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 tenancies — lost rent for the vacant period plus turnover work, re-letting fees, marketing spend and any discount needed to fill it.

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.

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 rather than the advertiser.

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

MER is total company revenue divided by total advertising spend across every channel, measured from your own sales system rather than 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, rather than 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 behaviour, 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 modelling the resulting gap in conversion data.

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.

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 wellbeing, 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.

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 behaviour over the following periods, so retention and revenue are read per group rather than as a single blended total.

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 colour, size, price, or brand — typically 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 rather than duplicates.

A buying committee is the group of people inside an organisation who collectively decide on a purchase — typically 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 behavioural 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 rather than generating leads and qualifying afterwards.

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 that a performance difference can be attributed to a specific decision rather than to everything at once.