Definition

The total amount of money thrown at advertising—basically your marketing budget burning in real-time.

Example Usage

We increased ad spend by 40% but only got 15% more conversions.

Origin

Marketing finance terminology

Fun Fact

Most companies waste 30-40% of ad spend on poor targeting and optimization

Source: Marketing budget and finance

Related Terms

Beginner

keyword stuffing

The now-penalized practice of cramming as many keywords as possible into content to manipulate search rankings, reflecting the quaint era when search engines were dumber than a bag of hammers. A relic of SEO's wild west days that occasionally still appears in content written by people who stopped learning in 2006.

📣 Marketing / Advertising
Advanced

Dark Social

Traffic that comes from private channels like texts and DMs where marketers can't track it, making it the speakeasy of social sharing. It sounds sinister, but it's really just your aunt forwarding articles in the family group chat.

📣 Marketing / Advertising
Intermediate

Impressions vs. Reach

Impressions = total times seen (if same person sees ad 5 times, that's 5 impressions); Reach = unique people (that same person counts as 1).

📣 Marketing / Advertising
Beginner

Viral

When content spreads across the internet faster than a rumor in a high school cafeteria. Every marketer wants their content to go viral, despite the fact that you can't plan virality any more than you can plan to be struck by lightning while winning the lottery.

📣 Marketing / Advertising
Advanced

real-time bidding

Automated auction-based ad buying where impressions are sold individually in milliseconds as pages load. High-frequency trading energy applied to banner ads, because markets apparently need to operate at inhuman speeds everywhere.

📣 Marketing / Advertising
Intermediate

Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)

The revenue generated for every dollar spent on advertising, assuming your attribution model isn't complete fiction.

📣 Marketing / Advertising

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