The marketing analytics glossary.

Concepts

Meta's algorithmic shopping-campaign type that automates audience, placement, and creative optimization in one ad set.

Attribution

The time period after a touchpoint during which a subsequent conversion will be credited to that touchpoint.

Metrics

How many months it takes for the cumulative gross profit from a customer to recover their acquisition cost. The cash-flow companion to LTV:CAC.

Privacy

Server-side Conversion APIs — the post-iOS 14.5 way to send conversion data directly from your server to ad platforms, bypassing browser-blocking.

Metrics

Cost Per Acquisition — total ad spend divided by number of customers acquired. Often called CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) in SaaS.

Metrics

Cost Per Click — what you pay each time a user clicks your ad. The middle layer between CPM (impressions) and CPA (conversions).

Metrics

Cost Per Mille — the cost of buying 1,000 ad impressions. The buying-side equivalent of CPC and CPA.

Creative

The decline in ad performance that occurs when an audience has seen the same creative too many times.

Metrics

Click-Through Rate — the percentage of impressions that result in a click. The single most useful leading indicator of creative performance.

Audiences

An audience built from your own data — customer email list, website visitors, app users, video viewers — for targeting or exclusion.

Attribution

An attribution model where credit weights are assigned by an ML model trained on your actual conversion data, rather than fixed rules.

Attribution

An attribution model that gives 100% of conversion credit to the first touchpoint that introduced the customer to your brand.

Audiences

The average number of times each unique user has seen your ad over a defined period.

Creative

The percentage of viewers still watching a video ad at the 3-second mark. The single biggest leading indicator of paid-social video performance.

Privacy

Apple's 2021 privacy framework that broke deterministic cross-app tracking on iOS, fundamentally changing paid-social attribution.

Attribution

An attribution model that gives 100% of conversion credit to the final touchpoint before conversion.

Audiences

An audience built by the ad platform to resemble an existing 'seed' audience — typically your customers or website visitors.

Metrics

Customer Lifetime Value — the total revenue (or gross profit) a customer generates over their full relationship with your business.

Metrics

The ratio of customer lifetime value to customer acquisition cost — the central efficiency metric for subscription businesses.

Attribution

A method of distributing conversion credit across every touchpoint in a customer journey rather than crediting only the last click.

Concepts

Google's algorithmic campaign type that runs ads across all Google inventory (Search, Shopping, Display, YouTube, Discovery) with one budget and one creative pool.

Metrics

Profit on Ad Spend — like ROAS but with gross profit instead of revenue. Honest for mixed-margin businesses where revenue and profit diverge.

Attribution

An attribution model that gives heavy credit to the first and last touchpoints, with the remainder split across middle touchpoints.

Audiences

Showing ads specifically to users who have already interacted with your brand — visited your site, viewed a product, abandoned a cart.

Metrics

Return on Ad Spend — the revenue generated for every dollar spent on advertising. The most-cited efficiency metric in performance marketing.