Marketing terms, slang included, and what they really mean.

Paid ads

The vocabulary of Google Ads, Meta, and Microsoft accounts. Most of the money is lost in the settings nobody reads aloud.

Asset GroupPaid ads

A container inside a Performance Max campaign that groups creative assets, headlines, descriptions, images, and videos, with an audience signal set. Asset groups can be organized by product category, customer segment, or another testable theme.

In practice. One asset group holding the entire catalog is the default that ships, and it is why so many accounts cannot answer which products the budget actually went to. See the comparison with standard Shopping.

Bid StrategyPaid ads

The rule set that decides what an account pays for an auction. Manual strategies set the price directly. Automated strategies set a target and let the platform price each auction toward it.

In practice. Switching strategies resets the learning period, so an account that changes bid strategy monthly is permanently in the worst two weeks of every strategy it has ever used.

Brand SearchPaid ads

Queries that include the company name or a close variant. Brand and non-brand performance are reported separately so existing demand is not counted as new-customer acquisition.

In practice. Brand campaigns look like the best performer in almost every account, because the customer had already decided before the ad loaded. Blending it into one number is the most common way a mediocre account looks healthy. See why blended return hides the problem.

Broad MatchPaid ads

A keyword setting that lets the platform match a query it judges related, including queries containing none of the original words.

In practice. Broad match plus automated bidding plus no negative keyword list is the fastest way to buy traffic for a business you are not in. The search terms report tells you within a week; most accounts check within a quarter. See a checklist for reading the account.

Click-Through RatePaid ads

Clicks divided by impressions, as a percentage. Read within a single campaign type and placement, because the number is not comparable across them.

In practice. A high rate proves the ad is interesting, not that the click is worth anything. Plenty of accounts have optimized their way to a very engaging path to no revenue.

Cost per AcquisitionPaid ads

Cost divided by conversions, where the conversion is defined by the account. Also written CPA.

In practice. The number is only as honest as the conversion behind it. An account counting form views, phone clicks, and page scrolls as conversions can report a very low cost per acquisition while acquiring nobody. See checking what the account counts as a conversion.

Creative FatiguePaid ads

The decline in response when an audience has seen the same ad enough times that it stops registering.

In practice. Usually diagnosed as a targeting problem, then treated by rebuilding audiences, which resets everything except the reason performance fell.

DaypartingPaid ads

Restricting or adjusting ad delivery by hour and day of week.

In practice. Often used to switch ads off outside office hours, which quietly hands every evening researcher to whoever is still running. Worth doing when nobody answers the phone, worth checking when leads arrive by form.

Dynamic RemarketingPaid ads

Ads that show specific products a visitor viewed, assembled automatically from a product feed.

Impression SharePaid ads

The share of available auctions an account actually appeared in, reported alongside the share lost to budget and the share lost to rank.

In practice. The two loss columns point at different problems and get treated as one. Lost to budget is a money decision. Lost to rank is a relevance and landing page decision, and more budget will not move it.

Match TypePaid ads

The setting that controls how closely a search query must resemble a keyword for the ad to be eligible. Broad, phrase, and exact behave differently and are reported together.

Negative KeywordsPaid ads

Terms excluded from matching, applied at campaign or account level, or as a shared list.

In practice. The single cheapest control in a paid account and the one most often left empty because it produces no dashboard to show anyone.

Performance MaxPaid ads

A Google campaign type that serves across Search, Shopping, YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail, and Maps from one budget, using asset groups and audience signals rather than keywords.

In practice. It will happily absorb branded search that would have converted anyway and report it as its own win. Running it without a separate branded search campaign makes it look better than it is. See why it does not replace Search.

Quality ScorePaid ads

A diagnostic estimate, reported one to ten, of expected click-through rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience for a keyword.

In practice. It is a symptom readout, not a lever. Accounts try to raise the score directly, when the score is reporting that the landing page does not match what the ad promised. See the ad-to-page mismatch behind it.

ROASPaid ads

Revenue attributed to advertising divided by advertising cost. Return on ad spend.

In practice. It contains no cost of goods, no shipping, no labor, and no returns. A store can hit a 4.0 target every month and lose money on every order, which is why the number is best read next to margin rather than instead of it. See the gap between return and profit.

Search Terms ReportPaid ads

The list of actual queries that triggered ads, as distinct from the keywords in the account.

In practice. The most useful screen in any paid account and the least opened. Everything an account is wasting money on is written there in plain language.

Set and ForgetPaid ads

Informal. Launching a campaign and leaving it to run without scheduled review.

In practice. Automated bidding made this sound reasonable. Platforms change targets, defaults, and campaign types on their own schedule, so the account does not stay where it was left. See the running record of what platforms changed.

Smart BiddingPaid ads

Automated bidding that sets auction-level bids toward a stated target, using signals the advertiser does not set directly.

In practice. It optimizes toward whatever the account calls a conversion. Point it at a bad conversion definition and it will pursue that definition with real budget and considerable skill.

Spray and PrayPaid ads

Informal. Running wide targeting with many ads and little structure, on the theory that volume will surface a winner.

In practice. It does surface winners, eventually, and it pays full price for every loser on the way. The approach is defended as testing, but a test has a hypothesis and an end date.

Target CPAPaid ads

A bidding target expressing the cost per conversion an account is willing to pay. The platform prices individual auctions toward that average.

Target ROASPaid ads

A bidding target expressing the revenue an account expects per unit of spend. The platform prices auctions toward that ratio.

In practice. A target set loosely and then beaten for months is not a win banked. It is a number the platform has permission to fall back to whenever it needs the volume.

Wasted SpendPaid ads

Spend on queries, placements, audiences, or products that cannot produce a qualifying customer, identified from the account data rather than estimated.

In practice. Every vendor pitching an account will name a percentage before looking at it. The figure is only real once it comes from the search terms, placements, and product-level revenue in that specific account. See finding it in a live account.

SEO

Search terms that everybody uses and few define the same way twice.

CannibalizationSEO

Two or more pages on one site competing for the same query, so search engines split signals between them and rank whichever it prefers that week.

In practice. The usual cause is a content plan that rewarded publishing volume. Ten posts about the same topic is not ten chances to rank, it is one topic with its authority divided nine ways. See consolidating overlapping pages.

Doorway PageSEO

A page built to capture a query and pass the visitor onward, carrying no substance of its own. Search engines treat the pattern as spam.

In practice. The city-name page duplicated across forty towns is the version most small businesses are sold. It stopped working years before the invoices stopped.

E-E-A-TSEO

Experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trust. Criteria from Google search quality rater guidelines used to describe content quality.

In practice. Not a score in any system, despite being sold as one. There is no dial to turn and no report to pull, which has not stopped it from appearing as a line item.

Keyword StuffingSEO

Repeating a target term beyond natural use in the hope of raising relevance.

In practice. Largely extinct as a deliberate tactic, thriving as an accident. Generated content briefs that specify a keyword count reintroduce it every day.

Link JuiceSEO

Informal. The ranking value passed from one page to another through a link.

In practice. The plumbing metaphor causes real damage, because it implies a fixed quantity to hoard and ration. It produced a decade of sites refusing to link out and burying their own best pages six clicks deep.

Money PageSEO

Informal. A page intended to produce revenue directly, such as a service or product page, as opposed to a page written to attract traffic.

In practice. Most sites have their traffic and their money on different pages and no link between them. The blog post ranks, the service page sells, and nothing connects the two. See how the service pages are organized.

SEO

Search engine optimization. The work of making a site findable and preferable for the queries its buyers actually type.

In practice. Everyone knows what it means, which is exactly the problem. It is treated as obvious and therefore cheap, so it gets done at volume: more pages, more keywords, more posts. Then the site ranks for its own company name and very little else, and the conclusion drawn is that SEO does not work, rather than that nobody chose which queries were worth winning. See whether it should even be first.

Thin ContentSEO

A page with too little substance to satisfy the query it targets.

In practice. Length is the symptom people fix. A four hundred word page that answers the question completely is not thin. A two thousand word page that circles it is.

Zero-Click SearchSEO

A search resolved on the results page itself, through a snippet, panel, or AI summary, with no visit to a source site.

In practice. Now the majority behavior for informational queries. Ranking first and receiving nothing is a normal outcome, which makes traffic a worse measure of search performance every year. See being visible when nobody clicks.

AI search

What changed when the answer stopped being a list of ten blue links.

AI CitationAI search

A reference to a source inside a generated answer, shown as a link or named attribution.

In practice. The pages that get cited are the ones that state something specific and checkable. Generic best-practice copy is unciteable, because there is nothing in it that only that page says. See what earns a citation.

AI OverviewAI search

A generated summary shown above search results, assembled from multiple sources and usually citing a few of them.

In practice. Appearing as a citation and ranking first are different achievements with different causes. A page can be quoted in the summary while sitting well down the results, and the reverse happens just as often. See how it differs from ranking.

Answer EngineAI search

A search surface that returns a composed answer rather than a ranked list of documents. ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI Overviews behave this way.

In practice. See how these surfaces read a site.

HallucinationAI search

A confident, fluent, and false statement produced by a language model.

In practice. For a business, the risk is less that a model invents a fact and more that it invents your facts: prices, service areas, hours, and policies assembled from stale or absent sources. The correction is to publish the real ones somewhere machine-readable.

Prompt VisibilityAI search

Whether a business appears in answers to the prompts its buyers actually type into an assistant.

In practice. Different from keyword ranking in a way that matters commercially: there is no position two. An assistant names a handful of options and the rest of the market is not mentioned at all. See getting named in those answers.

Structured DataAI search

Machine-readable markup describing what a page contains, commonly JSON-LD using schema.org types.

In practice. Adding it does not create eligibility for anything by itself. It describes what is already on the page, and marking up claims the page does not make is the fastest way to a manual action. See marking up a site properly.

Ecommerce and Shopify

Catalog, feed, and checkout language, where a small data error becomes a large revenue error.

AOVEcommerce and Shopify

Average order value. Revenue divided by orders over a period.

In practice. Moves for reasons that have nothing to do with marketing, including a single large order or a discount schedule. Read as a trend across enough orders to mean something, not month to month on low volume.

Cart AbandonmentEcommerce and Shopify

A session where a shopper adds to cart and leaves without purchasing.

In practice. Treated as an email problem, mostly a checkout problem. Recovery flows earn back a slice of the loss and leave the cause running: unexpected shipping cost, forced account creation, or a payment method the buyer wanted and did not find. See the checkout causes behind it.

FeedEcommerce and Shopify

The structured product file that supplies shopping surfaces with titles, prices, availability, images, and identifiers.

In practice. The feed, not the campaign, decides which products can be shown and for which queries. Accounts spend months tuning bids on a catalog where a third of the titles were never written for search. See what the feed controls.

LTVEcommerce and Shopify

Lifetime value. The total margin a customer produces across the whole relationship.

In practice. Frequently used to justify an acquisition cost the business cannot actually fund, because lifetime value arrives over years and the ad invoice arrives on the second of the month.

MEREcommerce and Shopify

Marketing efficiency ratio. Total revenue divided by total marketing spend across all channels.

In practice. Useful precisely because it cannot be gamed by platform attribution. Every channel reporting a strong individual return while this number falls is the most common shape of an ecommerce budget going wrong.

Payback PeriodEcommerce and Shopify

The time taken for a customer to repay the cost of acquiring them.

In practice. The number that decides whether growth is fundable. A business can be profitable on paper and still fail, because the cash goes out in January and comes back in September.

Subscription ChurnEcommerce and Shopify

The rate at which subscribers cancel, measured against the base at the start of the period.

In practice. Reported as one number covering two unrelated problems. Involuntary churn is a failed card and a billing fix. Voluntary churn is a product and expectation fix. Averaging them hides both.

Conversion and landing pages

What happens after the click, which is where most ad budgets are actually decided.

Above the FoldConversion and landing pages

The part of a page visible before scrolling.

In practice. Inherited from newspapers and applied to devices with no fold. It still matters, but as a question about what the first screen has to establish, not as a rule that everything important is crammed into it.

Banner BlindnessConversion and landing pages

The learned habit of ignoring page regions that look like advertising.

In practice. It now applies to anything that looks like a component: sliders, badge rows, and cookie-cutter testimonial rails get skipped whether or not they are ads.

Conversion Rate OptimizationConversion and landing pages

Systematic work to raise the share of visitors who complete a defined action, using research, hypothesis, and measurement rather than preference.

In practice. Sold as button colors and popups. The changes that move a rate are almost always about the offer, the price presentation, or the information a buyer needed and could not find. See what actually moves a rate.

FrictionConversion and landing pages

Anything that adds effort, delay, or doubt between intent and completion.

In practice. The instinct is to remove all of it. Some friction is load-bearing: a qualifying question that costs a lead can save a sales team a week, which is why removing form fields sometimes raises conversions and lowers revenue.

Landing PageConversion and landing pages

The page a visitor arrives on from a specific campaign or link, built to continue that specific promise.

In practice. The homepage is not a landing page. Sending paid traffic there asks a buyer who arrived for one thing to navigate a page built for everyone. See building the page the ad promised.

Social ProofConversion and landing pages

Evidence that other people have chosen and been satisfied by something.

In practice. Only works when it is specific and checkable. A row of unnamed five-star quotes reads as decoration, and buyers have been discounting it since roughly 2012.

Speed to LeadConversion and landing pages

Elapsed time between an inbound enquiry and a genuine human response.

In practice. The cheapest available improvement in most lead businesses and almost never on the marketing plan, because it is an operations fix and the marketing budget cannot buy it. See where enquiries actually stall.

Tracking and attribution

Measurement words. Treated as facts, usually opinions with a timestamp.

Attribution WindowTracking and attribution

The period after an ad interaction within which a conversion is still credited to it.

In practice. Two platforms with different windows will both claim the same sale, which is why reported conversions routinely exceed real orders. The window is a setting somebody chose, not a fact about the customer. See the same sale claimed three times.

Conversion TrackingTracking and attribution

The mechanism recording that a defined valuable action occurred and associating it with a source.

In practice. Breaks quietly. A theme update, a consent banner, or a checkout change can stop it, and the account keeps reporting confidently on whatever still fires. See verifying what still fires.

Dark SocialTracking and attribution

Sharing that happens in private channels, direct messages, and email, arriving with no referrer.

In practice. Lands in direct traffic and gets credited to nothing. Channels that mostly drive private sharing look weak in every report, which is how genuinely working channels get cut.

Last ClickTracking and attribution

An attribution model assigning full credit to the final touch before conversion.

In practice. Structurally flatters whatever sits closest to the purchase, usually branded search and email. Budget gets moved toward the last step and away from whatever created the demand the last step collected. See reading attribution with judgment.

UTM ParametersTracking and attribution

Tags appended to a URL that pass campaign source, medium, and name into analytics.

In practice. Only as good as the naming convention, and the convention is usually three conventions. Facebook, facebook, and FB will sit in a report as three separate channels for years.

Vanity MetricTracking and attribution

A number that reliably goes up and changes no decision. Impressions, reach, and follower counts are the usual examples.

In practice. The distinguishing test is not whether the metric is soft. It is whether anyone can name the action they would take if it halved.

Budgets, agencies, and how the work goes

The slang people use in meetings, and what it tends to mean once the invoice arrives.

Best PracticeBudgets, agencies, and how the work goes

Informal. A recommendation presented as settled and generally applicable.

In practice. Usually means it worked somewhere, for a business with different margins, catalog, and sales cycle. Reasonable as a starting position, expensive as a substitute for looking at the account.

Boiling the OceanBudgets, agencies, and how the work goes

Informal. Attempting the entire problem at once instead of the part that changes the outcome.

In practice. Common shape of a first engagement, because a plan covering everything is easier to sell than a short one. Six workstreams starting together tends to mean nothing finishes before the budget review.

Churn and BurnBudgets, agencies, and how the work goes

Informal. An agency model built on winning accounts faster than they leave, rather than on keeping them.

In practice. Recognizable from the outside: heavy onboarding, thinning contact, monthly reports that describe activity rather than result. The tell is a report that never mentions a decision. See what the reporting gives away.

Growth HackingBudgets, agencies, and how the work goes

Informal. Pursuing rapid growth through unconventional, low-cost tactics.

In practice. Named after a period when a few distribution loopholes were briefly open. Those closed. What remains under the label is usually ordinary marketing with a shorter deadline.

Low-Hanging FruitBudgets, agencies, and how the work goes

Informal. Improvements assumed to be quick, cheap, and certain.

In practice. Genuinely exists, and is genuinely the right place to start. Worth asking why it is still hanging there, because in an account somebody has been managing for two years the easy wins are usually easy for a reason.

MQLBudgets, agencies, and how the work goes

Marketing qualified lead. A contact meeting a marketing-defined threshold for sales follow-up.

In practice. The threshold is set by the team measured on the count. Where marketing and sales disagree about what qualifies, the argument is never really about the definition. See agreeing what counts as a lead.

RetainerBudgets, agencies, and how the work goes

A recurring fee for an ongoing scope of marketing work.

In practice. The billing structure and the work are separate questions, and the structure tends to outlive the work. A retainer set for a launch is frequently still running two years later against a maintenance workload. See how the engagement is scoped.

The AlgorithmBudgets, agencies, and how the work goes

Informal. Whatever automated system is held responsible for a result nobody has explained.

In practice. Does real work as an explanation because it cannot be checked. When performance moves and the account has not been read, this is what fills the gap. See the dated record of what actually changed.