Performance
Marketing Glossary

ACoS is the ratio of ad spend to revenue attributed to that spend, expressed as a percentage. Common in Amazon Ads and marketplace advertising as the primary profitability metric.

Attribution assigns credit for a conversion across the marketing touchpoints that contributed to it. Common models: last-click, first-click, linear, time-decay, and data-driven.

Customer Acquisition Cost is the fully-loaded spend required to acquire one paying customer, calculated as total acquisition spend divided by new customers in a period.

Cost Per Acquisition is the average ad spend per conversion event, typically counted within an ad platform. CPA is what ad platforms show; CAC is what your finance team sees.

Click-Through Rate is the percentage of ad impressions that result in a click. Calculated as (clicks / impressions) × 100. A leading indicator of creative relevance and audience targeting.

Incrementality is the revenue a marketing effort actually caused — the lift over what would have happened without it. Measured through geo holdouts, user-level holdouts, and synthetic control experiments.

Incremental ROAS is return on ad spend calculated against incremental revenue — the revenue the ads actually caused, not the revenue the platform claims credit for.

Customer Lifetime Value is the total gross profit a customer generates over their active relationship with the business. Paired with CAC to judge unit economics.

Marketing Mix Modeling is a statistical technique that estimates how much each marketing channel contributed to sales, using aggregated time-series data. The classical alternative to user-level attribution.

Return on Ad Spend is the ratio of revenue generated by ads to the ad spend, expressed as a multiplier. A ROAS of 4× means $4 of revenue for every $1 of ad spend.

Conversion Lift is Meta's native incrementality test — a randomized holdout that measures the incremental conversions ads caused, rather than the platform-attributed conversions.

A Cross-Channel AI Ad & SEO Copilot is an AI marketing agent that unifies paid advertising on multiple channels (Meta, Google, LinkedIn, Reddit) and SEO execution into a single workflow, keeping a human operator in control while automating the repetitive 80% of the work.

Dynamic Creative Optimization generates and tests ad creative variants automatically — swapping headlines, images, CTAs, and compositions — then shifts budget toward the variants performing best for each audience.

Retargeting shows ads to users who have already interacted with your brand — site visitors, cart abandoners, past buyers — using pixel or CAPI tracking. Usually the highest-ROAS slice of a paid media plan.

Vibe marketing is the marketing counterpart to vibe coding: you describe the outcome, tone and audience in plain language, and AI agents handle production, from creative and copy to targeting, launch and optimization.

Answer Engine Optimization is the practice of structuring web content so AI assistants like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews quote it directly as the answer to a user question.

Generative Engine Optimization is the practice of optimizing content so it is surfaced and cited by generative AI engines like Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and the web-search modes of ChatGPT and Claude.

llms.txt is an emerging plain-text file (served at /llms.txt) that tells large language models which pages, products, and facts a site wants cited in AI answers. Proposed by Answer.ai in 2024.

Meta Advantage+ is Meta's AI-automated campaign type that consolidates audiences, placements, and creatives into a single campaign optimized by Meta's machine-learning stack.

A connector is an AI vendor’s product name for a remote MCP server their assistant can reach over HTTPS. Claude connectors and ChatGPT custom connectors are the same underlying thing: a server you authorise with OAuth.

The Model Context Protocol is an open standard that lets an AI assistant discover and call tools in other software at runtime. Published by Anthropic on November 25, 2024 and now maintained in the open.

An MCP server is a program that publishes a list of actions an AI client can call, each with a name, a description and a JSON schema. Remote servers are reached by URL and OAuth; local ones are packages you install and run yourself.

Performance Max is Google's AI-automated campaign type that serves ads across Search, Shopping, YouTube, Display, Gmail, and Maps from a single campaign, optimizing for a single conversion goal.