Every industry hides behind its vocabulary. Marketing is worse than most. So here's the jargon you'll actually meet, explained the way I'd explain it across a table: short, direct, no posturing. Bookmark it, or just skim when someone tries to baffle you with an acronym.
Any marketing that happens through a screen. If a customer could encounter it on a phone, laptop, or smart fridge, it lives here. The umbrella over everything else on this page.
The journey from 'never heard of you' to 'just paid you,' imagined as a funnel because you lose people at every stage. The job of marketing is to widen the top and unclog the middle, until a conversion falls out the bottom.
The moment someone does the thing you wanted: buys, books, calls, signs up. Everything before it is potential; the conversion is when potential becomes money.
Of everyone who had the chance to convert, the percentage who actually did. A shop with 100 visitors and 3 sales converts at 3%. Small changes here move revenue more than most people expect.
The unglamorous art of getting more conversions from the traffic you already have. Usually cheaper than buying more traffic, and almost always neglected in favor of buying more traffic.
What you got back versus what you put in. Spend a dollar, make three, that's the number that matters. Every other metric is a supporting actor to this one. See also ROAS.
ROI's narrower cousin, specific to advertising: revenue earned per dollar of ad spend. A ROAS of 4 means four dollars back for every one spent, before you subtract the cost of making the product.
What you pay each time someone clicks your ad. In a competitive market this is set by auction, which means your rivals help decide your price whether you like it or not.
What it costs you, all in, to win one customer or one lead. The single most useful number in paid media, because it tells you whether the math works before you scale it up.
Of the people who saw your ad or listing, the percentage who clicked. A quick read on whether your message is landing. Low CTR usually means the offer or the wording, not the budget.
How many times your thing was shown, whether or not anyone cared. Useful for reach, dangerous as a vanity metric. Impressions don't pay invoices.
The handful of numbers you've agreed actually measure success. The trick is choosing the right ones up front. Start with the wrong definition of success and you've already failed.
The detective work of figuring out which marketing touch actually caused the sale. Genuinely hard, often gamed, and the source of most arguments between channels about who deserves credit.
The actual stuff people see: the words, images, and video. Not a channel, a consumable. Every channel burns through it, and bad creative quietly taxes all of them at once.
Earning your way to the top of Google's unpaid results by being genuinely the best answer. Slower than ads, cheaper forever. The compounding asset most businesses underfund.
SEO's younger sibling for the AI era: getting your business cited by answer engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity, not just ranked on Google. New, fast-moving, and increasingly where attention starts. The full explanation is here.
The page you get after searching. Understanding what fills it, ads, map packs, featured snippets, ten blue links, tells you what real estate you're actually competing for.
A word or phrase people type into search. The bridge between what someone wants and whether they find you. Target the ones with intent, not just the ones with volume.
A link from another website to yours. Search engines read them as votes of confidence: the more credible the source, the more the vote counts. Quality beats quantity, always.
A rough score for how much clout a website has earned in search. Not an official Google number, but a useful shorthand for 'how hard will it be to outrank these people.'
Visitors who found you without you paying for that specific click: search, direct, referrals. The traffic that keeps arriving after the work is done, which is exactly why it compounds.
Earning attention by being useful instead of interruptive. Guides, articles, videos, tools. The long game of becoming the resource people trust before they're ready to buy.
The channels you actually control: your website, your email list, your content. No landlord, no algorithm can evict you overnight. The foundation everything else builds on.
The one channel no platform can take away from you. Under-used by most businesses and disproportionately profitable for the ones who treat the list as a relationship, not a megaphone.
Marketing you rent by paying for placement: ads, sponsorships, promoted posts. Buys speed and reach, stops the moment you stop paying. A tap, not a well.
Advertising where you pay only when someone clicks, not just to be shown. The dominant model in search advertising, and the reason CPC matters so much.
Ads on the search results page, above the free listings. You're buying your way to demand that already exists, which is why it's the closest thing to a sure bet in paid media.
Ads on social platforms. Different job from paid search: instead of capturing existing demand, you're creating it in people who weren't looking. More art, more patience, different math.
Automated buying of banner and visual ads across the web. Mostly a reach-and-reminder tool: good for staying top of mind, rarely the thing that wins the immediate click.
Advertising inside shopping platforms like Amazon, right where the wallet is already open. If you sell products, this is often where paid budget should go first, not last.
Pay-per-lead ads that sit above Google's map results, built for local service businesses. Excellent for the right plumber or lawyer, money on fire for the wrong fit.
The money that goes to the platform to buy the audience, separate from any fee you pay a person to manage it. Confusing the two is the most common paid-budget mistake there is. More on that math here.
What you're willing to pay in an ad auction for a click or an impression. You rarely pay your full bid, but it sets your place in line against everyone else competing for the same person.
Showing ads to people who already visited you but didn't convert. The digital equivalent of a polite follow-up. Cheap, effective, and occasionally a little too good at following people around.
Attention you didn't pay for and don't own: press coverage, word of mouth, someone citing you unprompted. The most credible kind, precisely because you couldn't just buy it.
Earning coverage and links from publications worth being seen in. Slower than a press release and worth a hundred of them, because the credibility and the search value both compound.
What people think and feel about you when you're not in the room, and increasingly what AI says about you when you're not in the prompt. The compounding interest on everything else you do.
Publishing what you genuinely know so the right people come to see you as the expert. The honest version beats the polished-but-empty version far more often than people expect.
Precision marketing aimed at a named list of dream accounts, rather than casting wide. Less a channel, more a decision to go deep on the few instead of wide on the many.
Becoming a source AI answer engines trust enough to name. Think of it as the new Domain Authority: just as real and just as consequential to whether you get found, and every bit as nebulous to define and stubborn to measure. Nobody can hand you the exact number, but everyone can tell who has it.
Ask me. I'd rather demystify this stuff than have you nod along to a proposal you can't fully read. See it all working together on the flywheel.
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