Forty-Eight Terms
You Will Hear
On The Call.
Performance marketing runs on abbreviations, and most of them are used loosely. Here is what each one actually means — written plainly, so you can tell whether somebody is explaining or hiding.
The first time a newly registered customer puts money into an account. The point where acquisition produced revenue rather than a contact record. In gambling, betting, crypto and trading, this is the number worth being judged on.
More on this →Any deposit after the first. Measures whether the customer you acquired stayed, which is a retention question rather than an acquisition one — and frequently the difference between a profitable account and a busy one.
A lead that meets agreed criteria for being worth a sales team calling: budget, authority, market, product fit. A raw lead is a name, a phone number, an email and sometimes a country. The two are priced very differently for good reason.
What one completed action cost you. Useful only once you have defined which action — a registration and a deposit are both acquisitions and the gap between their costs can be enormous.
What one lead cost. Cheap CPL with no sales behind it is the most common way a campaign looks successful and produces nothing.
Total revenue a customer produces before they stop. Sets the ceiling on what you can afford to pay to acquire one, which is why any conversation about cost without LTV is guesswork.
Revenue divided by advertising cost. A ratio of 2.65 means every pound spent returned two pounds sixty-five in revenue — before margin, which is a different and less flattering number.
What a typical order is worth. Raising it is frequently cheaper than acquiring more customers, and almost always faster.
Total revenue divided by users. Common in gambling, subscriptions and apps where customers pay repeatedly rather than once.
The share of visitors who complete the action you care about. Meaningless without naming the action — a page can have an excellent form conversion rate and produce no deposits at all.
The specific action that produces revenue in your business: a first deposit, a qualified lead or a sale. Everything upstream exists to cause it, and anything optimised toward something else is optimised toward the wrong thing.
More on this →Cost per thousand impressions. What you pay to appear, regardless of whether anybody looked. This is why an advert nobody stopped for still costs money.
Cost per click. Easy to reduce and easy to mistake for progress — cheaper clicks from worse people is a downgrade, not a saving.
Clicks divided by impressions. Measures whether the creative and the copy worked together, and nothing about whether the visitor was any good.
How many people stayed past the opening seconds of a video, or stopped at all on a static image. Purely the creative doing its job, before copy or offer have had any influence.
More on this →How many watched a video to the end. A strong hook with a weak hold usually means the opening promised something the rest did not deliver.
The period where a delivery system gathers enough conversion events to stabilise. Too few events and it never leaves — which is the practical limit on optimising toward rare events like deposits.
More on this →The retrieval stage of Meta ads delivery across Facebook, Instagram and Threads. Narrows an enormous pool of eligible adverts down to those worth considering for a given person. Fail here and budget cannot rescue you.
More on this →The ranking stage of Meta ads delivery. Decides which of the surviving adverts a person actually sees, improving from the outcomes reported back to it.
More on this →An audience built by finding people who resemble a source list you supplied. Only as good as the source — a lookalike of poor customers finds more poor customers, efficiently.
Advertising to people who already interacted with you. Cheaper per conversion and permanently mistaken for a growth channel, when it mostly harvests demand created elsewhere.
Average number of times one person saw your advert. Rising frequency with falling results is the clearest signal that creative has fatigued.
Budget set at campaign level and distributed across ad sets by the platform. The alternative, ABO, sets budgets per ad set and keeps control with you.
The point where an audience has seen a creative enough times to stop responding. Arrives faster on TikTok than anywhere else, and slower in narrow B2B audiences.
More on this →A small piece of code on a page that reports visitor actions back to an advertising platform. Where it sits decides what the platform learns, which is why its placement matters more than almost any setting.
More on this →The specific action you tell a platform counts as success. Report a shallow one and the system gets extremely good at producing shallow ones.
More on this →Sending events from your own server instead of the visitor browser. You control what is transmitted, so the platform receives a signal that something valuable happened rather than access to your database.
A server-to-server notification confirming a conversion happened, typically carrying an identifier rather than personal data. Standard in affiliate and restricted verticals where browser tracking is unreliable or unsafe.
Deciding which channel gets credit for a sale. Every model is wrong in a different direction, and choosing one changes which channels appear to be working.
More on this →Credit goes entirely to whatever the customer touched last. Systematically flatters search and punishes anything that created the demand in the first place.
A conversion by somebody who saw but did not click an advert. Real, unverifiable in any satisfying way, and argued about constantly.
Whether a campaign produced sales that would not have happened anyway. The only honest way to answer it is to switch something off and watch what breaks.
A search network rating of how relevant your keyword, advert and landing page are to each other and to the searcher. Higher score, better position, lower cost — which is why bidding harder is usually the wrong response.
More on this →Terms you explicitly refuse to appear for. The most reliable saving in any search account and the most consistently neglected.
Title, description, keywords and screenshots that decide whether an app is found in store search and whether the listing converts once it is. Search optimisation for a different search engine.
More on this →People searching your company by name. The cheapest clicks you will ever buy, and the ones competitors will bid on if you do not.
The industry term for real-money online gambling as a whole — casino, sportsbook, poker, bingo and lottery. An umbrella, not a product, and the four inside it need different marketing entirely.
Used two ways, which is why it causes trouble. In some markets a synonym for iGaming; in others, competitive video gaming. Ask which one is meant before agreeing to anything.
Betting on events, and one product inside iGaming. A calendar business — acquisition costs fall sharply around major fixtures and rise between them, so timing decides more than budget.
Categories most platforms limit or refuse: gambling, betting, crypto, adult, payday lending and similar. Accounts here fail regularly, and the work is making failures rarer, shorter and cheaper.
More on this →Categories permitted with licensing and platform certification: forex and CFD, fintech, insurance, medical. Regulated is not the same as forbidden, and the distinction is the one most operators miss.
More on this →Categories with no advertising restrictions: e-commerce, SaaS, B2B, automotive, home improvement and similar. Discipline built in restricted verticals transfers downward easily and never upward.
More on this →A page between the advert and the offer that warms somebody up through story, context and proof. Turns curiosity into intent before anything is asked, which raises the share of arrivals who deposit or qualify.
More on this →A short connector carrying a visitor from an advert to a destination, setting expectations along the way. Not a pre-lander — it informs rather than persuades.
More on this →Showing review systems and crawlers different content than real visitors see. A serious policy violation on every major platform and the behaviour behind most enforcement described as circumventing systems. Named here so you recognise it when it is proposed to you.
More on this →A website that installs to the home screen and behaves like an app — icon, full screen, notifications — without any app store. Used heavily in gambling and crypto because store approval there is difficult, differs by country and can be withdrawn later.
More on this →Platform approval to advertise a regulated category, verified per market against your licences. Slow, unglamorous, and the only version of restricted advertising still running in a year.
More on this →Less Bureaucracy.
More Work.
Specialists assigned to your account, decisions explained before they run, and a number at the end that means something. Start the conversation — it costs nothing and you will leave it knowing more than you arrived with.
How the whole agency works · Case files · Blog · High-risk media buying
Reviewed and updated November 2026