Marketing Attribution & Analytics Glossary for E-Commerce & Lead Gen
Find definitions and explanations around marketing attribution, analytics, tracking, e-commerce and lead generation;
A
Ad Blocker
A browser extension or built-in feature that blocks the loading of ads, analytics scripts, and tracking pixels. The single biggest source of data loss in client-side tracking.
- Ad & Conversion Tracking
- Privacy & Compliance
Ad Creative
The actual content of an ad, the video or image, the copy, the hook and the call to action. On paid social, creative quality has become the biggest single lever on performance.
- Performance Marketing
Ad Fatigue
The performance decay that sets in when the same audience has seen the same creative too often. CTR falls, CPMs effectively rise, and the ad stops earning its budget.
- Performance Marketing
- Metrics & KPIs
AI Hallucination
When a language model produces confident, plausible-sounding output that is factually wrong. In analytics, it means an AI inventing numbers or metric definitions instead of reading real data.
- AI & Automation
- Analytics & BI
AOV (Average Order Value)
The average revenue per order over a given time window. A core lever for LTV and a fast-read signal for promotion design and merchandising decisions.
- Metrics & KPIs
- Performance Marketing
- Analytics & BI
Attribution
The discipline of assigning credit for a conversion to the marketing touchpoints that influenced it. The backbone of every paid-media spend decision.
- Marketing Attribution
Attribution Model
The specific rule or algorithm that splits conversion credit across the touchpoints in a customer journey. The choice that shapes every reported ROAS number.
- Marketing Attribution
Attribution Window
The lookback period during which a touchpoint is still eligible for conversion credit. Defines how far back the model can "see."
- Marketing Attribution
B
BI Dashboard
A visual interface for exploring business metrics across time, dimensions, and filters. The most common consumer of the semantic layer and the warehouse.
- Analytics & BI
Blocklist
A curated list of domains, scripts, or trackers that browsers and ad blockers refuse to load. The decision-making layer behind every privacy-protection feature.
- Ad & Conversion Tracking
- Privacy & Compliance
C
CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost)
The total marketing and sales cost of acquiring one new customer. The headline efficiency metric for any paid-acquisition business.
- Metrics & KPIs
- Performance Marketing
- Marketing Attribution
CAPI (Conversions API)
Meta's server-side API for sending conversion events directly from your server to Meta, bypassing the browser pixel. Recovers conversions lost to ad blockers and ITP.
- Ad & Conversion Tracking
CDP (Customer Data Platform)
A system that unifies customer data from every source, web, mobile, email, CRM, transactions, into a single queryable profile per person. The plumbing behind modern lifecycle and audience strategy.
- Ad & Conversion Tracking
- Analytics & BI
Channel
A specific marketing surface or distribution path through which you reach customers. The unit at which most performance reporting and budget allocation happens.
- Performance Marketing
- Marketing Attribution
Click ID
A unique identifier appended to a URL when a user clicks an ad. Lets the ad platform recognise the resulting conversion as coming from a specific click.
- Ad & Conversion Tracking
- Marketing Attribution
CMP (Consent Management Platform)
A system that captures, stores, and broadcasts users' privacy consent decisions. The piece of infrastructure that makes lawful tracking under GDPR and similar regulations possible.
- Privacy & Compliance
CNAME Cloaking
A technique where a third-party tracking service is reached via a CNAMEd subdomain of your own site, making the tracker look first-party. Increasingly detected and blocked.
- Ad & Conversion Tracking
Cohort
A group of customers (or users) sharing a common attribute, typically the period they were acquired in. The unit of analysis behind retention, LTV, and almost every meaningful longitudinal metric.
- Analytics & BI
- Performance Marketing
Consent Mode V2
Google's framework for transmitting user consent signals to its ad and analytics services. Mandatory for serving ads to EU users via Google's platforms in 2026.
- Privacy & Compliance
- Ad & Conversion Tracking
Conversion
A tracked user action that signals business value, purchase, signup, lead form submission, install. The "what we're optimising for" of every paid-media campaign.
- Performance Marketing
- Ad & Conversion Tracking
Conversion Rate
The percentage of visitors (or sessions, or clicks) that complete a desired action. The mid-funnel efficiency metric that compounds with CPC into CAC.
- Metrics & KPIs
- Performance Marketing
- Analytics & BI
Cookieless
Tracking and measurement approaches that work without browser cookies. The architecture that replaces what ITP, ETP, and third-party cookie deprecation took away.
- Privacy & Compliance
- Ad & Conversion Tracking
CPC (Cost Per Click)
The amount you pay each time someone clicks on one of your ads. A core paid-media metric that controls how much traffic a budget can buy.
- Metrics & KPIs
- Performance Marketing
- Marketing Attribution
CPM (Cost Per Mille)
The price you pay to deliver 1,000 ad impressions. The base unit for buying brand-style display and social ads where reach matters more than clicks.
- Metrics & KPIs
- Performance Marketing
- Ad & Conversion Tracking
CRM (Customer Relationship Management)
A system for managing the data and interactions across a customer's relationship with the business. The system of record for who customers are and what's happened with them.
- Ad & Conversion Tracking
- Analytics & BI
CTA (Call to Action)
The instruction that tells the viewer what to do next, Shop Now, Learn More, Get Offer. Every effective ad carries exactly one.
- Performance Marketing
CTR (Click-Through Rate)
The percentage of users who clicked an ad or link after seeing it. The first signal of creative-audience fit and the leading indicator of CPC trends.
- Metrics & KPIs
- Performance Marketing
- Ad & Conversion Tracking
Custom Audience
An ad-platform audience built from your own first-party data, customer lists, site visitors, or app users, used to retarget existing contacts or to seed lookalikes.
- Performance Marketing
- Ad & Conversion Tracking
Customer Match
Google Ads' feature for uploading hashed customer lists and targeting (or excluding) them in campaigns. The Google counterpart to Meta Custom Audiences.
- Performance Marketing
- Ad & Conversion Tracking
D
Data Team
The function (in-house or embedded) that owns measurement, tracking integrity, metric definitions, and analytical output. The connective tissue between raw data and business decisions.
- Analytics & BI
Data Warehouse
A centralised, query-optimised store for all of a business's structured data. The foundation that BI dashboards, attribution models, and AI agents all read from.
- Analytics & BI
Dimension
A categorical attribute used to slice a metric, channel, campaign, country, device, cohort. The other half of the metric/dimension pair that defines every BI query.
- Analytics & BI
DTC (Direct-to-Consumer)
A business model where a brand sells directly to end customers through its own channels, with no retailer or marketplace middleman in between. Owning the customer relationship is the whole point, which makes first-party data and clean attribution central to how DTC brands grow.
- Performance Marketing
E
ETP (Enhanced Tracking Protection)
Firefox's privacy framework, the Mozilla counterpart to Apple's ITP. Blocks known trackers, restricts third-party cookies, and degrades fingerprinting.
- Privacy & Compliance
- Ad & Conversion Tracking
Event
A discrete user action captured by your tracking system, page view, click, add to cart, purchase. The atomic unit that everything else is built from.
- Ad & Conversion Tracking
- Analytics & BI
F
Fingerprinting
A technique that identifies users by combining many low-entropy device attributes (screen size, fonts, GPU, language settings) into a near-unique signature. Privacy-hostile and increasingly blocked.
- Privacy & Compliance
- Ad & Conversion Tracking
First-Party Data
Data your business collects directly from customers in its own domain context. The currency of post-cookie marketing.
- Ad & Conversion Tracking
- Privacy & Compliance
Funnel
The sequence of steps a user moves through from first awareness to conversion (and beyond). The mental model behind almost every performance-marketing dashboard.
- Analytics & BI
- Performance Marketing
H
Holdout Test
An experiment that withholds a marketing action from a randomly chosen control group, then compares their conversions against an exposed group. The gap is the incremental lift.
- Marketing Attribution
- Analytics & BI
Hook
The first one to three seconds of an ad, the claim, visual or question that decides whether anyone watches the rest. In feed advertising, the hook is most of the battle.
- Performance Marketing
I
Identity Graph
A unified record of every device, session, and identifier that maps to a single customer. The infrastructure that turns scattered touchpoints into a coherent user journey.
- Ad & Conversion Tracking
Impression
A single instance of an ad being displayed, whether or not it was clicked. The base unit of ad delivery and the denominator behind CPM, CTR and frequency.
- Metrics & KPIs
- Performance Marketing
Incrementality
The portion of conversions that would NOT have happened without a given marketing action. The truth-test that attribution models cannot answer on their own.
- Marketing Attribution
ITP (Intelligent Tracking Protection)
Apple's privacy framework, built into Safari, that restricts how tracking cookies and storage can be used. The single biggest force behind tracking degradation in the consumer web.
- Privacy & Compliance
- Ad & Conversion Tracking
L
Landing Page
The first page a user sees after clicking a marketing link. The single biggest determinant of paid-traffic conversion rate.
- Performance Marketing
Learning Phase
The initial period after launching or editing an ad set when the platform's algorithm is still optimising delivery. Performance is unstable until it exits and enough conversions have accrued.
- Performance Marketing
Lookalike Audience
A modeled audience of users who share characteristics with your existing customers. The bridge between first-party data and effective prospecting.
- Performance Marketing
LTV (Customer Lifetime Value)
The total revenue (or contribution margin) a customer generates over the entire relationship with your brand. The denominator that gives CAC its meaning.
- Metrics & KPIs
- Performance Marketing
- Analytics & BI
M
Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM)
A top-down statistical approach that models the impact of each marketing channel on aggregate sales, without needing user-level tracking. The privacy-resilient counterpart to multi-touch attribution.
- Marketing Attribution
MCP (Model Context Protocol)
An open protocol that lets AI tools (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, others) query external data sources and call external tools in a standardised way. The plumbing that turns chat into action.
- AI & Automation
Metric
A quantitative measurement of business performance, revenue, orders, ROAS, CAC. The thing dashboards display and decisions get made on.
- Metrics & KPIs
- Analytics & BI
MTA (Multi-Touch Attribution)
An attribution approach that assigns fractional credit to every touchpoint in a customer journey, not just the last click. The bottom-up complement to MMM.
- Marketing Attribution
P
PII (Personally Identifiable Information)
Any data that can identify a specific individual, directly or in combination with other available data. The category that triggers most data-protection obligations.
- Privacy & Compliance
Pixel
A snippet of JavaScript (or a 1×1 invisible image) that fires when a user takes an action, sending event data to an ad platform or analytics tool. The original conversion-tracking primitive.
- Ad & Conversion Tracking
Postback
A server-to-server signal sent from an advertiser's backend (or attribution provider) to an ad platform when a tracked event happens. The bidirectional half of conversion attribution.
- Ad & Conversion Tracking
- Marketing Attribution
Prospecting
Paid-media targeting aimed at audiences who don't yet know the brand. The top-of-funnel counterpart to retargeting.
- Performance Marketing
R
Reach
The number of unique people who saw an ad or campaign at least once. Impressions count views, reach counts humans, so reach is the honest measure of how many people an ad actually touched.
- Metrics & KPIs
- Performance Marketing
Read-Only Access
A permission model where a system or user can query and view data but cannot modify, delete, or export it. The safest default for AI agents and third-party integrations.
- Privacy & Compliance
- AI & Automation
Retargeting
Paid-media targeting aimed at users who have already engaged with the brand, site visitors, cart abandoners, past customers. The conversion-oriented counterpart to prospecting.
- Performance Marketing
- Ad & Conversion Tracking
Retention
The percentage of customers who continue to engage or transact over time. The multiplier on LTV and the quiet engine of profitable growth.
- Performance Marketing
- Analytics & BI
ROAS (Return on Ad Spend)
Revenue generated for every euro spent on advertising. The fastest-read efficiency metric in performance marketing, and one of the easiest to misinterpret.
- Metrics & KPIs
- Performance Marketing
- Marketing Attribution
S
Scroll-Stop Rate (SSR)
The share of impressions that survive the first three seconds of a video ad, calculated as 3-second video plays divided by impressions. Also called thumb-stop rate or hook rate; the standard measure of whether a hook works.
- Metrics & KPIs
- Performance Marketing
Semantic Layer
A unified set of metric and dimension definitions that sits between raw data and downstream consumers (dashboards, BI tools, AI agents). The "one source of truth" that prevents the same metric meaning different things in different reports.
- Analytics & BI
- AI & Automation
Server-Side Tracking
A tracking architecture where events are sent from your own server to ad platforms and analytics tools, instead of fired client-side by the browser. The modern answer to ad blockers and browser privacy restrictions.
- Ad & Conversion Tracking
- Privacy & Compliance
T
Touchpoint
An individual interaction between a customer and the brand, an ad impression, a click, an email open, a site visit. The atomic unit of an attribution journey.
- Marketing Attribution
- Ad & Conversion Tracking
Tracking
The collection of events, identifiers, and context that lets you reconstruct what users did across your site, app, and ad platforms. The foundation everything else in measurement sits on.
- Ad & Conversion Tracking
U
UGC (User-Generated Content)
Ad creative shot to look like a real customer made it, phone footage, natural speech, native framing. The dominant style of high-performing video ads on Meta and TikTok.
- Performance Marketing
UTM Parameter
A standardised URL parameter (utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign..) that describes where a visit came from. The simplest, most portable way to tag inbound traffic.
- Ad & Conversion Tracking
- Marketing Attribution
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