Performance Advertising

A digital marketplace where publishers and advertising buyers transact ad inventory, commonly through automated auctions.

Deliberate activity that generates invalid advertising impressions, clicks, conversions or other events for financial or competitive gain.

A platform that stores, selects, delivers and measures digital advertising creative across websites, apps or other channels.

A defined method for assigning credit for a conversion or outcome across marketing interactions and channels.

Bounce rate is the percentage of sessions classified as non-engaged by a specific analytics platform; in Google Analytics 4, it is the inverse of engagement rate.

The policies and controls used to reduce the risk that advertising appears beside content or in contexts that could harm a brand.

Category Entry Points are internal or external cues—such as needs, motives, occasions, or situations—that buyers use to retrieve a product or service category and possible brands from memory.

The percentage of eligible impressions that produced a click, calculated as clicks divided by impressions multiplied by 100.

Consent Mode is a Google tag-platform feature that adjusts tag and app-SDK behaviour according to a user’s consent choices.

Conversion design is the practice of designing an experience so that people can understand, evaluate, and complete a defined valuable action with minimal avoidable friction.

Conversion lift is the incremental increase in conversions caused by an intervention, estimated by comparing outcomes for an exposed treatment group with a comparable unexposed control group.

Conversion rate is the proportion of eligible visits, users, interactions, leads, or opportunities that complete a defined conversion during a stated period.

Cost per acquisition is the average measured spend required to generate a defined acquisition, calculated as included cost divided by attributed acquisitions.

Cost per click is the amount paid for, or average cost allocated to, each recorded advertising click.

Cost per lead is the average included marketing cost required to generate a lead that meets a stated capture or qualification rule.

Cost per mille (CPM) is the advertising cost for one thousand recorded ad impressions.

Cross-device tracking links activity from two or more devices to the same person, household or profile.

Customer acquisition cost (CAC) is the average sales and marketing cost incurred to acquire a new customer during a defined period.

The projected total net revenue a business expects to earn from a single customer account across the entire duration of their relationship.

A platform used by advertisers or agencies to buy and optimise digital advertising inventory across exchanges and publishers.

Publicity, mentions, links or exposure gained through third-party editorial attention, recommendation or sharing rather than purchased placement.

A Google Ads measurement feature that uses consented, hashed first-party conversion data to improve conversion matching.

A control that limits how often an individual or identifier is eligible to receive an advertisement within a defined period.

Impression share is the percentage of impressions an advertisement receives compared with the estimated number of impressions it was eligible to receive.

Inbound marketing is a practice for attracting and helping prospective customers through useful, relevant content and experiences rather than relying only on unsolicited outreach.

Incrementality is the additional outcome caused by an intervention compared with the outcome that would have occurred without it.

Lead generation is the process of attracting prospective buyers and obtaining sufficient permission or information to begin a measurable commercial relationship.

Marketing attribution is the assignment of credit for a conversion or other outcome to marketing touchpoints along a measured customer path.

Paid advertising designed to match the format and user experience of the surrounding publisher or platform content while remaining identifiable as advertising.

The process of sending conversions completed outside an advertising platform back to that platform for measurement and optimisation.

Advertising delivered in public or shared physical environments, including billboards, transit media and digital displays.

Advertising in search-engine results where advertisers bid or pay for eligible placements associated with queries or audiences.

Paid advertising distributed through social-media platforms using platform targeting, placement and optimisation systems.

An advertising pricing model in which the advertiser is charged when a user clicks an advertisement.

The automated buying, selling and optimisation of digital advertising inventory using platforms, data and real-time decisioning.

A diagnostic Google Ads measure of the comparative quality and relevance of an ad, keyword and landing-page experience.

An auction process in which individual digital ad impressions are offered and bid on in near real time.

Advertising-attributed revenue divided by advertising cost, usually expressed as a ratio or percentage.

A platform used by publishers to manage, offer and optimise digital advertising inventory across buyers and exchanges.

A unique selling proposition is a specific, defensible reason a defined customer should choose one offer rather than its alternatives.

A Urchin Tracking Module parameter is a standardised utm_-prefixed query parameter added to a destination URL so analytics tools can classify campaign traffic.

User-generated content is material created and shared by customers, community members, or other users rather than produced solely by the organisation publishing or featuring it.

A view-through conversion is a conversion attributed to an ad impression when the person did not click or otherwise interact with that ad before converting within a defined window.

Website cookies are small name–value records that a web server asks a user agent to store and return with eligible HTTP requests to maintain state.