Every marketing term, in plain English.

Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who complete a desired action, calculated as conversions divided by total visitors or clicks.

CPA is the average cost to acquire one paying customer (or completed action), calculated as spend divided by conversions.

CPC is the average amount you pay each time someone clicks your ad, calculated as total spend divided by clicks.

CPL is the average cost to generate one lead, calculated as total ad spend divided by the number of leads collected.

CPM is the cost to show your ad 1,000 times, calculated as total spend divided by impressions, multiplied by 1,000.

CTR is the percentage of people who click your ad after seeing it, calculated as clicks divided by impressions.

Frequency is the average number of times each person saw your ad, calculated as impressions divided by reach.

An impression is counted each time your ad is displayed on screen, regardless of whether the same person sees it more than once.

Reach is the number of unique people who saw your ad at least once during a given time period.

ROAS is the revenue generated for every dollar of ad spend, calculated as conversion revenue divided by ad spend.

Advantage+ audience is Meta's AI-driven targeting that treats your audience inputs as suggestions and expands delivery to likely converters.

An audience is the defined group of people your ads are eligible to reach, built from location, demographics, interests, behaviors, or your own data.

Behavioral targeting reaches people based on actions and patterns — purchase behavior, device usage, travel, or life events — rather than stated interests.

Broad targeting gives Meta minimal audience constraints — often just location, age, and gender — and relies on the algorithm to find buyers.

A cold audience is people who have never interacted with your business and are encountering your brand for the first time.

A core audience is a targeting group built from Meta's own data — location, age, gender, interests, and behaviors — rather than from your customer lists.

A custom audience is a targeting group built from your own data, such as a customer email list, website visitors, or people who engaged with your content.

First-party data is information you collect directly from your own customers and prospects, such as email addresses, phone numbers, and purchase history.

A frequency cap limits how many times the same person can be shown your ad within a set time period.

Geotargeting restricts your ads to people in specific locations — a country, city, ZIP code, or a radius around an address.

Interest targeting reaches people based on topics, pages, and activities Meta has associated with them, such as 'yoga' or 'small business owners'.

A lookalike audience is a group Meta builds to resemble an existing source audience, finding new people who share traits with your best customers.

Prospecting is advertising to new, cold audiences to find people who have never engaged with your business.

Retargeting is showing ads to people who have already interacted with your business — visited your site, watched a video, or engaged with your page.

A warm audience is people who already know your business through prior visits, engagement, or contact — as opposed to cold strangers.

Attribution is the process of crediting conversions to the ads, clicks, or impressions that led to them, determining which marketing earned the result.

An attribution window is the time period after a click or view during which a resulting conversion is credited to the ad.

Bot traffic is non-human website activity from crawlers, scrapers, and automated scripts that inflates analytics and wastes ad budget.

Call tracking assigns unique phone numbers to each ad, campaign, or channel so you know exactly which marketing made the phone ring.

A click ID is a unique code (like fbclid or gclid) that ad platforms append to your URL so a visit can be traced back to the exact ad click.

A click-through conversion is credited when someone clicks your ad and then completes a conversion within the click attribution window.

Consent mode adjusts how tracking tags behave based on a visitor's cookie-consent choice, using modeled data to fill gaps when tracking is declined.

The Conversions API sends conversion events to Meta directly from your server, supplementing the browser pixel for more complete and reliable tracking.

Event deduplication prevents Meta from double-counting a conversion that is reported by both the browser pixel and the Conversions API.

Global Privacy Control is a browser signal that automatically tells every website a visitor opts out of the sale or sharing of their personal data.

A heatmap is a visual overlay showing where visitors click, tap, and scroll on a page, with warm colors marking the busiest areas.

Identity resolution connects scattered signals — devices, emails, phone numbers, clicks, and visits — into a single unified profile of one person.

An intent score is a number rating how likely a visitor or lead is to buy, based on behavior like pages viewed, time spent, and actions taken.

iOS 14's App Tracking Transparency requires apps to ask users for permission before tracking them, which sharply reduced the data Meta can use for ad targeting and measurement.

The Meta Pixel is a snippet of code on your website that tracks visitor actions and sends them back to Meta for measurement and ad optimization.

Offline conversions are sales that happen away from your website — calls, store visits, signed contracts — uploaded back to ad platforms for credit.

Session replay is a recording of a real visitor's journey through your website — scrolls, clicks, taps, and hesitations — played back like a video.

A standard event is a predefined action the Meta Pixel can track, such as Lead, Purchase, AddToCart, or CompleteRegistration.

A third-party cookie is a tracking file set by a domain other than the site being visited, historically used to follow people across the web.

UTM parameters are tags added to a URL that tell analytics tools where a visitor came from — the source, medium, and campaign that brought them.

A view-through conversion is credited when someone sees your ad without clicking it, then converts within the view attribution window.

Ad creative is the visual and written content of an ad — the image or video, the headline, and the copy that capture attention and communicate the offer.

Ad fatigue is the decline in ad performance that occurs when an audience has seen the same creative too many times.

A carousel ad is a single ad that lets people swipe through multiple images or videos, each with its own headline and link.

A collection ad pairs a main image or video with a grid of products beneath it, opening into a full-screen Instant Experience when tapped.

A hook is the opening moment of an ad — the first image, line, or few seconds of video — designed to stop the scroll and capture attention.

Reels are short, vertical, full-screen videos on Instagram and Facebook, and a fast-growing placement for native-feeling video ads.

A single image ad is the simplest Meta ad format — one static image paired with headline and text — fast to produce and easy to test.

Stories ads are full-screen vertical ads that appear between users' Stories on Instagram and Facebook, lasting a few seconds before auto-advancing.

UGC is content that looks like it was made by a real customer or everyday person rather than a brand, used in ads to feel authentic and trustworthy.

A video ad is an ad built around moving footage, used to demonstrate, tell a story, or build emotional connection more powerfully than a static image.

An A/B test compares two versions of an ad or page that differ in one element, splitting traffic between them to see which performs better.

An AI receptionist is an AI-powered agent that answers calls or chats for a business around the clock, booking appointments and capturing leads.

A call to action is the prompt telling people exactly what to do next — 'Book Now', 'Call Today', 'Get a Quote' — on an ad, button, or page.

Chatbot lead capture uses an automated chat widget to greet website visitors, answer questions, and collect contact details around the clock.

A conversion is a completed action you've defined as valuable — a purchase, form submission, call, or booking — tracked back to your marketing.

A landing page is a standalone web page built for one campaign and one action, where ad traffic is sent to convert.

A lead is a person who has shown interest in your business and shared contact information — a name, phone number, or email you can follow up with.

A lead form is a native Meta form that opens inside Facebook or Instagram, pre-filled with the user's info, so people can submit without leaving the app.

A marketing funnel is the staged path from stranger to customer — awareness, consideration, conversion — with fewer people at each step down.

AI Overviews are Google's AI-generated answers at the top of search results, summarizing sources before any traditional links appear.

Answer engine optimization structures your content so AI assistants, voice search, and featured snippets can extract direct answers from it.

CAC is the total cost to acquire one new customer, including ad spend and all sales and marketing expenses, divided by customers won.

Generative engine optimization is the practice of making your content likely to be cited in AI-generated answers from tools like ChatGPT and Google.

llms.txt is a proposed standard file at a website's root that gives AI crawlers a clean, curated summary of the site's most important content.

The local pack is the block of three map-pinned business listings Google shows for searches with local intent, above the regular organic results.

LTV is the total revenue (or profit) a customer generates over the entire span of their relationship with your business.

NAP consistency means your business name, address, and phone number appear identically everywhere they're listed online.

Review velocity is the rate at which a business earns new customer reviews — a freshness signal for local rankings and buyer trust.

Speed to lead is how fast you respond to a new inquiry — responding within minutes dramatically raises the odds a lead becomes a customer.

Value-based bidding optimizes ad delivery toward the highest-value conversions rather than the highest number of conversions.

The ad auction is the real-time process where Meta decides which ad each person sees, weighing bid, estimated action rate, and ad quality.

Campaign budget optimization sets one budget at the campaign level and lets Meta shift spend automatically toward the best-performing ad sets.

Google Analytics 4 is Google's free analytics platform that tracks who visits your website, where they came from, and what they do there.

Google Business Profile is the free listing that controls how your business appears in Google Search and Maps — hours, photos, reviews, and posts.

The learning phase is the period after launching or editing an ad set when Meta's algorithm is still working out who converts, so results are volatile.

Local Services Ads are Google's pay-per-lead ads for local service providers, shown at the very top of search with a Google Guaranteed badge.

Performance Max is a Google Ads campaign type that runs one campaign across Search, Maps, YouTube, Gmail, and Display using goal-based automation.

A placement is a specific location where your ad can appear — Facebook feed, Instagram Stories, Reels, Messenger, or the Audience Network.

Quality ranking is Meta's diagnostic grading your ad's perceived quality against other ads competing for the same audience.

Accounts payable is money your business owes suppliers and vendors for goods or services already received but not yet paid for.

Accounts receivable is money customers owe you for work already delivered but not yet paid for.

Cash accounting records money when it moves; accrual accounting records it when it is earned or owed, regardless of when it is paid.

A balance sheet is a snapshot of what your business owns, what it owes, and what is left over for the owners on a specific date.

A cash flow statement tracks the actual money moving in and out of your business over a period, separate from profit on paper.

A chart of accounts is the master list of every category your business records money into — each income, expense, asset, liability, and equity bucket.

Cost of goods sold is the direct cost of delivering what you sold — materials, products, and the labor tied to the job itself.

The general ledger is the complete record of every transaction your business has posted, organized by account.

Gross margin is the share of revenue left after the direct cost of delivering it, expressed as a percentage.

A marketing P&L is a profit and loss view of your advertising: the revenue your campaigns produced in a period, minus ad spend, agency fees, and the cost of delivering what you sold, ending with the profit or loss the marketing actually made.

The monthly close is the routine of finishing a month's books — categorizing everything, reconciling every account, and finalizing the reports.

Reconciliation is the monthly check that your books match your bank and card statements — same transactions, same ending balance.