Marketing analytics terms,
explained in plain English
57 terms every marketer, growth lead, and executive should know, from CAC and ROAS to attribution models and Core Web Vitals, organized by category.
Marketing analytics has more overlapping acronyms than almost any other business function: CAC and CPA measure similar things at different levels, CTR and CVR sound alike but track different stages of a funnel, and attribution models can make the same channel look completely different depending on which one is used. This glossary exists to make those distinctions clear in plain English, organized by the part of the funnel each term belongs to, from the first ad impression to a closed deal in a CRM.
Acquisition & Paid Media
The metrics that describe how efficiently a channel turns spend into clicks and leads, before revenue enters the picture at all.
CPC (Cost Per Click)
The amount spent for each click on an ad, calculated as total spend divided by total clicks. A core efficiency metric for Search and Shopping campaigns.
CPM (Cost Per Mille)
The cost of 1,000 ad impressions. Common in awareness-focused campaigns on Meta, LinkedIn, and video platforms where reach matters more than immediate clicks.
CPA (Cost Per Acquisition)
The cost to acquire one conversion, such as a purchase, signup, or lead, calculated as spend divided by conversions.
CPL (Cost Per Lead)
The cost to generate one lead, most commonly used for B2B channels like LinkedIn Ads where the immediate conversion is a form fill, not a purchase.
CTR (Click-Through Rate)
The percentage of impressions that result in a click, calculated as clicks divided by impressions. A key signal of ad and creative relevance.
Quality Score
Google Ads' 1-10 rating of ad relevance, expected click-through rate, and landing page experience, which directly influences cost per click and ad rank.
Impression Share
The percentage of available impressions an ad actually received, versus the total it was eligible for. Low impression share often signals a budget or bid constraint.
Frequency
The average number of times a single person sees an ad over a given period. Rising frequency alongside falling CTR is the classic signal of creative fatigue.
Reach
The number of unique people who saw an ad at least once, as distinct from impressions, which count every view including repeats.
Ad Rank
Google Ads' formula for determining an ad's position and whether it's shown at all, based on bid amount combined with Quality Score and expected impact of ad extensions.
Lookalike Audience
An audience Meta or another platform builds by finding new people who share characteristics with an existing seed audience, such as past customers.
Negative Keyword
A search term explicitly excluded from triggering an ad, used to prevent budget from being spent on clearly irrelevant searches.
Conversion & Revenue
Once a click or lead exists, these metrics describe whether it turned into something a business actually cares about: revenue and paying customers.
ROAS (Return on Ad Spend)
Revenue generated per dollar of ad spend, calculated as revenue divided by spend. A ROAS of 4 means $4 of revenue for every $1 spent.
ACOS (Advertising Cost of Sales)
The inverse of ROAS, common in Amazon Ads: ad spend as a percentage of the sales it generated. Lower ACOS means more efficient spend.
CVR (Conversion Rate)
The percentage of visitors, clicks, or sessions that complete a desired action, such as a purchase or signup.
CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost)
The total cost, across all channels, to acquire one paying customer. Unlike single-channel CPA, blended CAC accounts for the full acquisition budget.
LTV (Lifetime Value)
The total revenue a customer is expected to generate over the full length of their relationship with a business.
LTV:CAC Ratio
Lifetime value divided by customer acquisition cost. A ratio of 3:1 or higher is generally considered a healthy benchmark for sustainable growth.
Payback Period
The amount of time it takes for the revenue from a customer to cover the cost of acquiring them. Shorter payback periods mean capital is recovered and can be reinvested sooner.
AOV (Average Order Value)
The average amount spent each time a customer places an order, calculated as total revenue divided by number of orders.
Churn Rate
The percentage of customers or revenue lost over a given period, the inverse of retention, and a key input into calculating lifetime value.
Net Revenue Retention (NRR)
The percentage of recurring revenue retained from existing customers over a period, including expansion and downgrades, but excluding new customer revenue. Above 100% means existing customers are growing revenue faster than they're churning.
Attribution & Modeling
Attribution answers a harder question than any single metric: which channels actually deserve credit when a customer journey spans several of them.
First-Touch Attribution
A model that credits 100% of a conversion to the first channel or touchpoint a customer interacted with.
Last-Touch Attribution
A model that credits 100% of a conversion to the final channel or touchpoint before conversion. The default in many ad platform dashboards.
Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA)
A model that distributes credit for a conversion across every touchpoint in the customer journey, weighted by position, time, or influence.
Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM)
A statistical approach that measures the impact of marketing channels on outcomes using aggregate, historical data, often used alongside or instead of touch-level attribution.
Blended CAC
Customer acquisition cost calculated across all marketing channels combined, rather than any single channel in isolation.
Incrementality
The portion of conversions that would not have happened without a specific marketing activity, as opposed to conversions that would have occurred anyway.
Attribution Window
The time period after an ad interaction during which a conversion is still credited to that ad, such as a 7-day click or 1-day view window.
U-Shaped Attribution
A multi-touch model that gives 40% credit each to the first and last touchpoint, splitting the remaining 20% across everything in between.
Data-Driven Attribution
A model that uses machine learning on a platform's own historical conversion data to assign credit, rather than a fixed rule like first-touch or last-touch.
Website & Product Analytics
These describe what happens after someone lands on a site or opens a product, where acquisition metrics stop and behavioral metrics take over.
Engagement Rate
In GA4, the percentage of sessions that lasted longer than 10 seconds, had a conversion event, or had 2 or more page or screen views.
Bounce Rate
The percentage of sessions that were not engaged, meaning no conversion event, no additional page view, and a session under 10 seconds.
Funnel Drop-off
The point in a multi-step process, such as checkout or signup, where the largest share of users abandon before completing the flow.
Session
A group of user interactions with a website within a given time frame, typically ending after a period of inactivity.
Event
In GA4, any interaction tracked on a site or app, from an automatically collected page view to a custom-defined action like a button click.
Cohort Retention
The percentage of users from a specific acquisition period who return or remain active over subsequent time periods.
Exit Rate
The percentage of sessions that ended on a specific page, as distinct from bounce rate, which only counts sessions where that page was the only one viewed.
DAU/MAU Ratio
Daily active users divided by monthly active users, a common measure of product stickiness. A higher ratio means users return more frequently within a given month.
Activation
The point at which a new user experiences enough value in a product to be considered genuinely onboarded, distinct from simply signing up.
SEO & Search
Search-specific metrics that describe visibility and technical health, mostly sourced from Google Search Console rather than an analytics platform.
Impressions (Search Console)
The number of times a link to a page appeared in Google Search results for a user, whether or not it was clicked.
Average Position
The average ranking position of a page or query in Google Search results over a given period.
Core Web Vitals
Google's set of page experience metrics, including Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Interaction to Next Paint (INP), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), which factor into search ranking.
Crawled, Not Indexed
A Search Console status meaning Google visited a page but chose not to add it to the search index, often due to quality or duplication signals.
Organic Traffic
Visitors who arrive at a site through unpaid search engine results, as distinct from paid, direct, or referral traffic.
Keyword Cannibalization
When two or more pages on the same site compete for the same search query, typically causing both to rank worse than one consolidated page would.
Domain Authority
A third-party score, not an official Google metric, estimating how likely a site is to rank in search results based on its backlink profile and other signals.
Backlink
A link from another website pointing to a page on your site, historically one of the strongest ranking signals in search algorithms.
Canonical URL
The version of a page's URL that a site indicates as the primary one when duplicate or near-duplicate content exists at multiple addresses, telling search engines which version to index and rank.
Pipeline & B2B Metrics
For B2B teams, the journey doesn't end at a form fill. These metrics track what happens between a lead and a closed deal.
MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead)
A lead that has met marketing's criteria for readiness, such as engagement level or firmographic fit, but has not yet been vetted by sales.
SQL (Sales Qualified Lead)
A lead that sales has vetted and accepted as a legitimate opportunity to pursue, typically the stage after MQL.
Form Completion Rate
The percentage of people who start a lead capture form, such as a LinkedIn Lead Gen Form, and successfully submit it.
Pipeline
The total value of open sales opportunities being worked at a given time, often segmented by source or campaign for attribution purposes.
Win Rate
The percentage of sales opportunities that close as won, out of all opportunities that reached a decision, used to judge lead quality alongside volume.
Sales Cycle Length
The average time between a lead entering the pipeline and a deal closing, which directly informs how long an attribution window needs to be to fairly credit upper-funnel channels.
ABM (Account-Based Marketing)
A B2B strategy that targets marketing and sales efforts at a specific list of named accounts, rather than a broad audience, often measured by account engagement rather than individual leads.
Sales Velocity
A formula combining number of opportunities, average deal size, win rate, and sales cycle length into a single measure of how fast a pipeline generates revenue.
Ask these questions directly
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Frequently Asked Questions
What is marketing analytics? +
Marketing analytics is the practice of measuring, analyzing, and interpreting marketing performance data, spanning paid channels, website behavior, and revenue outcomes, to guide budget and strategy decisions.
What's the difference between marketing analytics and website analytics? +
Marketing analytics typically covers campaign and channel performance, such as ad spend and conversions. Website analytics focuses on on-site behavior, such as traffic, engagement, and funnels. Terno AI can query both together, since they're usually most useful combined.
Which attribution model should we use? +
It depends on the decision being made. Last-touch is simple and common for day-to-day optimization. Multi-touch gives a fairer view of upper-funnel channels for budget planning. Many teams compare more than one model side by side rather than picking a single one permanently.
Can Terno AI answer questions using these metrics directly? +
Yes. Terno AI computes these metrics on demand from your connected platforms and databases, so you can ask a question using this terminology and get a real, computed answer instead of a definition.
What's the difference between CAC and CPA? +
CPA is usually a single-channel metric, the cost per conversion on one platform. CAC is broader: the total cost to acquire one paying customer across every channel combined, which is why blended CAC is often higher than any individual channel's CPA.
Why do ROAS and ACOS measure the same idea differently? +
ROAS expresses efficiency as revenue per dollar spent, where higher is better. ACOS, common in Amazon Ads, expresses the same relationship inverted as spend per dollar of sales, where lower is better. They describe the same underlying performance from opposite directions.
Is a higher or lower LTV:CAC ratio always better? +
Higher is generally healthier, but an extremely high ratio can also signal underinvestment in growth. A commonly cited benchmark is 3:1 or higher, though the right target varies by business model and growth stage.
What's the difference between MQL and SQL? +
An MQL has met marketing's criteria for readiness, such as engagement or firmographic fit. An SQL has been reviewed and accepted by sales as a legitimate opportunity. The MQL to SQL conversion rate is a common measure of lead quality.
What's the difference between engagement rate and bounce rate? +
They're near opposites. Engagement rate is the percentage of sessions that met GA4's engagement criteria, like lasting over 10 seconds. Bounce rate is the percentage that didn't, making it roughly the inverse of engagement rate.
Why do CPC and CPM apply to different types of campaigns? +
CPC ties cost directly to a click, which suits performance campaigns optimizing for direct response. CPM ties cost to reach regardless of clicks, which suits awareness campaigns where the goal is visibility rather than an immediate action.
Why does this glossary include both marketing and website analytics terms? +
In practice, marketing and website performance are usually judged together: a channel's real value depends on what happens after the click, and a page's ranking or engagement often depends on which channel sent the traffic. Keeping both in one place reflects how the questions actually get asked.
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