Marketing glossary

An experiment comparing two variants to see which performs better — valid only when each variant gets enough traffic (sample size) to reach statistical significance.

The decline in ad performance as the same audience sees a creative too many times — tracked through frequency, the average impressions per person.

The methodology for deciding which marketing touchpoints get credit when a customer converts — first-click, last-click, multi-touch, or model-based.

A contested PR metric that estimates the cost of buying earned coverage as paid advertising. Useful as a rough scale, widely criticised as a measure of value.

The accumulated value of a brand beyond its current revenue — the recognition, trust, and pricing power it carries into every future interaction.

The sales volume at which total revenue equals total cost and profit is zero — fixed costs ÷ contribution margin per unit. The floor every campaign has to clear.

Customer acquisition cost — the total sales and marketing spend divided by the number of new customers won in the same period.

The percentage of customers (or recurring revenue) that leaves the business in a given period — the single biggest determinant of LTV.

The share of impressions that result in a click — clicks ÷ impressions, as a percentage. The headline read on creative and targeting relevance.

The percentage of visitors or sessions that complete a desired action — conversions ÷ total. The hinge between traffic and revenue.

The fully-loaded cost of an event divided by a chosen outcome — attendees, qualified leads, or meetings. The efficiency metric for experiential and field marketing.

Cost per action (or acquisition) — ad spend divided by the number of actions, such as purchases or sign-ups. The bottom-line efficiency metric for performance media.

Cost per click — the average amount you pay each time someone clicks your ad. Calculated as ad spend ÷ clicks.

Cost per lead — ad spend divided by the number of leads captured. The headline acquisition-efficiency metric for B2B and considered-purchase marketing.

Cost per mille — the price to serve an ad 1,000 times. The baseline unit of cost for awareness and reach campaigns across display, video, social, and out-of-home.

Cost per view — ad spend divided by the number of video views. The pricing unit for video and connected-TV campaigns bought on a view basis.

The cost per 1,000 impressions for digital out-of-home — programmatic billboards and screens — where impressions are modelled from plays, screens, and audience data.

The return on investment from an email programme — revenue generated against the cost of running it. Consistently one of the highest-ROI channels in marketing.

The share of an audience that interacts with content — engagements divided by reach, followers, or impressions. The core measure of organic and influencer performance.

A description of the type of customer most likely to buy, stay, and refer — usually defined by industry, size, role, and a few qualifying behaviours.

How fees for influencers and key opinion leaders are set — benchmarked against reach (CPM) and engagement (cost per engagement) rather than follower count alone.

Customer lifetime value — the gross profit a single customer is expected to generate over the entire time they stay with a business.

Marketing-qualified lead — a lead that has crossed a defined engagement threshold, signalling enough intent for sales to follow up.

The deliberate choice of how a product wants to be understood — by whom, against which alternatives, and on what unique value.

A scannable 2D barcode that links the physical world to a URL — bridging out-of-home, print, packaging, and events into trackable digital journeys.

Return on ad spend — the revenue generated divided by the advertising spend used to generate it, within a fixed attribution window.

Net profit as a percentage of the cost that produced it — (revenue − cost) ÷ cost. The all-in profitability test for any spend.

A brand’s share of total category presence — mentions, spend, or impressions — against all competitors. A leading indicator of market share.

Sales-qualified lead — an MQL that a sales rep has actively qualified and accepted as worth pursuing, usually after a discovery call.

Tags appended to a URL — source, medium, campaign, term, content — that tell analytics tools where a visit came from. The backbone of campaign attribution.