar things. Statistical stereotyping, but make it marketing.

📣 Marketing / Advertising

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