Marketing glossary

A/B testAn A/B test shows two versions of one thing, such as an ad, a landing page or an email subject line, to two randomly split groups at the same time, and compares how many in each group took the action you wanted.Read the entry Ad assetsAd assets, called ad extensions until 2022, are the extra pieces Google Ads can attach to a search ad, such as sitelinks, callouts, a phone number, a location, prices or images, making the ad larger and giving people more reasons to click.Read the entry Ad creative and creative fatigueAd creative is the ad people see, the image or video, the headline, the text and the button, as distinct from the audience it is shown to and the budget behind it, and creative fatigue is the drop in results that comes when the same people have seen the same creative too many times.Read the entry Ad RankAd Rank is the value Google Ads calculates for your ad in every auction, from your bid, the quality of your ad and landing page, the search's context and other factors, to decide whether it shows, where, and at what price.Read the entry AI agentAn AI agent is software built on a language model that works towards a goal you set by choosing its own steps, using tools such as a web browser, email or a payment account, and checking the results until it finishes or gets stuck.Read the entry AI CMOAn AI CMO is software that does a chief marketing officer's thinking for a business too small to employ one: it sets the goal, chooses the strategy, writes the plan and reviews the numbers each week, by talking with the owner, who still does the work.Read the entry AI constitutionAn AI constitution is a published document setting out the principles and priorities an AI system is meant to follow, such as honesty, safety and whose interests come first, used to guide how the AI is trained or how it behaves.Read the entry AI guardrailsAI guardrails are the rules and technical limits built into an AI product that control what it can see, say and do, such as blocking certain topics, checking answers before they are shown, or removing the ability to make changes at all.Read the entry AI hallucinationAn AI hallucination is an answer from an AI model that sounds confident and plausible but is false or invented, such as a made-up statistic, a quote nobody said, a source that does not exist or a setting the software does not have.Read the entry AI marketingAI marketing is using AI software to plan, write, run or measure marketing, and the phrase covers everything from a chatbot drafting a post to a system that reads your ad accounts and tells you what to change.Read the entry AI marketing teamAn AI marketing team is a set of marketing jobs (strategy, content, ads and measurement) done by AI specialists that all work towards one business goal, with the owner in charge and making every change.Read the entry AI modelAn AI model is the trained engine, stored as billions of learned numbers, that turns input into output, while an AI app is the product built around one or more models, adding instructions, memory, tools, data connections and a screen to use it on.Read the entry Answer engine optimisation (AEO)Answer engine optimisation (AEO) is writing and structuring your website so that ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI answers quote it when someone asks a question; it is also called generative engine optimisation (GEO).Read the entry APIAn API, or application programming interface, is a set of rules that lets one piece of software request data or actions from another, such as an app reading your Google Ads campaigns, without anyone logging in and copying figures by hand.Read the entry Average order value (AOV)Average order value (AOV) is the revenue from a period divided by the number of orders in it, so $36,400 from 520 orders is an AOV of $70; for a service business the same figure is the average job or invoice.Read the entry

BacklinkA backlink is a link from another website to yours; Google uses links to find pages and as one sign of trust, so a link from a relevant, respected site helps and a bought or spammy one can count against you.Read the entry Boosted postA boosted post is an ordinary Facebook or Instagram post that you pay to show to more people through the Boost button, which runs it as an ad with a short list of goals and audiences instead of the full set of choices in Ads Manager.Read the entry Break-even ROASBreak-even ROAS is the return on ad spend at which the gross profit from ad-driven sales exactly covers the cost of the ads, worked out as 1 divided by your gross margin, so a 40 percent margin breaks even at a ROAS of 2.5.Read the entry

call to action (CTA)A call to action, or CTA, is the instruction in an ad, web page, email or post that tells the reader exactly what to do next, such as Book now, Get a quote or Call us, usually as a button or a short line.Read the entry Chatbot, copilot, agent or teamA chatbot answers what you type, a copilot works beside you on a task, an agent acts on its own, and an AI marketing team is specialists sharing one plan; the difference that matters to an owner is who sees the screen, who decides, and who clicks.Read the entry Churn rateChurn rate is the share of the customers you had at the start of a period who stopped buying or cancelled during it, so losing 6 of 120 monthly customers in July is a churn rate of 5 percent for that month.Read the entry Click-through rate (CTR)Click-through rate (CTR) is the share of people who saw your ad or search listing and clicked it, worked out as clicks divided by impressions: 30 clicks from 1,000 views is a CTR of 3 percent.Read the entry Close rateClose rate, also called the quote-to-job rate, is the share of quotes you send that turn into paid work, so 8 kitchens won from 40 quotes is a close rate of 20 percent; some businesses measure it from first enquiry instead.Read the entry Computer use AIComputer use AI is an AI that operates a computer the way a person does, moving the mouse, typing and clicking through software to finish a task on its own, which is a different thing from an AI that sees your screen and tells you what to do.Read the entry Consent mode and cookiesConsent mode is the Google setting that tells its tags whether a visitor agreed to cookies, so the tags measure what they are allowed to and Google models the rest; it is one of several reasons the conversions an ad platform reports are now fewer than the sales a business makes.Read the entry content marketingContent marketing is publishing useful material, such as articles, videos, guides or emails, that answers the questions your customers have, so that they find you, trust you and come back when they are ready to buy.Read the entry context windowA context window is the maximum amount of text, counted in tokens, that an AI model can take in and consider in a single request, including its instructions, the conversation so far, any attached documents and the reply it is writing.Read the entry Contribution marginContribution margin is the price of a sale minus every cost that rises with that one sale, such as stock, commissions, card fees and packaging, which leaves the amount each extra sale adds towards rent, wages and profit.Read the entry ConversionA conversion is an action that you have told an ad account or analytics tool to count as a success, such as a purchase, a booking, a form or a call, so it counts only what was set up and nothing else.Read the entry Conversion rateConversion rate is the share of visitors (or clicks) that did the thing you wanted, such as booking, buying, calling or filling in the form: 20 bookings from 400 clicks is 5 percent.Read the entry Conversion rates (the family)The conversion rates are a family of percentages, each dividing the people who took one step by the people at the step before, such as clicks that became leads or quotes that became jobs, so each one tests a different part of the business.Read the entry Conversion trackingConversion tracking is the set-up that records when someone who clicked your ad does something you value, such as sending a form, calling or buying, and reports it back to Google Ads so you can see which ads and keywords produce customers.Read the entry Core Web VitalsCore Web Vitals are three measurements Google uses to judge how a web page feels to real visitors: Largest Contentful Paint for loading, Interaction to Next Paint for responsiveness, and Cumulative Layout Shift for visual stability.Read the entry Cost per acquisition (CPA)Cost per acquisition (CPA) is the ad spend on a campaign divided by the conversions that ad account recorded, so it measures what Google or Meta charged for each action you told it to count, such as a booking, a form or a purchase.Read the entry Cost per click (CPC)Cost per click (CPC) is the price you paid, on average, each time someone clicked your ad, worked out as ad spend divided by clicks; in Google Ads you set the most you will pay and usually pay less.Read the entry Cost per lead (CPL)Cost per lead (CPL) is what a campaign spent divided by the number of enquiries it produced, such as forms, calls and messages, so $2,100 that brings in 35 enquiries is a cost per lead of $60.Read the entry CPM (cost per thousand impressions)CPM, cost per thousand impressions, is what you paid for every 1,000 times your ad was shown, worked out as spend divided by impressions and multiplied by 1,000; the M is the Roman numeral for a thousand.Read the entry Crawling and indexingCrawling is Google's software visiting and downloading the pages of your website, and indexing is Google analysing those pages and storing them in its index; only an indexed page can appear in Google's search results.Read the entry Custom audienceA custom audience is a group of people an ad platform builds from something you already have, such as a customer list, your website visitors or the people who engaged with your page, so you can show them ads, exclude them from ads, or use them as the source for a lookalike.Read the entry Customer acquisition cost (CAC)Customer acquisition cost (CAC) is the total you spent to win new customers in a period, including ads, agency fees, sales time and printing, divided by the number of new customers you won in that period.Read the entry Customer lifetime value (LTV)Customer lifetime value is what one customer is worth to you over the whole time they keep buying from you, not only their first sale: the number that tells you how much you can afford to spend to win one.Read the entry

Data-driven attributionData-driven attribution is a model, the default for most conversion actions in Google Ads, that shares the credit for each conversion across the ads a customer interacted with, weighting each by how often similar paths in your account led to a conversion.Read the entry Domain authorityDomain authority is a score from 1 to 100, created by the SEO company Moz, that predicts how well a website might rank, mainly from the links pointing to it; Google has said repeatedly that it does not use it.Read the entry

Email deliverabilityEmail deliverability is whether the emails you send reach the inbox rather than the spam folder or nowhere, and it rests on three records that prove you are who you say you are (SPF, DKIM and DMARC), a low complaint rate, and a list of people who asked to hear from you.Read the entry Email flow (automation)An email flow, called an automation or a customer journey in some tools, is a sequence of emails that sends itself when a trigger happens, such as a sign-up, a first purchase or a cart left behind, so the right message reaches each person at the right moment without anyone pressing send.Read the entry Email open rate and click rateEmail open rate is the share of delivered emails that were opened and click rate is the share that had a link clicked; since Apple Mail began pre-loading emails in 2021 the open rate counts opens that never happened, so the click rate is the one to trust.Read the entry Email segmentationEmail segmentation is dividing your list into groups by something you know about the people in them, such as what they bought, when they last bought or whether they have clicked recently, and sending each group an email written for it instead of one email to everyone.Read the entry embeddingsAn embedding is a long list of numbers that an AI model produces to represent the meaning of a word, sentence or document, arranged so that texts with similar meanings get similar numbers and can be found by comparing them.Read the entry Engagement rate (GA4)Engagement rate in Google Analytics 4 is the share of sessions that were engaged, meaning they lasted longer than 10 seconds, included a key event or viewed at least two pages, and GA4's bounce rate is the share that were not.Read the entry

fine-tuningFine-tuning is extra training given to an existing AI model on a set of example inputs paired with the outputs you want, so that it picks up a style, format or narrow task more reliably than written instructions alone achieve.Read the entry Fractional CMOA fractional CMO is a senior marketer you hire for part of their week, usually on a monthly retainer, to set direction for a business too small to employ a chief marketing officer full time.Read the entry

generative AIGenerative AI is artificial intelligence that creates new content, such as text, images, audio, video or code, in response to a request, by producing output that follows the patterns of the material it was trained on.Read the entry Google Business ProfileA Google Business Profile is the free listing, formerly called Google My Business, that shows your business on Google Search and Google Maps with its name, category, hours, phone number, website, photos and reviews, and that you claim and manage yourself.Read the entry Google reviewsGoogle reviews are the star ratings and written comments customers leave on a Google Business Profile; Google says their number and rating feed into local ranking, and for the person comparing three businesses they are often the deciding detail.Read the entry Google Shopping ads and Merchant CenterGoogle Shopping ads are ads that show a product's photo, price and shop name in Google results, built from product data you upload to Google Merchant Center, the free Google account that holds your product catalogue and checks it against Google's rules.Read the entry Google Tag ManagerGoogle Tag Manager is a free Google tool that holds all the tracking code on your website, such as the Google tag, the Meta Pixel and conversion tags, in one container, so a tag can be added or changed in Tag Manager without anyone editing the website itself.Read the entry Gross marginGross margin is the share of revenue left after paying the direct cost of what you sold, such as stock, materials and the labour that does the job, written as a percentage: $60 left from a $100 sale is a 60 percent gross margin.Read the entry

Impression shareImpression share is the percentage of the times your Google ad was eligible to show that it did show, worked out as impressions divided by the estimated eligible impressions; the rest was lost either to budget or to Ad Rank.Read the entry Incrementality and lift testsIncrementality is the part of your sales that happened only because of a piece of marketing, and a lift test measures it by comparing sales from people, places or weeks that got the marketing with ones that did not.Read the entry inferenceInference is the stage where a trained AI model is put to use to produce an output, such as reading a question and writing an answer, and because each answer runs the model on specialised chips, every call carries a computing cost.Read the entry Invalid clicksInvalid clicks are clicks on your ads that Google judges do not come from genuine interest, such as accidental double clicks, bots or someone clicking to drain your budget; Google filters them out and does not charge for the ones it catches.Read the entry

Key event (GA4)A key event is any event in Google Analytics 4 that you have marked as important to your business, such as a purchase, a form or a tap on your phone number; GA4 called these conversions until Google renamed them in 2024.Read the entry KeywordA keyword is a word or phrase people type into a search engine, such as "carpet cleaning penrith"; in Google Ads it is a phrase you bid on, and in SEO it is a phrase you want a page to rank for.Read the entry Keyword match typesKeyword match types are the three settings in Google Ads (broad, phrase and exact) that decide how closely a search must match your keyword before your ad can show, from related searches on broad to the same meaning on exact.Read the entry

Landing pageA landing page is the web page a person arrives on after clicking an ad, email, post or search result; for an ad, the best one is built around the single thing the ad promised, with the next step on the first screen.Read the entry large language model (LLM)A large language model, or LLM, is an AI program trained on an enormous amount of written text to predict the next word in a passage, which is the ability behind ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and most AI writing tools.Read the entry Last-click attributionLast-click attribution is a rule that gives 100 percent of the credit for a sale or lead to the last ad or link the customer clicked before converting, and none to anything they clicked or saw earlier.Read the entry latencyLatency is the delay between an action and its response; in a voice conversation with an AI, it is the time from the moment you stop speaking to the moment you hear the reply begin, usually measured in milliseconds.Read the entry LeadA lead is a person you can contact who has shown interest in buying what you sell, such as by filling in a form, calling or messaging, and who has not yet become a paying customer.Read the entry lead magnetA lead magnet is something useful a business offers free, such as a guide, checklist, calculator or sample, in return for a person's contact details and permission to follow up, so it can stay in touch with people not yet ready to buy.Read the entry Lead valueA lead is worth your average sale multiplied by the share of leads you close: a $650 job won from one enquiry in three makes each enquiry worth about $217 in revenue, and the margin version of that number is the most you can pay for a lead.Read the entry Local pack (map pack)The local pack, or map pack, is the block of a map and usually three business listings that Google shows near the top of the results for searches with local intent, such as "hairdresser near me", drawn from Google Business Profiles.Read the entry Lookalike audienceA lookalike audience is a group of people the ad platform chooses because they resemble a group you gave it, such as your customers or your website visitors, so your ads reach strangers who look, in the data, like the people who already buy from you.Read the entry LTV to CAC ratioThe LTV to CAC ratio is customer lifetime value divided by customer acquisition cost: a customer worth $1,080 in gross profit over their time with you, won for $360, gives a ratio of 3 to 1.Read the entry

machine learningMachine learning is a branch of AI in which software learns to make predictions or decisions from examples and data, rather than following rules a programmer wrote, and gets better at the task as it sees more examples.Read the entry Marketing agencyA marketing agency is a company you pay a monthly retainer to run some or all of your marketing for you, and the retainer usually buys hours of their staff rather than results.Read the entry Marketing attributionMarketing attribution is the set of rules that decides which ad, channel or campaign gets the credit for a sale or lead when the customer met the business more than once, through different ads and channels, before buying.Read the entry marketing automationMarketing automation is software that sends messages or takes marketing steps by itself when a set trigger happens, such as a welcome email after a sign-up or a reminder after an abandoned cart, so follow-up happens without anyone remembering to do it.Read the entry Marketing efficiency ratio (MER)Marketing efficiency ratio (MER), also called blended ROAS, is the total revenue of the business in a period divided by the total spent on marketing in that period, across every channel, regardless of which channel says it made the sale.Read the entry Marketing funnelA marketing funnel is the series of steps between someone first noticing your business and becoming a customer, with a count of the people at each step, so you can see where most of them drop away.Read the entry Marketing goalA marketing goal is one dated number, such as $40,000 a month in revenue by June, that every strategy and tactic in the plan has to answer to.Read the entry Marketing planA marketing plan is a written document that names the one result you are chasing, the two or three strategies that will get you there, and the tactics you will do each week, with dates and numbers; a list of marketing activity is not a plan.Read the entry Marketing ROIMarketing ROI, or return on investment, is the gross profit your marketing brought in minus what the marketing cost, divided by what it cost, so $3 of gross profit from $1 of marketing is an ROI of 200 percent.Read the entry Marketing strategyA marketing strategy is the route you choose to reach your marketing goal, such as winning more repeat orders from existing customers, and the tactics are the steps you take along that route.Read the entry Marketing tacticA marketing tactic is one thing you do, with a cost in dollars and in your own hours, that moves one number inside a strategy; a tactic without a strategy above it is activity.Read the entry Meta campaign structure (campaigns, ad sets and ads)In Meta Ads Manager a campaign holds the objective (what you want: sales, leads, traffic), each ad set inside it holds an audience, its placements, budget and schedule, and each ad inside an ad set holds one creative, so a change at one level applies to everything beneath it.Read the entry Meta Pixel and the Conversions APIThe Meta Pixel is a piece of code on your website that reports what visitors do after clicking a Facebook or Instagram ad, and the Conversions API sends the same events from your website server, so Meta still sees a purchase when a browser blocks the Pixel.Read the entry Multimodal modelA multimodal model is an AI model that takes in more than one kind of input, such as text, images and sound, and reasons across them, which is what lets an AI look at a screen and talk about what it sees.Read the entry

Negative keywordsA negative keyword is a word or phrase you add in Google Ads so your ad will not show on searches containing it, such as "jobs" or "free"; it blocks spend on people who were never going to buy.Read the entry

organic vs paidOrganic means visits, reach or results you did not pay for per click or view, such as unpaid Google search results and unboosted posts, while paid means results bought through advertising, such as Google Ads clicks or Meta ads.Read the entry owned, earned and paid mediaOwned, earned and paid media is a way of sorting marketing by who controls it: owned media is what you publish on channels you control, earned media is what customers and press say about you, and paid media is attention you buy.Read the entry

Payback periodThe payback period on a customer is the number of months it takes for the gross profit from a new customer to repay what it cost to win them, worked out as acquisition cost divided by the monthly gross profit that customer brings in.Read the entry Performance MaxPerformance Max is a Google Ads campaign type that runs one budget across all of Google's ad inventory, including Search, YouTube, Display, Gmail, Discover and Maps, with Google's automation choosing where, when and to whom each ad shows.Read the entry positioningPositioning is the place a business deliberately takes in its customers' minds compared with the alternatives they could choose, defined by who it is for, what it does best and why that matters to those buyers.Read the entry promptA prompt is the instruction, question or material you give an AI model to work from, typed or spoken, and the quality of what comes back depends largely on how much of the job the prompt describes.Read the entry prompt injectionPrompt injection is an attack in which instructions are hidden in content an AI reads, such as a web page, email or document, so that the AI follows them instead of, or as well as, the instructions of the person using it.Read the entry

Qualified leadA qualified lead is an enquiry from someone who fits what you sell: they want the kind of work you do, they are somewhere you serve, and they have the money and the say to go ahead.Read the entry Quality Score (Google Ads)Quality Score is Google's rating, from 1 to 10, of how well a keyword's ad and landing page match what the people searching for it want, built from expected click-through rate, ad relevance and landing page experience; Google calls it a diagnostic tool, not a target.Read the entry

Reach and frequency (Meta Ads)Reach is how many people saw your ad at least once, and frequency is how many times each of them saw it on average, which is impressions divided by reach; Meta reports all three, and reading impressions as people is the common mistake.Read the entry Repeat purchase rateRepeat purchase rate is the share of customers in a period who bought from you more than once in it, so 378 repeat buyers out of 1,400 customers over 12 months is a repeat purchase rate of 27 percent.Read the entry Responsive search adA responsive search ad is the standard Google search text ad, made from up to 15 headlines and 4 descriptions that you write, which Google combines differently for each search, testing the combinations to find the ones that get clicked.Read the entry Retargeting (remarketing)Retargeting, which Google calls remarketing, is showing ads to people who have already been to your website, used your app or bought from you, by keeping them in an audience the ad platform can recognise; it is cheap per sale because those people were already interested.Read the entry retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)Retrieval-augmented generation, or RAG, is a way of building AI tools in which the system first searches a set of documents for passages relevant to a question, then hands those passages to a language model to answer from.Read the entry ROAS (return on ad spend)ROAS, return on ad spend, is the revenue your ads produced divided by what the ads cost: a ROAS of 3 means $3 of sales came back for every $1 spent, before the cost of the product or anything else in the business.Read the entry

Schema markup (structured data)Schema markup, or structured data, is code added to a web page that labels its facts in a standard vocabulary from schema.org, such as a business's hours, a product's price or an event's date, so search engines can read them without guessing.Read the entry Search intentSearch intent is the goal behind a search, what the person wants to happen next, such as learning something, buying something, reaching a particular website or visiting a place; matching the page or ad to that goal decides whether a click becomes a customer.Read the entry Search terms reportThe search terms report in Google Ads lists the actual searches that triggered your ads and what each one cost, which can differ from the keywords you chose; it is where wasted spend shows up and where negative keywords come from.Read the entry Sessions and users (GA4)In Google Analytics 4, a session is a single visit to your site that ends after 30 minutes without activity, and a user is the browser or device that made the visit, so one person can count as several users and many sessions.Read the entry Smart BiddingSmart Bidding is the group of Google Ads bid strategies, Maximise conversions, Maximise conversion value, Target CPA and Target ROAS, that set a separate bid in every auction based on how likely that search is to lead to a conversion.Read the entry SMS marketingSMS marketing is sending marketing messages by text to customers and enquirers who have agreed to receive them, and in Australia the Spam Act 2003 requires consent, a sender who identifies the business, and a way to unsubscribe in every message.Read the entry Statistical significanceA test result is statistically significant when the difference between the versions is large enough, for the number of conversions counted, that it would rarely appear by chance if the versions performed the same; the usual bar is fewer than 1 time in 20.Read the entry

temperatureTemperature is a setting on an AI language model that controls how much randomness goes into choosing each next word: a low temperature makes it pick the most likely words, a higher one makes it vary more and take chances.Read the entry Title tag and meta descriptionA title tag is the page title written into a web page's code, which Google usually shows as the clickable headline of the search result; a meta description is a short summary in the code that Google may show as the text beneath it.Read the entry tokensTokens are the small pieces of text, often a whole short word or a fragment of a longer one, that an AI language model reads and writes, and they are the unit that model limits and prices are counted in.Read the entry training dataTraining data is the collection of text, images, audio and examples an AI model learns its patterns from before release, typically public web pages, licensed material and human-written examples, plus users' conversations where the app's settings allow it.Read the entry

UTM parametersUTM parameters are short tags added to the end of a link, such as utm_source=newsletter, that tell Google Analytics where a visitor came from, so visits and sales from an email, post or ad are credited to it instead of lumped in with direct traffic.Read the entry

value propositionA value proposition is a clear statement of the specific result a customer gets from buying from you, for whom, and why it is a better choice than the alternatives, written in words the customer would use.Read the entry Vision AI for marketingVision AI for marketing is AI that looks at the screens where your marketing lives (your ad accounts, your analytics, your website, your designs) and gives advice from what it sees; a narrower sense of vision AI, which usually means software that understands images and video.Read the entry voice AIVoice AI is artificial intelligence that listens to spoken language and replies in a spoken voice in real time, either by chaining speech recognition, a language model and speech synthesis, or by using one model that handles audio directly.Read the entry