Glossary
The terms behind measuring ad performance, defined without the jargon. Written by the people who build the tracking.
An attribution model is the rule that decides which marketing touch gets credit for a conversion. Here are the common models and their trade-offs.
First-click attribution credits the first marketing touch a customer had. It highlights demand creation, but ignores everything that closed the sale.
Incrementality measures the sales that only happened because of an ad. It is the truest test of whether marketing spend is actually working.
Last-click attribution gives all the credit for a conversion to the final touch before the sale. It is simple, common, and quietly misleading.
Marketing mix modeling uses statistics to estimate how each channel drives sales, without relying on cookies or individual tracking. Here is how it compares to attribution.
Multi-touch attribution spreads credit for a conversion across every marketing touch in the journey, not just the last one. Here is how it works and where it helps.
A Conversions API sends conversions to an ad platform from your server instead of the browser. Meta, Google, TikTok, and Microsoft each have their own version.
Enhanced conversions send hashed customer data alongside a conversion so the ad platform can match it more accurately when cookies fall short.
First-party data is collected on your own domain with the customer's relationship to you. Third-party data comes from elsewhere. The difference now decides what you can track.
A GCLID is the click identifier Google Ads adds to a link so it can match a click to a conversion. Here is what it is and why it matters for tracking.
Offline conversion tracking reports sales that happen away from the website, like closed deals and phone orders, back to the ad platform that drove them.
Server-side tracking reports conversions to ad platforms from your server instead of the browser, so ad blockers and cookie limits cannot drop them.
UTM parameters are tags added to a link so analytics knows which campaign a visit came from. Here are the five standard parameters and how to use them.
CAC is what it costs to win one new customer. On its own it means little; against lifetime value it tells you whether growth is sustainable.
LTV is the total revenue a customer brings over their whole relationship with you. It is what turns a scary acquisition cost into a smart investment.
ROAS is revenue divided by ad spend, the core measure of whether advertising pays. Here is the formula, what counts as good, and the catch.
Connect a store, run Trakt in shadow mode, and compare it against your ad account before you change a thing.