Marketing terms, actually explained.

Contribution margin is what remains from a sale after subtracting every variable cost of fulfilling it: cost of goods, shipping, payment processing, discounts and returns.

CAC is the total cost of acquiring a new customer (advertising, salaries, tools and agency fees) divided by the number of new customers acquired in that period.

LTV is the total contribution margin a customer generates across their entire relationship with your business, not the total revenue they produce.

AOV is total revenue divided by total number of orders over a given period: the average amount a customer spends per transaction.

CAC payback period is the number of months a customer takes to generate enough contribution to repay what it cost to acquire them.

Vacancy cost is the total cost of a unit standing empty between tenants: lost rent for the vacant period plus turnover work, re-leasing fees, marketing spend and any discount needed to fill it.

Marginal CAC is the cost of acquiring one additional customer at your current spend level (the change in spend divided by the change in customers between two points), as opposed to average (blended) CAC, which is total spend divided by total customers.

CPA is the cost to generate one conversion within a specific channel or campaign (ad spend divided by conversions). It's narrower in scope than blended CAC, which includes every acquisition cost across the whole business.

A/B testing is a method of comparing two versions of a page, email or ad (a control and a variant differing in one changed element) by showing each to a separate group and measuring which produces a better result on a predefined metric.

ROAS is the revenue an advertising platform attributes to itself divided by the amount you spent on that platform.

Product feed optimization is the practice of improving the structured product data file that powers Shopping campaigns, Advantage+ catalog ads, and other catalog-driven advertising.

Brand search is search traffic where the query contains your company or product name: people who are already looking specifically for you.

Cost per lead is total lead-generation spend divided by the number of leads generated in that period. It's the cost of getting someone to raise a hand, not the cost of getting them to buy.

Performance Max is a Google Ads campaign type that spends a single budget across Search, Shopping, YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail and Maps, with placement and bidding decided by automation, not the advertiser.

The learning phase is the period after a campaign or ad set is created or significantly edited, during which the platform's delivery algorithm is still calibrating and performance is unstable and usually worse than it will settle at.

CTR is the percentage of people who saw an ad or link and clicked it: clicks divided by impressions, multiplied by 100.

Cost per click (CPC) is the average amount you pay each time someone clicks your ad, calculated as total ad spend divided by total clicks.

SEM, or search engine marketing, is promoting a website in search results through paid ads, such as Google Ads and Microsoft Ads. Some people use the term to include SEO as well.

PPC, or pay-per-click, is an advertising model where you pay a fee each time someone clicks your ad, most commonly on search engines and social platforms.

CPM, or cost per mille, is what an advertiser pays for every 1,000 times an ad is shown. Mille is Latin for thousand.

Affiliate marketing is a performance-based arrangement where a business pays a third party (the affiliate) a commission for sales or leads the affiliate refers, typically tracked through a unique link or code.

Influencer marketing is paying or otherwise compensating an individual with an engaged audience to promote a product or brand to that audience, leveraging the trust and attention they've already built, instead of a brand's own channels.

Programmatic advertising is the automated, algorithmic buying and placement of digital ad inventory in real time, typically through an auction that happens in the milliseconds it takes a webpage to load, instead of ad space being bought and sold through direct, manually-negotiated deals.

Retargeting, also called remarketing, is showing ads specifically to people who have already visited a website, engaged with an app, or interacted with a brand. It re-engages a warm audience instead of reaching new prospects.

MER is total company revenue divided by total advertising spend across every channel, measured from your own sales system, not from any ad platform.

Incrementality is the share of conversions that occurred because of your advertising, as opposed to conversions that would have happened anyway.

An attribution window is the period following an ad interaction during which a resulting conversion will be credited to that ad.

Server-side tracking sends conversion events from your own server directly to advertising platforms, instead of relying on a JavaScript pixel in the visitor's browser.

First-party data is information you collect directly from your own customers and audience through your own properties: purchases, site behavior, email engagement and stated preferences.

A geo holdout test measures advertising's true causal effect by withholding it entirely in a set of geographic regions and comparing total outcomes against matched regions where it continues to run.

Consent Mode is a Google framework that adjusts how tags behave according to a user's consent choices, sending cookieless signals when consent is denied and modeling the resulting gap in conversion data.

Share of Search is your brand's search volume as a percentage of total search volume across all named competitors in your category. It's a relative, category-normalized metric, not a standalone measure of how much people search your brand.

The winner's curse is the tendency for a test's reported lift to overstate the true, permanent lift once the change ships. That's because the variant that "won" was selected partly for its real effect and partly for random noise that happened to run in its favor during the test window.

K-factor, or viral coefficient, is the average number of new users each existing user brings in through invites. It's calculated as invites sent per user multiplied by the share of those invites that convert into new signups.

UTM parameters are five standardized tags added to a URL (source, medium, campaign, term and content) that tell an analytics platform exactly where a visit came from, instead of relying on the platform's own, often coarser, default attribution.

Bounce rate is the percentage of sessions in which a visitor viewed a single page and left without any further interaction: no additional page view, click or tracked engagement event.

GA4, or Google Analytics 4, is Google's current web and app analytics platform. It records user actions as events and reports on traffic, engagement and conversions.

A KPI, or key performance indicator, is a measurable value that shows how well a business, team or campaign is progressing toward a specific goal.

Engagement rate is the share of people who interact with a piece of content, such as liking, commenting, sharing, clicking or spending meaningful time on it, out of everyone who saw it or could have.

Marketing automation is the use of software to trigger marketing actions (emails, ads, workflow steps) automatically based on a user's behavior, a time trigger or a defined condition, instead of requiring manual execution for each instance.

E-E-A-T is the framework in Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines for assessing content quality across four dimensions: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.

GEO is the practice of structuring content so AI-powered search engines cite it as a source when generating answers.

AEO is the practice of shaping content so search engines, voice assistants and AI tools can lift it as a direct answer to a question.

Schema markup is structured data added to a page, usually as JSON-LD, that describes what the content means in a vocabulary search engines understand.

YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) is Google's classification for topics that could significantly affect a person's health, financial stability, safety or well-being, and which are therefore held to a substantially higher quality standard.

A topic cluster is a content structure consisting of one comprehensive pillar page on a broad subject, supported by multiple focused pages on subtopics, all connected through deliberate internal linking.

A backlink is a link from another website to yours. Search engines treat good backlinks as signs that other sites trust and recommend your content.

A meta description is an HTML tag that summarizes a page in a sentence or two. Search engines may show it under the page title in search results.

Local SEO is the work of helping a business appear in search results for nearby customers, especially in Google Maps and the map pack shown for local searches.

On-page SEO is the work of improving the content and HTML of a page itself, like its title, headings, text, links and markup, so search engines understand it and rank it for the right searches.

Domain Authority is a 1 to 100 score created by the SEO software company Moz to estimate how likely a website is to rank, based mostly on the links pointing to it.

Technical SEO is the work of making a website easy for search engines to crawl, render, understand and index, covering things like site speed, structure, redirects and structured data.

A Google Business Profile is a free listing from Google that shows a business's name, location, hours, reviews, photos and more in Google Search and Google Maps.

SEO, or search engine optimization, is the work of improving a website so it shows up higher in unpaid search results for the searches its customers make.

A sitemap is a file, usually in XML format, that lists the pages on a website you want search engines to find and index.

Robots.txt is a plain text file at the root of a website that tells search engine crawlers and other bots which pages or sections they shouldn't crawl.

Alt text is a short written description of an image, added in the image's alt attribute, that screen readers read aloud and search engines use to understand what the image shows.

A SERP, or search engine results page, is the page a search engine like Google shows after someone searches, listing ads, organic results and other features for that query.

Long-tail keywords are specific, usually longer search phrases that each get relatively few searches but show clearer intent, such as 'emergency plumber open now in Austin' instead of 'plumber'.

Churn rate is the percentage of customers, or of recurring revenue, lost during a given period.

Repeat purchase rate is the percentage of customers who have placed more than one order, measured over a defined window.

Activation rate is the percentage of new users or customers who reach the specific moment where your product first delivers its core value, within a defined time window.

A win-back campaign is a marketing sequence aimed at customers who have already stopped buying or subscribing, intended to bring them back after the relationship has lapsed.

Cohort analysis groups customers by when they first joined and tracks each group's behavior over the following periods, so retention and revenue are read per group, not as a single blended total.

NPS is a customer loyalty metric based on one question ('How likely are you to recommend us, 0 to 10?'), calculated as the percentage of promoters (9-10) minus the percentage of detractors (0-6).

Email marketing is sending emails to people who have opted in to hear from a business, to build relationships, share information and drive sales.

Cross-selling offers a customer a complementary or related product alongside their existing purchase; upselling offers a higher-tier or upgraded version of the product they were already considering or already own.

Core Web Vitals are three field-measured metrics Google uses to assess page experience: Largest Contentful Paint (loading), Interaction to Next Paint (responsiveness), and Cumulative Layout Shift (visual stability).

Crawl budget is the number of URLs a search engine will crawl on your site within a given period, determined by how fast your server responds and how much demand the engine has for your content.

Faceted navigation is the filtering system on category or listing pages that lets users narrow results by attributes such as color, size, price or brand, usually by generating a new URL per combination.

A canonical tag is an HTML link element that tells search engines which URL is the preferred version of a page when several URLs serve the same or very similar content.

Hreflang is an HTML or sitemap annotation that tells search engines which language and regional version of a page to serve to which audience, so equivalent pages in different languages are treated as alternates, not duplicates.

A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect that automatically sends visitors and search engines from an old URL to a new one, telling search engines the move is permanent.

A buying committee is the group of people inside an organization who collectively decide on a purchase. Usually that's an economic buyer, one or more technical evaluators, end users, and a procurement or legal gatekeeper.

An MQL is a lead that marketing has judged, usually from behavioral and firmographic scoring, to be ready for sales follow-up.

A sales qualified lead is a prospect that the sales team has reviewed and accepted as worth active pursuit, based on agreed criteria covering fit, need, authority and timing.

Account-based marketing is a B2B approach that treats a defined list of named companies as the market, coordinating marketing and sales against those accounts, instead of generating leads and qualifying afterward.

An Ideal Customer Profile is the set of accounts most likely to become high-value, low-churn customers, derived by scoring your actual closed-won accounts against firmographic, technographic, and behavioral fit signals. Not a written description of your imagined best-fit buyer.

A PQL is a lead qualified by specific, predictive usage behavior inside the product itself, not by marketing engagement (MQL) or a salesperson's judgment of fit (SQL). It's usually the same activation event or usage threshold that correlates with conversion and retention in a self-serve or freemium motion.

Creative fatigue is the decline in advertising performance that occurs as an audience sees the same creative repeatedly, showing up as falling click-through rate and rising cost per acquisition at stable spend.

Hook rate is the percentage of impressions that keep watching a video ad past roughly the first three seconds: the share of people your opening actually stopped.

Hold rate is the percentage of people who started watching a video ad and stayed to the end: the share your content kept once the opening had done its job.

A creative testing matrix is a production plan that varies one element at a time (hook, claim, format or messenger) so a performance difference can be traced to a specific decision, not to everything at once.

RFM score ranks each customer 1–5 on Recency, Frequency, and Monetary value within your own customer base, then combines the three digits into a code (like 455) used to segment customers by behavior, not demographics.

Purchase propensity score is a probability estimate, typically expressed 0 to 1 or 0 to 100, of a customer completing a purchase within a defined window. It's a single predictive number, not a descriptive tier.

Customer Engagement Score is a weighted sum of a customer's activity events (logins, feature use, content interaction, support contact and similar signals), normalized to a single score that segments customers by ongoing behavioral engagement, independent of what or how much they've bought.

Market segmentation is the practice of dividing a broad market into distinct groups of buyers who share characteristics relevant to how they should be marketed to, sold to, or served.

A marketing funnel is a model of the stages a prospect moves through between first becoming aware of a business and becoming a customer, usually awareness, consideration and decision.

Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors or users who complete a specific desired action (a purchase, a form fill, a sign-up), divided by total visitors, multiplied by 100.

Brand awareness is the extent to which a target audience recognizes or recalls a brand, typically measured through aided recall (recognizing a name when prompted) and unaided recall (naming a brand unprompted within a category).

A value proposition is a clear statement of the specific value a customer gets from choosing a product or service, why that value matters to them, and why it beats every realistic alternative, including doing nothing.

A Unique Selling Proposition is a single, specific claim about what makes a business truly different from every competitor. Not just different in wording, but different in a way a customer can independently verify and that competitors either can't or don't make.

A target audience is the specific group of people a marketing message, campaign, or product is deliberately built for. It's defined narrowly enough that messaging, channel choice and creative can be built around real, shared traits instead of generic appeal.

A SWOT analysis is a strategic planning framework that evaluates a business or initiative across four categories: internal Strengths and Weaknesses, and external Opportunities and Threats.

The marketing mix is the set of controllable variables a business combines to position an offer in its market: classically Product, Price, Place and Promotion, sometimes extended with People, Process, and Physical Evidence for services.

A go-to-market strategy is the specific plan for how a new product or offering will reach its target customers, differentiate against alternatives, and convert interest into revenue. It covers audience, positioning, channels and launch sequencing together as one plan, not separate workstreams.

The customer journey is the complete path an individual takes across every touchpoint, from first becoming aware of a business, through consideration and purchase, to ongoing use and potential advocacy. Not just the marketing-controlled portion of that path.

Lead generation is the process of attracting prospects and capturing their contact information or expressed interest, converting anonymous audience attention into an identifiable, sales-pipeline-ready record.

A lead magnet is something useful a business offers for free, like a guide, tool, template or audit, in exchange for a visitor's contact details.

Content marketing is creating and sharing useful content, like articles, guides, videos and tools, to attract, educate and keep customers, so they come to trust you before they buy.

Digital marketing is the promotion of a business, product or service through online channels, such as search engines, websites, social media, email and digital ads.

A CRM, or customer relationship management system, is software that stores information about customers and prospects and tracks every interaction with them, from first contact to sale and beyond.

Demand generation is the set of marketing activities that build awareness of and interest in a problem or category, creating the pool of prospects that lead generation later identifies and captures. It delivers value before anyone is asked for their contact information.

A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of a specific type of individual buyer or decision-maker (their goals, concerns and behavior), built from real customer research to guide messaging and content decisions.

Brand identity is the collection of visual and verbal elements (logo, color palette, typography, tone of voice, imagery style) that make a brand consistently recognizable across every place a customer encounters it.

A marketing strategy is the set of high-level choices about which audience to target, how to position against alternatives, and where to compete. These are the decisions that determine which tactics make sense, not a list of the tactics themselves.

A call to action is the specific instruction (usually a button, link or line of text) that tells a visitor exactly what to do next, such as 'Start your free trial' or 'Book a call.'

Social proof is evidence (reviews, testimonials, customer logos, usage numbers, expert endorsements) that other people have already made the same choice, used to reduce a prospective buyer's perceived risk in making it too.

A landing page is a standalone web page designed around a single, specific conversion goal (a sign-up, a purchase, a demo request), built for visitors arriving from a specific campaign or source instead of serving the general navigation purpose a homepage does.