Marketing Glossary

An A/B test compares two variants (A and B) of something — an ad, a landing page, an email subject line — by randomly showing each to a portion of the audience and measuring which performs better.

AARRR (Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, Revenue) is a framework for organizing growth metrics around the five stages of a customer's relationship with a product.

Acquisition is the stage of the growth funnel focused on getting new users or customers to a product for the first time — the first letter of the [[aarrr-funnel:AARRR framework]].

Activation rate is the percentage of new signups or installs who reach a defined "aha moment" — the first point where they experience the product's core value.

An active user is anyone who performed a defined qualifying action within a specific time window — the exact action and window are set by each product, not standardized industry-wide.

An ad auction is the real-time process a platform runs to decide which ads to show, in what order, at what price, every time there's ad space to fill.

Ad Rank is Google Ads' formula for deciding an ad's position (or whether it shows at all) in the auction, combining bid with quality and expected impact.

Advantage+ is Meta's suite of automated campaign tools that reduce manual targeting and creative decisions in favor of algorithmic optimization.

Anchor text is the clickable, visible text of a hyperlink, used by search engines as a relevance signal for what the linked page is about.

AOV is the average amount spent each time a customer places an order.

ARPPU is the average revenue generated per paying user only, excluding non-paying users from the calculation.

ARPU is the average revenue generated per user over a given period, typically monthly.

Attribution is the process of assigning credit for a conversion to the marketing touchpoints that preceded it.

Attribution models are the rule sets used to distribute conversion credit across multiple marketing touchpoints in a customer's journey.

The attribution window is the time period after someone clicks or views an ad during which a resulting conversion is still credited to that ad.

Audience targeting is the set of criteria (demographics, interests, behaviors, or data-based matches) used to decide who sees an ad.

A backlink is a link from another website pointing to yours, historically one of the strongest ranking signals in Google's algorithm.

Bounce rate is the percentage of sessions where a visitor left without any further interaction beyond the page they landed on.

Break-even ROAS is the minimum return on ad spend needed to cover the cost of goods sold, before any profit is made.

Broad match is a Google Ads keyword setting that shows your ad for searches related to your keyword's meaning, not just its exact wording.

Burn rate is how much cash a company spends beyond what it earns each month; runway is how many months of cash remain at the current burn rate.

CAC is the total cost of acquiring one new customer, calculated as total acquisition spend divided by the number of new customers acquired.

A canonical URL is the version of a page a site tells search engines to treat as the primary, authoritative copy when duplicate or near-duplicate URLs exist.

A CDP unifies known, identified customer data (from a CRM, app, website, and other first-party sources) into a single profile per person; a DMP primarily manages anonymous, cookie-based audience segments for ad targeting.

Churn rate is the percentage of customers (or revenue) lost over a given period, typically measured monthly.

A click is counted each time someone clicks or taps an ad, though platforms differ on exactly what qualifies.

A click-through conversion is credited when someone clicks an ad and then converts within the attribution window.

CM1 is revenue minus the direct variable costs tied to producing and delivering a sale — typically the first layer of profitability below gross revenue.

CM2 is [[contribution-margin-cm1:CM1]] minus additional variable operating costs, most commonly marketing and customer acquisition spend.

COGS is the direct cost of producing or acquiring the products a business sells — materials, manufacturing, and direct labor, but not marketing or overhead.

A cohort is a group of users who share a starting point in time (typically the same signup week or month); cohort analysis tracks how their behavior evolves afterward, compared cohort-to-cohort.

A confidence interval is a range of values that likely contains the true value of a metric, given the uncertainty in a sample-based estimate.

A content cluster is a group of related articles all linking to and from one comprehensive "pillar" page covering a broad topic, forming a structured internal-linking network.

A content gap is a topic or keyword competitors rank for that your site doesn't cover at all, or covers weaker than what's currently ranking.

A conversion is any user action a business defines as valuable enough to track and optimize toward — a purchase, signup, lead, or app install.

Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors or users who complete a defined [[conversion:conversion]] out of the total who had the opportunity to.

Core Web Vitals are Google's standardized set of page-speed and user-experience metrics — currently LCP, INP, and CLS — used as a minor ranking signal.

CPA is the amount spent to generate one conversion — a sale, signup, lead or whatever action a campaign is optimized for.

CPC is the average amount you pay each time someone clicks your ad.

CPI is the amount spent to generate one app install, the primary buying metric for mobile user acquisition.

CPL is the amount spent to generate one lead — typically a form fill, sign-up, or contact submission.

CPM is the cost of 1,000 ad impressions, used to price and compare reach-driven advertising.

CPS is the amount spent to generate one completed sale or purchase — the strictest, most revenue-adjacent cost metric in the CPx family.

CPV is the cost of one counted video view, most commonly used on YouTube and video ad platforms.

Crawl budget is the number of pages a search engine is willing and able to crawl on a given site within a given timeframe.

Crawling is the process by which a search engine's automated bot (a crawler) discovers pages by following links, in order to read and evaluate them for indexing.

Creative fatigue (or ad fatigue) is the decline in an ad's performance over time as the same audience sees it repeatedly.

Creative refresh is the practice of regularly introducing new ad variations to counteract declining performance from [[creative-fatigue:creative fatigue]].

A CRM is software that stores and manages a business's interactions with individual leads and customers, typically owned by sales.

Upselling offers an existing customer a higher-value version of what they have; cross-selling offers a related, complementary product; downselling offers a cheaper alternative when a customer is about to churn or decline.

A CTA is the specific instruction telling someone what to do next — "Shop Now," "Sign Up," "Get Started" — placed in an ad, email, or landing page.

CTR is the percentage of people who saw an ad or link and clicked it.

A custom audience is built from data you already have — a customer list, website visitors, or app users — and uploaded to a platform for targeting or exclusion.

The customer journey is the full sequence of touchpoints and experiences a person has with a brand, from first awareness through purchase and beyond.

CVR is the percentage of visitors, clicks, or users who complete a desired action — usually a purchase, signup, or lead.

DAU, WAU, and MAU count the number of unique users who engaged with a product within a day, week, or month respectively — standard measures of active usage.

Demand Gen is a Google Ads campaign type focused on visually rich ads across YouTube, Discover, and Gmail, aimed at generating demand rather than just capturing existing search intent.

A Display campaign shows visual banner ads across Google's Display Network of partner websites and apps, targeted by audience or context rather than search intent.

Domain Authority is a third-party (Moz) metric estimating how likely a whole domain is to rank, based primarily on its backlink profile.

Duplicate content is identical or near-identical content appearing on multiple URLs; thin content is a page with too little unique value to justify ranking.

E-E-A-T is the framework in Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines describing the qualities raters look for when assessing content and site quality.

EBIT is operating profit — earnings before interest and taxes are subtracted, but after depreciation and amortization are included.

EBITDA is a company's operating profit before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization are subtracted — used to compare core operating performance across companies with different capital structures.

EBITDA margin expresses EBITDA as a percentage of revenue, showing how much of every rupee or dollar of sales converts into core operating earnings.

Engagement rate measures interactions (likes, comments, shares, saves, or GA4 engaged sessions) relative to reach or impressions.

Event tracking is the practice of recording specific user actions (a click, a purchase, a video play) as discrete, named events for analysis, rather than just counting pageviews.

Exact match shows your ad only for searches that mean the same thing as your keyword, with the tightest control of the three match types.

Expansion revenue is additional revenue generated from existing customers — through upsells, cross-sells, seat additions, or usage growth — without acquiring any new customers.

Faceted navigation is a filtering system (common on ecommerce category pages) that generates a distinct URL for nearly every combination of filters — size, color, price, brand.

A featured snippet is a highlighted excerpt shown above standard organic results, pulled directly from a ranking page to answer the query at a glance.

Fixed costs stay roughly the same regardless of sales volume (rent, salaries); variable costs scale directly with volume (materials, per-unit shipping, payment processing fees).

Frequency is the average number of times a unique person saw a given ad over a period, calculated as impressions divided by reach.

A funnel is a defined sequence of steps a user takes toward a goal; funnel analysis measures drop-off at each step to find where users disengage.

Funnel conversion rate measures the percentage of users who move from one specific funnel step to the next.

GEO is the practice of optimizing content to be cited or summarized by AI-generated answers (ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity) rather than just ranked in traditional blue-link search results.

GMV is the total value of goods sold through a platform or marketplace, before deducting the platform's own commission or fees.

Googlebot is the name of Google's web crawler — the automated program that visits and reads pages across the web to build Google's search index.

Gross margin is the percentage of revenue left after subtracting the direct cost of producing or delivering what was sold.

A growth loop is a self-reinforcing cycle where an output of the system (like a new user) becomes an input that generates more of the same output, without requiring continuous new investment.

A holdout test deliberately withholds a marketing activity from a comparable subset of an audience (the control group) to measure its true causal effect against a group that did receive it (the test group).

A hook is the opening moment of an ad — usually the first 1–3 seconds of video — designed to stop someone from scrolling past.

HTTP status codes are the standardized responses a server sends when a page is requested, several of which have direct SEO implications.

HTTPS is the encrypted version of the HTTP protocol, secured via an SSL/TLS certificate, and has been a confirmed (if lightweight) Google ranking signal since 2014.

An impression is counted each time an ad is served and rendered on a screen, regardless of whether anyone noticed or clicked it.

Impression share is the percentage of eligible impressions your ads actually received, out of all impressions they were eligible to receive.

Incremental lift is the measured increase in conversions, revenue, or another outcome directly attributable to [[incrementality:incrementality]] testing, expressed as a percentage or absolute number.

Incrementality measures the additional outcome caused by a marketing activity that would not have happened without it — the true causal effect, isolated from what would have occurred anyway.

Indexing is the process of a search engine analyzing and storing a crawled page so it can be retrieved and shown in search results.

An internal link connects one page on your own site to another, helping both users and search engines navigate and understand your content structure.

A keyword is a word or phrase that represents what people search for, used to guide both SEO content and paid search targeting.

Keyword cannibalization happens when two or more pages on the same site compete for the same keyword, splitting ranking signals and confusing search engines about which page to rank.

Keyword difficulty is a tool-generated score (usually 0–100) estimating how hard it would be to rank on page one for a given keyword.

Landing page views count how many people actually loaded the destination page after clicking an ad — a stricter measure than raw clicks.

LCP, INP, and CLS are the three individual metrics that make up [[core-web-vitals:Core Web Vitals]] — measuring loading speed, interaction responsiveness, and visual stability.

Link equity is the ranking value passed from one page to another through a link, influenced by the linking page's own authority and relevance.

A long-tail keyword is a longer, more specific search phrase with lower individual search volume but typically higher intent and lower competition than a broad, short-tail keyword.

A lookalike audience is a group of new users a platform selects because they resemble an existing audience you provide, such as your best customers.

LTV is the total gross profit a business expects to earn from a customer over the entire relationship.

LTV:CAC compares how much a customer is worth against how much it cost to acquire them, expressed as a ratio.

Marketing automation is software that triggers marketing actions — emails, notifications, ad audience updates — automatically based on user behavior or predefined rules, without manual execution each time.

The meta title and meta description are the page's title and summary snippet, typically shown as the clickable headline and preview text in search results.

Media Mix Modeling is a statistical technique that uses historical spend and outcome data across all channels to estimate each channel's contribution to overall results, independent of individual-level tracking.

Mobile-first indexing means Google predominantly uses the mobile version of a page's content for indexing and ranking, even for searches performed on desktop.

MRR is the predictable monthly revenue from active subscriptions; ARR is that same figure annualized (typically MRR × 12).

A negative keyword tells Google Ads or other search platforms not to show your ad for searches containing that term.

Net margin is the percentage of revenue left as pure profit after every cost, including interest and taxes, has been subtracted.

Noindex is a directive telling search engines not to include a page in search results; nofollow tells them not to pass ranking credit through a specific link.

A North Star Metric is the single metric a company chooses as the clearest proxy for the core value it delivers to customers, used to align teams around one shared goal.

NRR measures revenue retained from an existing customer cohort including expansion and contraction; GRR measures the same but excludes any expansion, capping it at 100%.

Offline conversion tracking uploads data about conversions that happen outside a website or app — a phone sale, an in-store purchase, a sales team closing a deal — back to the ad platform that originally drove the lead.

Operating margin expresses operating profit ([[ebit:EBIT]]) as a percentage of revenue.

OPEX covers the day-to-day costs of running a business that aren't directly tied to producing a specific product — salaries, rent, marketing, software, and admin.

Organic CTR measures the percentage of people who clicked your listing out of everyone who saw it in search results, tracked in Google Search Console.

An orphan page is a page with no internal links pointing to it from anywhere else on the site, making it hard for both users and search engines to discover.

Payback period is the number of months it takes to recover a customer's acquisition cost from the gross profit they generate.

People Also Ask (PAA) is an expandable Google SERP feature showing related questions, which reveals fresh related queries each time a box is expanded.

Performance Max is a Google Ads campaign type that automatically serves ads across Search, Display, YouTube, Gmail, Maps, and Discover from a single campaign.

Phrase match shows your ad for searches that include the meaning of your keyword phrase, in the same word order, plus additional words before or after.

Primary text and headline are the two main copy fields in most ad formats — the longer body copy above the creative, and the short, bold line beneath it.

Product-market fit is the point at which a product satisfies strong market demand well enough that growth becomes meaningfully easier and more organic.

Quality Score is Google Ads' 1–10 diagnostic estimate of your ad, keyword, and landing page relevance compared to other advertisers.

Ranking (or position) is where a page appears in organic search results for a given query — position 1 being the top organic result.

Reach is the number of unique people who saw an ad at least once, as opposed to the total number of times it was shown.

Reactivation (or winback) targets users who went dormant or fully churned, trying to bring them back to active use or a renewed subscription.

Remarketing is Google's term for the same practice most of the industry calls [[retargeting:retargeting]] — advertising to people who already engaged with your brand.

Rendering is the process of executing a page's JavaScript to produce the final HTML content, which search engines must do before they can read JS-dependent content.

Retargeting shows ads to people who already interacted with your brand — visited your site, opened your app, or engaged with previous content.

A retention curve is a graph showing what percentage of an audience is still watching (for video) or still active (for users) at each point over time.

Retention rate measures the percentage of users still active at a given point after their first use, typically checked at Day 1, Day 7, and Day 30 milestones.

Revenue is the total amount of money a business brings in from sales, before any costs are subtracted.

ROAS measures the revenue generated for every unit of currency spent on advertising.

Robots.txt is a file at a site's root that tells well-behaved crawlers which parts of the site they should and shouldn't crawl.

ROI measures the net gain from an investment relative to its cost, expressed as a percentage.

ROMI is ROI applied specifically to marketing spend — the profit generated by marketing activity relative to what was spent on it.

Sample size is the number of users, sessions, or conversions included in a test — and it directly determines how much you can trust the result.

A Search campaign shows text ads on Google's search results page, triggered by keywords matching what someone typed.

Search intent is the underlying goal behind a search query — what the searcher actually wants to accomplish, not just the words they typed.

Search Lost IS shows the percentage of impressions a search campaign missed, split by budget-constrained or rank-constrained causes.

Search volume is an estimate of how many times a keyword or phrase is searched over a given period, typically reported as a monthly average.

Segmentation groups customers by shared traits or behavior; personalization tailors messaging or experience to those segments (or to individuals) rather than sending one message to everyone.

SEO is the practice of improving a website so it ranks higher in organic (unpaid) search results for relevant queries.

The SERP is the page of results a search engine shows after a query — the mix of organic listings, ads, and special features that appears.

A SERP feature is any non-standard result element on a search results page — snippets, carousels, knowledge panels, map packs — beyond the standard organic listing format.

Server-side tracking sends conversion and event data directly from a business's own server to an ad platform, rather than relying solely on a browser-based pixel.

Server-side rendering (SSR) generates a page's full HTML on the server before sending it to the browser; client-side rendering (CSR) sends minimal HTML and builds the page in the browser using JavaScript.

A Shopping campaign shows product listings with image, price, and store name directly in Google search results, driven by a product data feed rather than keywords.

A short-tail keyword (or head term) is a broad, typically one-to-two-word search phrase with high search volume and generally ambiguous or mixed intent.

Signup rate measures the percentage of visitors, installers, or leads who complete account creation — a specific funnel-step conversion rate, not a single universal metric.

An XML sitemap is a file listing a site's important URLs, submitted to search engines to help them discover and prioritize pages for crawling.

Social proof is any signal in an ad or landing page that shows other people already trust, use, or endorse a product — reviews, ratings, follower counts, or visible testimonials.

Statistical significance is a measure of how likely an observed difference between two groups is to be real, rather than a result of random chance.

Structured data is code (typically JSON-LD, following the Schema.org vocabulary) added to a page that explicitly labels its content for search engines — an article, a product, an FAQ, a review.

Take rate is the percentage of [[gmv:GMV]] a marketplace or platform keeps as its own revenue, with the rest passed through to sellers or supply-side partners.

Technical SEO covers the infrastructure work that determines whether search engines can crawl, render, and index a site correctly — separate from content quality or backlinks.

A thumbnail is the static preview image representing a video before it's played, and one of the biggest single drivers of click-through on video platforms.

Thumbstop rate (also called hook rate) measures the percentage of people who stop scrolling and watch the first few seconds of a video ad.

Topical authority is the degree to which search engines treat a site as a trusted, comprehensive source on a specific subject, built through depth and breadth of related content over time.

UGC is content created by real customers or creators, rather than by a brand's in-house team or agency, often used as ad creative.

Unit economics measures the revenue and cost associated with a single unit of the business — usually one customer or one order — to see if the core business model is profitable at all, independent of scale.

URL structure and site architecture describe how a site's pages are organized and named, affecting both crawlability and how clearly topic relationships are communicated.

UTM parameters are tags appended to a URL that tell analytics tools exactly which campaign, source, and medium sent that traffic.

Video completion rate measures the percentage of people who watched a video ad all the way to the end, out of everyone who started it.

A video view is a platform-defined threshold of watch time or interaction that counts as someone having "viewed" a video ad — and the threshold differs by platform.

A view-through conversion is credited when someone converts after simply seeing (not clicking) an ad within the attribution window.

View-through rate measures the percentage of people who watched a video ad relative to how many times it was shown.

The viral coefficient (K-factor) measures how many new users each existing user brings in on average — a K greater than 1 means the user base grows on its own, without paid acquisition.

VTR measures what percentage of people who saw a video ad started watching it, most commonly used for YouTube TrueView campaigns.

Watch time is the total or average amount of time viewers spent watching a video, regardless of whether they finished it.

An API lets two systems exchange data on request; a webhook lets a system push data automatically the instant an event happens; an SDK is a packaged toolkit for building an integration with a specific platform.

Whitelisting (or on TikTok, Spark Ads) is running paid ads directly from a creator's own account, rather than a brand's account, to keep the ad's authenticity and engagement.