Glossary

CACMetrics

What it costs to acquire one paying customer: every marketing cost divided by new customers.

Counted from the ad account alone it lands about half the real figure. Salaries, contractors and tools are acquisition costs too.

LTVMetrics

How much a customer brings over the whole relationship, not on the first order.

A business with double the LTV can pay double per click and still profit. That is the real advantage in an auction, not a better creative.

LTV/CACMetrics

Customer value divided by the cost of acquiring them.

Below 1 every new customer costs more than they bring. Below 3 you can grow, but with no margin for a mistake.

ROASMetrics

Revenue returned per unit of ad spend.

A 4x ROAS sounds fine until you add margin. At 20% margin it is a loss. Never read ROAS without the margin next to it.

ROIMetrics

Profit minus cost, divided by cost.

Unlike ROAS it counts profit rather than revenue, which makes it honest and almost always smaller than expected.

Cost per leadMetrics

What one enquiry costs you.

The easiest metric to fool yourself with. Cheap leads usually mean the wrong audience, and sales will feel it before marketing does.

Cost per acquisitionMetrics

Cost of one target action: a request, a signup, a purchase.

Before comparing CPA across channels, check the action is the same in both. It usually is not.

Cost per clickMetrics

The price of one click.

A click price is neither good nor bad on its own. An expensive click converting at 8% is cheaper than a cheap one converting at 0.5%.

CPMMetrics

Cost of a thousand impressions.

CPM rising with no setting changed means the auction got more expensive: usually seasonality or a new competitor with a bigger budget.

CTRMetrics

Share of people who clicked out of those who saw.

High CTR with low conversion means the ad promises something the landing page does not deliver.

Conversion rateMetrics

Share of visitors who take the target action.

One point of conversion is often cheaper than 20% more traffic, and it works on all traffic at once rather than only the new part.

Average order valueMetrics

Revenue divided by number of orders.

The fastest lever available. Raising the order value by 10% is usually easier than finding 10% more customers, and the effect is identical.

Gross marginMetrics

What is left of revenue after the cost of goods.

It sets the ceiling on your ad budget. At 25% margin you physically cannot pay more than a quarter of the order to acquire it.

RetentionMetrics

Share of customers who come back for the next purchase.

Five points of retention usually beats any ad optimisation, because it works on the whole base rather than on new arrivals.

ChurnMetrics

Share of customers who left over a period.

At 10% monthly churn the average customer lasts ten months. That is your maximum payback horizon, whether you planned for it or not.

Payback periodMetrics

How long a customer takes to repay the cost of acquiring them.

It decides how much cash you must hold. Six-month payback means financing six months of growth in advance.

ARPUMetrics

Average revenue per user for a period.

Shows whether you grow deeper or only wider. A growing base with falling ARPU means you are attracting the wrong people.

Share of voiceMetrics

Your share of category mentions or impressions.

Long term, market share follows share of voice. If your voice is smaller than your share, you are giving the market away quietly.

IncrementalityMetrics

Sales a channel delivered beyond what would have happened anyway.

Retargeting often shows excellent attribution and near-zero incrementality: it claims buyers who were returning regardless.

AttributionMetrics

The rule that assigns a sale to a channel.

Change the model and the winners change while the sales stay the same. Compare channels inside one model or not at all.

AuctionAdvertising

The mechanism deciding whose ad appears each time.

You compete on bid multiplied by quality, not on bid. That is why cheaper advertising often belongs to whoever built the better landing page.

Quality scoreAdvertising

A rating of how relevant the ad, keyword and landing page are to each other.

One point of quality score moves click price more than most bid adjustments, and it costs nothing to earn.

Ad rankAdvertising

Auction position: bid times quality plus expected effect of extensions.

It explains why a competitor with a lower bid sits above you. That is arithmetic, not a conspiracy by the platform.

Lost impression shareAdvertising

Impressions you did not get, due to budget or due to rank.

Splitting those two causes matters. Budget losses are cured with money, rank losses only with quality.

Look-alike audienceAdvertising

An audience resembling your source list by behaviour.

Quality depends entirely on the seed. A look-alike built from all visitors is close to random; one built from payers is a different tool.

RetargetingAdvertising

Showing ads to people who already visited.

The best numbers in the dashboard and the most disputed value. Some of those people were returning anyway. Only a holdout settles it.

Holdout groupAdvertising

A slice of the audience deliberately kept ad-free for comparison.

The only way to learn a channel’s true contribution. It costs a few forgone sales and saves much larger budget mistakes.

FrequencyAdvertising

How many times one person saw the ad on average.

Past three or four exposures a week you stop building recognition and start building irritation, and CTR falls on the same budget.

Creative fatigueAdvertising

An ad losing effect because people have already seen it.

Visible as CTR falling while CPM rises. Cured by a new creative, not by a higher bid.

Learning periodAdvertising

The time an algorithm needs to gather enough conversions to optimise.

Edits during learning reset it. The most expensive habit in paid media is tweaking a campaign on day three.

Negative keywordsAdvertising

Queries you forbid the ad from appearing on.

Without them search campaigns can lose a third of the budget to “free”, “DIY” and competitor names.

Broad matchAdvertising

A match type where the system decides which queries are close enough.

It buys volume and eats budget at the same time. Safe only with a well-built negative list and working conversion tracking.

Landing pageAdvertising

The page an ad sends people to.

The cheapest place to improve. One message, one action, and a headline that matches the ad beats a week of bid tuning.

Performance MaxAdvertising

A Google campaign that spreads budget across all placements itself.

It trades control for volume. Without excluding brand queries it claims sales that would have happened anyway.

IndexingSEO and AEO

A page entering the search engine’s database.

A page can be crawled and still not indexed. Confusing the two is the usual reason behind “we did everything and there is no traffic”.

Crawl budgetSEO and AEO

How many pages a bot is willing to fetch per visit.

Spent on redirects, duplicates and empty filters. On a large store it is why new products take weeks to appear.

Canonical URLSEO and AEO

The tag naming which of several identical pages is the main one.

The quietest expensive mistake: pages compete with each other while from outside it just looks like “not ranking”.

SitemapSEO and AEO

A file listing the addresses worth crawling.

For a new domain with no inbound links it is almost the only way to be found. Without it crawling starts weeks later.

robots.txtSEO and AEO

The file controlling crawler access to parts of the site.

A single Disallow line removes the site from search entirely. It usually arrives from the staging server along with a release.

Structured dataSEO and AEO

Markup that tells a machine what is actually on the page.

It produces rich results and is what lets language models cite you. Without it a page is just text to a machine.

AEOSEO and AEO

Optimising for AI answers rather than for ten blue links.

A model cites what it can read and what others reference. A site with no direct answers and no outside mentions does not exist to it.

E-E-A-TSEO and AEO

Experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust: Google’s quality criteria.

The cheapest step is signing material with real people and their role. Anonymous text loses to signed text at equal quality.

Keyword researchSEO and AEO

The set of queries a site is built around.

The most expensive place to be wrong. A year spent on queries nobody buys from looks like traffic growth and zero revenue.

SERPSEO and AEO

The search results page.

Position one no longer means top of screen. Answer boxes, maps and ads push organic below the fold on many queries.

SnippetSEO and AEO

The fragment of your page shown in results.

It is an ad you do not pay for. Title and description decide whether the click goes to you or to the identical position next door.

CannibalisationSEO and AEO

Several of your pages competing for one query.

Instead of one strong page you get three weak ones. Cured by merging, not by writing a fourth.

BacklinkSEO and AEO

A link to you from somebody else’s site.

Still the strongest external signal. For a new domain the first few links change crawl speed more than any on-page work.

Internal linkingSEO and AEO

Links between your own pages.

A free way to send weight where you want it. A page with no internal links pointing at it reads as secondary to a crawler.

Local SEOSEO and AEO

Optimising for queries tied to a city or district.

For a clinic, salon or cafe it is the shortest path to enquiries: narrower competition and much higher intent to buy.

Core Web VitalsSEO and AEO

A set of page speed and stability metrics.

They affect ranking less than people assume and conversion more than people measure.

ReachSocial

How many unique people saw the post.

Organic reach has fallen for years on every platform. Planning growth on it means planning on somebody else’s asset.

EngagementSocial

Reactions, comments, saves and shares relative to reach.

Platforms value saves and shares above likes, because those show usefulness rather than politeness.

User generated contentSocial

Content created by the customers themselves.

It answers the main objection in online selling: how this looks in real life. Often outperforms studio work and costs less.

HookSocial

The first seconds of a video or the first line of a post.

The decision to keep watching happens in one or two seconds. No amount of editing rescues a weak hook.

Community managementSocial

Working with the audience in comments and direct messages.

Reply speed in DMs often decides the sale more than the content does. This is sales, not support.

Tone of voiceSocial

The manner in which a brand speaks.

The cheapest part of branding and the most visible: it is heard in every message, while the logo is seen once.

Content calendarSocial

A schedule of posts with topics and formats.

Its real value is not discipline but visibility of imbalance: when eighteen of twenty posts turn out to be selling.

Influencer marketingSocial

Promotion through people with their own audience.

Micro-creators with ten thousand followers usually deliver a cheaper action than large accounts, because the trust is still personal.

Content strategyContent

Deciding who you write for, about what, and why.

Without it you get what most sites have: many pieces addressed to nobody in particular.

Content briefContent

A spec for a piece: query, intent, structure, sources.

The difference between briefed and unbriefed writing shows up in an editor’s first hour, not in analytics a month later.

Search intentContent

What the person actually wants when typing a query.

An overview article never ranks for a commercial query, however much you polish it. Intent first, text second.

Content auditContent

Reviewing every piece: what works, what to update, what to delete.

Merging two weak articles into one strong page usually returns more than writing a third.

Content refreshContent

Updating an old article instead of writing a new one.

The cheapest traffic growth available. The page already has weight, it only lacks freshness.

Pillar and clusterContent

A large anchor page with narrower pieces around it.

Shows search that you cover a topic fully rather than having written one piece at random.

Lead magnetContent

A useful asset or tool exchanged for a contact.

It only works when the value arrives immediately. A checklist you still have to fill in collects addresses, not trust.

Case studyContent

A breakdown of real work with before and after numbers.

The only format that sells without promising. A case with no numbers is a testimonial wearing a costume.

DeliverabilityEmail

Share of emails landing in the inbox rather than spam.

The gap between “sent” and “delivered” can be several times over, and your sending platform report does not show it.

SPFEmail

A record listing which servers may send mail for your domain.

Without it major mailbox providers score your message down before anyone reads a word of it.

DKIMEmail

A cryptographic signature on the message.

It proves the message was not altered in transit. With SPF it is the minimum before any campaign should be sent.

DMARCEmail

The policy stating what to do with mail failing the checks.

The usual failure is alignment: SPF and DKIM pass, the domains in them do not match, and the policy fires anyway.

Open rateEmail

Share of emails opened.

Since mailbox privacy protection it is inflated and nearly useless for comparison. Read clicks instead.

Domain warm-upEmail

Gradually raising volume from a new sending domain.

Sending ten thousand messages from a week-old domain is the shortest route to permanent spam placement.

SegmentationEmail

Splitting a list into groups by behaviour or attributes.

One blast to everyone damages deliverability: inactive subscribers pull your domain reputation down for the rest.

Email sequenceEmail

An automated series triggered by an action.

A welcome sequence typically outperforms every manual campaign in a month, and it runs without you.

ReactivationEmail

Trying to win back subscribers who stopped opening.

Cheaper than acquiring new ones. Those you cannot win back should be unsubscribed: they cost you reputation.

GA4Analytics

The current version of Google Analytics, built on events.

Data arrives with a delay and never matches the ad dashboard. That is normal: the attribution models differ.

Search ConsoleAnalytics

Google’s tool with data about your site in search.

The only place with real queries and positions. It reports two or three days behind, so “today” never exists there.

UTM tagsAnalytics

URL parameters telling analytics where a visit came from.

Without one naming rule, six months later your report shows facebook, Facebook and fb as three separate channels.

End-to-end analyticsAnalytics

Ads, leads and closed deals connected in one place.

Until it exists, every budget decision is a guess. It should be installed before the first dollar of ad spend, not after.

Cohort analysisAnalytics

Comparing groups of customers by the month they arrived.

Shows what averages hide: that May customers behave nothing like March customers.

A/B testAnalytics

Comparing two versions on randomly split traffic.

A test with no power calculation answers nothing. “No difference” may simply mean the sample was never large enough.

Statistical significanceAnalytics

The probability that a difference is not chance.

Stopping a test the moment it turns significant is the most common way to produce a result that was never there.

HeatmapAnalytics

A visualisation of clicks and scrolling on a page.

It shows where people stop, never why. Hypotheses from it need testing, not immediate implementation.

CROWebsite

Work on raising conversion from the traffic you already have.

Cheaper than buying traffic and it compounds: the improvement applies to every future visitor.

Above the foldWebsite

What is visible without scrolling.

This is where the rest of the site is accepted or refused. One message and one action beat six bullet points.

Call to actionWebsite

The button or link leading to the target action.

Wording from the visitor’s side and from the outcome (“Show my estimate”) usually beats a faceless “Submit”.

Lead formWebsite

The way somebody leaves their contact.

Every extra field lowers the number of submissions. Ask for what you need to reply, find out the rest in the conversation.

Mobile layoutWebsite

How the site looks on a phone.

Most traffic arrives on phones, and most checking is done on a large screen. That gap explains most broken layouts.

Time to first byteWebsite

How long the server thinks before answering.

It poisons every speed metric at once and cannot be fixed by compressing images. It is a hosting and caching question.

Client-side renderingWebsite

The page is drawn by a script inside the browser.

A crawler arrives, sees an empty shell and leaves. For a new site with no links, that is the difference between existing in search and not.

Progressive enhancementWebsite

Building so the page works without scripts, which only add convenience.

It protects against the dumbest scenario: one JavaScript error turning the whole site into a white screen.

PositioningBrand

The place you occupy in a customer’s head relative to alternatives.

If you do not define it, the customer will, and almost always as “same as the others, but pricier”.

Value propositionBrand

One sentence on who you help and with what.

Test it simply: if it fits a competitor’s site unchanged, it says nothing at all.

Brand awarenessBrand

Share of the audience that knows the brand.

It grows slowly and decays slowly, which is why brand is an asset that accumulates rather than a monthly expense.

Brand bookBrand

The document with rules for using the identity.

Its value is not beauty. It is that any contractor produces something consistent without you in the room.

Visual identityBrand

The system of logo, colour, type and grid.

Consistency matters more than originality: people recognise what repeats, not what is clever.

RebrandBrand

Changing how the company presents itself.

The expensive mistake is doing it instead of fixing the product. A new logo does not cure a bad service.

CRMAutomation

The system tracking customers and deals.

Without it marketing sees leads but not money, and optimises the wrong thing. It is the usual reason two reports disagree.

Sales funnelAutomation

The sequence of states from first touch to closed deal.

Useful not as a diagram but as a place to measure. Without stage-to-stage rates you cannot see where the money leaks.

Lead scoringAutomation

Rating how ready an enquiry is to buy.

It lets sales call the closest to a decision first. Even a three-signal system changes conversion measurably.

TriggerAutomation

An event that launches an automatic action.

An abandoned cart email outperforms any scheduled campaign, because it arrives at the moment of interest.

ChatbotAutomation

An automated responder on the site or in a messenger.

Good on repetitive questions and damaging on complex ones. The critical part is a fast exit to a human.

WebhookAutomation

One system notifying another about an event automatically.

It puts a lead into the CRM and the messenger within a second. Every hour of delay measurably lowers the chance of reaching them.

IntegrationAutomation

A connection letting two systems exchange data without a person.

Manual transfer is not just expensive. It quietly loses part of the enquiries, and only a reconciliation reveals it.

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