Forty terms in plain English, with notes on the ones people use wrong all the time.
CTFM Team
Marketing has an unusual amount of jargon for a field that is mostly about explaining things clearly. Some of it is genuinely useful shorthand. Some of it exists to make ordinary ideas sound purchased.
Here are 40 terms in plain English, with a note where the term is routinely misused.
How to use this
Search the page for the term you got stuck on. Some entries have a "commonly misused" note. Read those bits. They are usually the reason you got confused in the first place.
SEO: Search engine optimisation. Getting your pages to appear in search results without paying for the placement.
SERP: search engine results page. Yes, it just means the page of results.
Keyword: A word or phrase people type into a search box. Slightly outdated as a term, since search engines now match meaning rather than exact strings.
Search intent: What the person actually wants: to understand something, to compare options, or to buy right now. Commonly ignored. People chase high-volume keywords with the wrong intent and then wonder why the traffic never converts.
Long tail: the specific, lower-volume searches. Fewer people type them, which usually makes them easier to rank for and closer to someone actually deciding to buy.
Backlink: A link from another site to yours.
Domain authority: a third-party score guessing how likely a site is to rank. Commonly misused, because it is one company's model rather than anything Google publishes, and Google does not use it at all.
Canonical: A tag telling search engines which version of a duplicated page is the real one.
Crawling and indexing: Crawling is a bot visiting your page. Indexing is the search engine storing it so it can appear in results. A page can be crawled and not indexed.
E-E-A-T: Experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trust. Concepts from Google's published quality rater guidelines. Commonly misused. It is not a score you can see or optimise directly.
CPC: Cost per click. What you pay each time someone clicks.
CPM: Cost per thousand impressions. What you pay to be shown a thousand times.
CPA: Cost per acquisition. What you pay to get one conversion.
ROAS: Return on ad spend. Revenue divided by ad spend.
Impression: One instance of your ad being shown. Commonly abused. Impressions are the cheapest number to grow and the least connected to revenue, which is why they dominate agency reports.
Reach and frequency: Reach is how many different people saw it. Frequency is how many times each of them did. High frequency on low reach means you are annoying a small group.
Retargeting: Advertising to people who already visited you. Effective and systematically over-credited, because it reaches people who had largely decided already.
Bid strategy: The rules you give a platform for how to spend your budget in its auction.
Creative: The actual ad. Image, video, headline, copy.
Attribution window: The period after seeing or clicking an ad during which a sale still counts as caused by it. Commonly the reason your numbers disagree. Each platform sets its own, which is why two dashboards never match.
Attribution: Deciding which piece of marketing gets credit for a sale. Every model is partly wrong.
Last touch: Crediting the final interaction before purchase. The default in most tools and the most reliably misleading.
Conversion: Whatever action you decided counts. Not necessarily a sale.
Conversion rate: Conversions divided by visitors. Commonly compared badly. Rates are meaningless across different traffic sources, since a rate on branded search and a rate on cold ad traffic measure different populations.
Bounce rate: The share of visitors who left without a further interaction. Often misread as failure, when for a page that answered someone's question completely, it is success.
Vanity metric: Any number that goes up without changing a decision.
Incrementality: Whether something caused a result, tested by running it in one place and not another. The most honest measurement on this list and the least used.
Statistical significance: A measure of whether a difference is likely to be more than chance. Commonly abused. Stopping a test the moment it looks good invalidates it, and most small sites lack the volume to test small changes at all.
Cohort: a group defined by when they arrived, which lets you compare like with like as time passes, instead of mixing last week's customers in with last year's.
CAC: Customer acquisition cost. Total spend divided by customers acquired.
LTV: Lifetime value. Total profit expected from a customer over the whole relationship. Commonly inflated. Early-stage businesses have no idea what their lifetime value is, because no customer has had a lifetime yet.
Payback period: how long it takes to earn back what you spent getting a customer. More useful than lifetime value, because you can actually measure it right now.
Churn: Customers leaving. Logo churn counts customers. Revenue churn counts money, and the two can move in opposite directions.
MQL and SQL: Marketing qualified lead and sales qualified lead. Commonly meaningless. These mean whatever your company decided they mean, so a benchmark from another company tells you nothing.
Funnel: The path from stranger to customer. Useful as a checklist, misleading as a map, since real journeys loop.
Buying committee: Everyone involved in a purchase decision. In business sales, rarely one person.
Growth hacking: Originally meant finding unconventional, product-led distribution. Now mostly means marketing, said with more confidence.
Engagement: Any interaction. Genuinely meaningless without specifying which interaction. A like and a fifteen-minute read are both engagement.
Brand awareness: Whether people know you exist. Real and important. Also the standard justification for any campaign with no measurable outcome.
Virality: Growth where existing users bring new ones. Commonly confused with popularity. A post getting lots of views is not viral. A product where each user brings two more is.
Personalisation: Adapting content to a person. Ranges from genuinely useful to inserting a first name into a subject line and calling it a strategy.
Omnichannel: Being present on several channels in a joined-up way. Usually describes an aspiration rather than a state.
Thought leadership: Publishing opinions to build credibility. Fine as a practice. The phrase itself is a warning sign, because people doing it well tend to just call it writing.
A test for any marketing term
Try to say the sentence without the term. If the plain version is just as clear, the term was decoration. If the plain version takes three extra sentences, the term was doing real work.
