Marketing Reference
Advertising Glossary
Clear definitions for every metric that matters — with formulas, examples, and links to free calculators.
21 terms across 5 categories
Cost Per Mille
The cost an advertiser pays for one thousand ad impressions.
Cost Per Click
The amount an advertiser pays each time a user clicks on their ad.
Cost Per Action
The cost an advertiser pays for each completed conversion or desired action.
Cost Per Lead
The cost an advertiser pays for each qualified lead generated through an ad campaign.
Cost Per View
The amount an advertiser pays each time a user views their video ad.
Effective Cost Per Mille
A normalized metric expressing revenue or cost per 1,000 impressions regardless of the original pricing model.
Viewable Cost Per Mille
The cost per 1,000 ad impressions that were actually seen by a user (viewable impressions).
Retargeting
Showing ads to people who have previously visited your website or interacted with your brand.
Quality Score
Google's rating of the relevance and quality of your keywords, ads, and landing pages.
Click-Through Rate
The percentage of people who click on an ad after seeing it.
Conversion Rate
The percentage of visitors or users who complete a desired action.
Ad Impressions
The number of times an advertisement is displayed, regardless of whether it was clicked.
Ad Reach
The number of unique people who saw your ad at least once.
Ad Frequency
The average number of times a unique user sees your ad during a campaign.
UTM Parameters
Tags added to URLs to track the source, medium, and campaign of web traffic in analytics tools.
Marketing Attribution
The process of assigning credit to marketing touchpoints that contributed to a conversion.
Return on Ad Spend
The revenue generated for every dollar spent on advertising.
Customer Acquisition Cost
The total cost of acquiring one new customer, including all marketing and sales expenses.
Customer Lifetime Value
The total revenue a business can expect from a single customer over the entire relationship.
Not sure which metric to use?
See our comparison guides for side-by-side breakdowns of the most commonly confused advertising metrics.
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