The terms behind the dashboards.

The percentage of people who saw your ad and clicked it. The first signal of whether your hook is working.

How much you pay in ad spend for each new customer or qualified action.

How much you pay each time someone clicks your ad. The link between bidding and CTR.

How much you pay to generate one qualified lead. The standard metric for lead-gen campaigns where the conversion is a form fill, not a purchase.

How much it costs to show your ad to 1,000 people. The 'price of attention' on a given network.

Total revenue divided by total marketing spend. The pragmatic ROAS replacement when attribution gets fuzzy.

Revenue generated for every euro / dollar spent on advertising. The single most-watched paid-acquisition metric.

Deciding which marketing touchpoints get credit for a conversion. The most-debated number in modern marketing.

The average revenue per order. The lever that, when raised, makes every other unit-economic problem easier.

How long it takes for a new customer's revenue to repay what you spent acquiring them. The cash-flow constraint behind every aggressive growth plan.

Grouping customers by their signup or first-purchase month and tracking how each group's behaviour evolves over time. The honest test of LTV claims.

The percentage of visitors who complete a desired action — purchase, signup, lead form. The lever that compounds with everything else.

Server-to-server event tracking that sends conversion data directly from your backend to Meta — bypassing the pixel and the browsers that block it.

The fully-loaded cost of acquiring one customer, including ad spend plus all the marketing inputs that helped convert them.

The total revenue (or contribution margin) a customer generates across their entire relationship with your brand.

Customer data you collect directly from your users — email, phone, purchase history. The post-iOS replacement for ad-platform tracking.

Pausing ads in a controlled region or audience while running normally elsewhere — the cleanest way to measure incremental impact.

The revenue your ads actually drove versus what would have happened anyway. The honest version of ROAS.

How far back in time the ad platform looks to credit a conversion to one of your ads. The single biggest setting that changes your reported ROAS.

A snippet of JavaScript on your site that reports user actions (page views, add-to-carts, purchases) back to Meta. The data backbone of Meta Ads optimisation.

Tracking tags appended to URLs (utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign…) that tell your analytics where the click came from. The lingua franca of link attribution.

When a user sees your ad without clicking, then later converts via a different path. Generous credit; treat with skepticism.

Letting Meta's algorithm find buyers across its full user base instead of restricting to specific interests, lookalikes, or saved audiences.

An audience the ad platform builds that statistically resembles your existing customers. The bridge between retargeting and cold prospecting.

Showing ads to people who've already visited your site, viewed a product, or abandoned a cart. The highest-converting paid audience you can build.

When the same audience has seen your creative too many times and stops responding. The most common reason a winning ad suddenly underperforms.

Letting the ad platform automatically mix and match headline / image / CTA combinations to find the best-performing pairing per audience.

The first 1–3 seconds of an ad — the part that decides whether anyone watches the next 27. The single highest-leverage creative element.

Ad creative that looks like a customer made it — phone-shot, unscripted, on-platform. The format that beats polished brand creative for cold-traffic conversion in most categories.

Comparing two variants of an ad, page or offer head-to-head with traffic split between them, then picking the winner statistically.

How Google decides which ads to show in which order on a search results page. Combines bid, Quality Score, expected impact of ad extensions, and context.

The traditional Meta budget setting where each ad set gets its own daily / lifetime budget, and you control the split between them.

Searches on Google for your brand name (or close variants). Almost always profitable to bid on; almost always overstates true marketing impact.

Meta budget setting where you assign a budget to the campaign and let the platform reallocate spend across ad sets in real time.

A limit on how many times the same person sees the same ad. The simplest way to prevent ad fatigue.

Top, middle, bottom of funnel — the standard shorthand for where a prospect is in the buyer journey and what creative they need.

Google Ads campaign type that runs across Search, Display, YouTube, Discover, Gmail and Maps from a single asset feed. Maximum reach, minimum operator control.

Meta's all-in-one DTC ecommerce campaign type — single objective, broad targeting, automated placement and bidding. The PMax equivalent on Meta.

Google's 1-10 grade of how relevant your ad + keyword + landing page are. Higher Quality Score means lower CPC at the same ad rank.

An automated bid strategy where you tell the platform a CPA you'd accept, and it optimises delivery to hit that target.