Glossary

The average number of times a single user sees your ad within a given time period.

The percentage of visitors who land on a page and leave without any further action.

The percentage of users who complete a desired action after clicking your ad.

The total ad cost to acquire one customer or conversion.

The amount you pay each time someone clicks your ad.

The cost per 1,000 ad impressions.

The amount paid each time a viewer watches your video ad.

The percentage of people who click your ad after seeing it.

The percentage of people who interact with your ad out of total impressions.

The total number of times your ad was displayed, counting every repeat view.

The percentage of visitors to your landing page who complete the desired action.

The number of unique people who saw your ad at least once during a campaign.

Revenue generated for every dollar spent on advertising.

The percentage of viewers who watch your video ad to completion.

The percentage of viewers who watch a video ad to completion without clicking, and convert later.

The average revenue per order across a defined period.

The total gross-profit a customer contributes over their lifetime with the brand.

The total marketing cost to acquire one new customer.

Contribution profit generated per dollar of ad spend.

Total revenue divided by total marketing spend at the account level.

Total attributed revenue across all paid channels divided by total paid spend.

The revenue that would not have happened without ads, per dollar of ad spend.

The ad spend required to generate one lead.

The ad spend to acquire one mobile app install.

The share of email opens that produce a click.

Average revenue generated per site visitor.

The share of product views that add the item to cart.

The share of checkouts started that don't complete.

Revenue remaining per order after all variable costs.

Average number of items per completed order.

Net profit relative to total investment, expressed as a percentage.

Gross revenue minus refunds, returns, discounts, and chargebacks.

The average number of times a user sees an ad or campaign.

The score that decides which ads win auctions and in what position.

The share of exposed users who remember seeing an ad within a defined window.

Google Ads' 1–10 estimate of an ad's expected CTR, ad relevance, and landing-page experience.

Average times each unique user is exposed to your ads in a period.

The share of viewers still watching a video past a defined threshold.

Change in awareness, recall, favourability, or intent attributable to ad exposure.

Reaches people based on their actual actions — pages browsed, products viewed, purchases made.

An audience that has never engaged with your brand before.

Ads are placed based on the content of the page being viewed rather than data about the user.

A targeting option that lets you reach people who have already interacted with your business.

Information a business collects directly from its own audience through owned channels.

The bottom-of-funnel audience with the highest buying intent.

Reaches users based on their hobbies, behaviors, and interests as inferred by platforms.

An audience built to share characteristics with an existing high-value segment.

Showing ads to users who have previously visited your website or engaged with your brand.

Mid-funnel audience that has engaged with your brand but hasn't purchased yet.

Grouping users by shared traits or behaviors so you can target and message each group differently.

Reaches users whose signals indicate near-term purchase intent.

Targeting that lets the platform find buyers without interest, behavior, or demographic constraints.

Scheduling ads to run only at specific times or days of the week.

Targeting users when they enter, exit, or occupy a defined geographic area.

Terms that exclude a query from triggering your search ads.

The written text within an ad, including headlines, descriptions, and CTAs.

The proportional relationship between an ad's width and height.

A locked set of colors, fonts, logos, and rules that every creative must follow.

The instruction telling the user what to do next.

An ad format displaying multiple cards, each with its own image, headline, and link.

The document that aligns strategy, message, format, and specs before production starts.

When an ad's performance drops because the audience has seen it too many times.

Ads that automatically pull products from your feed and personalize to each user.

The first 1–3 seconds of an ad that decides whether the viewer keeps watching.

A structured file of your catalog used by ad platforms for dynamic ads and shopping.

The area inside a creative where UI won't cover important content.

A single-frame image ad without motion or video.

A frame-by-frame sketch of a video ad before it's produced.

The still frame representing a video before playback.

Content created by real customers or creators, used natively in ads.

A static or motion ad that mimics native platform UI elements to blend into the feed.

An ad delivered in video form — from 6-second bumpers to 60-second stories.

The plain white product-on-white treatment used for catalog and marketplace listings.

Content visible on screen before the user scrolls.

Content that only becomes visible after the user scrolls.

The main visual above the fold on a page or ad.

Feed fields you define to group products by margin, season, lifecycle, or any custom attribute.

The structured fields describing each SKU in your feed.

A structured list of your SKUs and their attributes used to run product ads.

A named subset of your product catalog for targeting and reporting.

The file or API that pushes your SKUs and attributes into ad platforms.

Animation and typographic movement used to communicate quickly in ads.

The page ad traffic arrives at, designed to convert that specific traffic.

A predicted quality score for a creative before it launches.

The structured process of comparing ad variants to find winners.

Analytics that tag creative attributes so you can slice performance by content, not just campaign.

The workflows, tooling, and roles that let teams produce creative at scale.

Turning brand rules and templates into automatically generated ad variants at scale.

Creative assets produced by generative models — images, video, copy — from a brief or product data.

How often new creative is introduced to a campaign to counter fatigue.

A creative asset that consistently outperforms the account benchmark.

The percentage of viewers who watch past the first 3 seconds of a video.

Using templates and data to generate many ad variants quickly.

Systematically improving ads through structured testing and data.

Product ads built from templates and catalog data, on-brand and high-performing.

Ads whose elements are swapped or assembled at delivery to match user and placement.

A public archive of ads a brand is currently running on a platform.

Structured review of how rivals position, price, and promote in-market.

The percentage of category ad presence a brand owns versus competitors.

A structured breakdown of why a specific ad works or fails.

The industry-average performance number used to compare against your own.

A structured analysis of a competitor's creative strategy across their ad library.

Monitoring where and how a brand is mentioned online across social, press, and reviews.

Estimated ad spend by competitors, inferred from placements, impressions, and third-party trackers.

The community and newsletter for brands running catalog ads.

A controlled experiment comparing two variants to measure which performs better.

The model that assigns credit for a conversion to one or more marketing touchpoints.

The revenue a channel actually caused that wouldn't have happened otherwise.

An experiment that withholds ads from a subset of users to measure incremental impact.

An experiment that tests multiple variables at once to find the best combination.

The confidence that an observed result isn't due to chance.

The baseline audience in a test that receives no treatment or the current default.

The time period after ad exposure during which conversions are counted.

Attribution that credits ads that were seen but not clicked.

Attribution that only credits ads the user actually clicked before converting.

Assigns 100% of conversion credit to the first touchpoint in a customer's journey.

Assigns 100% of credit to the last touchpoint before conversion.

Distributes conversion credit across multiple touchpoints in a journey.

A survey-based experiment measuring how ads change brand awareness, recall, or favorability.

A statistical model that estimates the impact of each marketing channel on total sales.

Full-screen vertical ad placements between organic Stories on Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat.

Vertical short-form video placements on Instagram and Facebook.

In-line ads that appear within a platform's main scrolling feed.

Video ads that play before, during, or after streaming video content.

Sponsored content designed to match the look and feel of surrounding editorial content.

Banner-style image or HTML5 ads served across the open web.

Text-based ads triggered by keyword queries on search engines.

Product-focused ads with image, price, and merchant, served on search and shopping surfaces.

A mobile ad format combining a hero image or video with a grid of product tiles below.

A TikTok ad format that promotes existing organic posts as paid ads.

Platform-managed delivery across many placements with automatic asset selection.

A container for ads that share targeting, bid, and placements.

Meta's term for the layer between campaign and ad, where targeting and budget live.

Product ads that show the plain catalog image without a designed template.

Running the same product catalog across Meta, TikTok, Pinterest, Snap, and CTV with unified templates.

Product feed-driven ads served on connected TV.

A placement showing ads from multiple brands together in a single unit.

Short (usually 6-second) non-skippable video ads used mainly on YouTube.

Video ads that play before video content starts.

Video ads that play during video content — usually at natural breaks.

Video ads that play after content finishes.

Video ads that play in non-video placements — in-article, in-feed.

Ads that match the form and function of the platform they appear on.

Image and video ads served across a network of websites and apps.

Facebook and Instagram advertising across feed, stories, reels, and audience network.

Google's ad ecosystem — search, shopping, display, YouTube, and Performance Max.

Advertising on TikTok — in-feed, Spark Ads, TopView, and Branded Effects.

Video advertising on YouTube — TrueView, bumpers, in-stream, and Shorts.

Advertising on Pinterest — promoted pins, video pins, and shopping ads.

Advertising on Snapchat — Snap Ads, Story Ads, Collection Ads, and AR Lenses.

B2B-focused advertising on LinkedIn — sponsored content, InMail, and lead gen forms.

The end-to-end path from first exposure to conversion, split into stages.

A top-of-funnel campaign optimising for reach, video views, or brand lift.

A mid-funnel campaign optimising for engagement, video views, or landing page views.

A bottom-of-funnel campaign optimising for purchases, leads, or signups.

Post-purchase marketing to keep customers coming back and increase LTV.

A continuously running campaign that maintains presence outside of tentpole moments.

A campaign built around a specific season, holiday, or tentpole moment.

How the platform values conversions relative to spend when bidding in auctions.

The platform allocates a single campaign budget across ad sets automatically.

System that suggests products to users based on behavior and product attributes.

Meta's campaign objective for driving purchases through catalog ads.

The suite of platform tools Meta offers advertisers — Ads Manager, Business Manager, Advantage+, Catalog.

Meta's central hub for managing ad accounts, pixels, catalogs, and user permissions.

The peak ecommerce promotional period spanning late November.

Setting and hitting revenue-per-dollar targets that reflect your true margins.

Exporting the right aspect ratio for each placement — 1:1, 4:5, 9:16, 16:9 — so nothing gets cropped.

Square format, historically Instagram feed's default, still strong across feed placements.

Vertical feed format — takes 25% more screen real estate than 1:1 on mobile.

Full-screen vertical format for Reels, Stories, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts.

Horizontal landscape format — native to YouTube, CTV, and desktop video.

The legacy widescreen aspect ratio used for Facebook link-preview cards.

Cinematic ultra-wide ratio, native to some CTV and premium placements.

Wide format used in some B2B feeds and hero banners.

The recommended vertical ratio for Pinterest pins — 1000×1500.

Classic photography ratio, works for photography-first ads and Google Shopping.

Classic TV/print ratio — 1024×768. Rarely optimal for modern digital ads.

A quick reference for converting between ad aspect ratios and pixel sizes.

Reference for where UI chrome sits so you keep text and logos visible on every placement.

Non-destructive methods for adapting creative between ratios using padding, background extension, and smart crop.

When to accept bars top/bottom (letterbox) or side (pillarbox), and when to avoid both.

Ratio is the shape; resolution is how many pixels fill it.

The recommended aspect ratios for Facebook feed, story, reels, and marketplace placements.

The recommended ratios for Instagram feed, reels, stories, and explore.

The recommended ratios for LinkedIn single image, video, and carousel ads.

2:3 vertical is Pinterest's native and highest-performing ratio.

9:16 full-screen vertical is the only ratio that fits Snapchat's UI cleanly.

9:16 native vertical consistently outperforms cropped or letterboxed formats.

X supports 16:9 landscape and 1:1 square best; 2:1 works for image ads.

16:9 for in-stream and TrueView; 9:16 for Shorts.

A digital marketplace where buyers and sellers of ad inventory transact in real time.

Software that stores, serves, and tracks ad creatives across sites and apps.

A company that aggregates inventory from many publishers and resells it to advertisers.

Software advertisers use to buy digital ad inventory programmatically across many exchanges.

Software publishers use to sell their ad inventory programmatically to many buyers.

System that collects, organises, and activates audience data for advertising.

The auction process that matches bids to impressions in milliseconds.

Streaming video content delivered over the internet, bypassing traditional TV distribution.

Automated buying of ad inventory using software rather than direct sales.

The advertiser-side practice of buying inventory through DSPs and exchanges.

The tracking snippet that lets Meta measure and optimise ads based on site actions.

Server-to-server API for sending conversion events to Meta (and other platforms).

A tracking snippet that fires when a key user action (purchase, lead) happens.

Snapchat's site-side conversion tracking pixel.

Google's event-based analytics platform, the successor to Universal Analytics.

Tag management system that deploys tracking snippets without code changes.