Where every click is a journey and every impression counts.
Inactive accounts or deleted user profiles that persist in analytics and reporting, inflating your actual user base. They're the ghost accounts that haunt your CAC calculations.
What you pay each time someone completes a specific action—purchase, signup, download, etc. It's the advertiser's way of only paying for results that actually matter.
Testing different ad designs, videos, images, or messaging to see what resonates. Like A/B testing but for the actual advertisement itself.
Google's proposed replacement for third-party cookies using privacy-preserving technologies like Federated Learning of Cohorts. It's a sandbox for you, not for your data.
A person who bears such a striking physical resemblance to someone famous that they're hired to impersonate them at parties, or followed by confused paparazzi. The budget version of celebrity cloning.
A video of someone opening and reviewing a product, turned into a genuine marketing channel that somehow became an entire genre. It's the TikTok phenomenon where people watch others open packages.
Brief windows when someone's intent to act is highest—catching them right when they're deciding to buy, search, or share.
A word or phrase preceded by '#' that categorizes content and enables discoverability on social media. A democratic tagging system that devolved into corporate spam within five years.
The concept that human attention is a scarce resource that competing ads fight over—making advertising increasingly expensive just to be noticed.
A minimal landing page focused entirely on capturing email addresses, stripping away everything but the value proposition and email field. It's the landing page that pretends to have no other agenda.
When someone actually does what you want—buy, sign up, call—the rare moment that justifies your entire marketing spend.
Overwhelming someone or a system with excessive volume of something—be it data, requests, marketing messages, or literal water. The goal is saturation; the result is usually chaos or capitulation.
The carefully curated visual representation of a person, brand, or product designed to manipulate your perception and make you like them. Sometimes it bears zero resemblance to reality.
The percentage of people who see your ad and actually click it, calculated as clicks divided by impressions. It's the metric that separates ads people tolerate from ads people actively ignore.
The cost to display your ad to 1,000 people, regardless of whether they click it. The advertiser's relationship with a brick wall—you pay to exist, whether anyone looks or not.
The distinct set of psychological and social characteristics that define an individual or brand—what makes you, well, you. In marketing, it's the carefully curated persona that sells the product alongside the product itself.
A person engaged in the act of purchasing goods—the lifeblood of retail. Also, the name for those coupon-laden community newspapers that somehow end up in everyone's mailbox.
Google's targeting option for people with demonstrated interests in specific topics. Less creepy than behavioral targeting, only slightly.
A 1x1 invisible image or JavaScript code placed on websites to track user behavior, conversions, and retargeting data. The tiny digital footprint that creates a giant surveillance network.
Showing ads to people who have already visited your website but didn't convert—digital stalking with a polite veneer and a display network budget.
Stock Keeping Unit - a unique identifier for a product variant, crucial for inventory and sales tracking. It's the number that makes you realize you have 247 'different' versions of the same thing.
Giving credit for a conversion to multiple marketing touchpoints rather than just the last click. It's acknowledging that marketing is a journey, not a moment.
Marketing touchpoints occurring outside traditional tracking channels (dark social, word-of-mouth, offline conversations) that influence conversions but remain invisible to analytics. The conversion credit you'll never get.
Something that was already made by someone else and is therefore available for immediate use without your input. In fashion, it's the alternative to custom tailoring; in business, it's the escape route from actually thinking about originality.