Performance Marketing glossary

The narrowing sequence from reach to first purchase.

Work aimed at winning new customers rather than keeping existing ones.

The point where a new customer first gets real value. Weak activation shows up as churn three months later.

When customers bring other customers. The cheapest acquisition channel that exists.

A path where a channel appeared without being the last touch.

Credit by which audience segment converted.

The point where someone learns you exist.

Bottom of funnel. Conversion activity, judged on cost per acquisition and return.

The decision stage, where intent is highest and competition is fiercest.

Credit assigned at campaign level rather than channel or creative.

Credit assigned across channels such as search, social and email.

The same number, usually said by salespeople rather than analysts.

The point where someone weighs you against alternatives.

The steps between arriving and converting. Each step leaks, and the largest leak is where to work.

A general term for everything between first contact and the sale.

Effort spent turning existing traffic into customers instead of buying more traffic.

The sequence of interactions before a conversion. Longer than most people assume, and mostly invisible.

Credit at the level of individual ads. Where you find out one image carried the whole account.

The whole process of turning a stranger into a paying customer, and the cost attached to it.

The share of leads that end up as paying customers, end to end.

The full route from first exposure to purchase, including offline steps.

The moment of choosing. Friction here costs more than friction anywhere else.

How much of the existing demand in a market you actually take. Impression share is the closest practical proxy.

Making people want something they were not looking for. Slow, costly, and the only way past a demand ceiling.

The older discipline performance marketing grew out of. One ad, one offer, one measurable response.

The sequence of interactions that did not end in a purchase yet.

The comparison phase, where reviews, pricing pages and demos do the work.

Covering every stage from awareness to purchase in one plan.

Running awareness, consideration and conversion together rather than chasing the bottom only.

A funnel that includes retention and referral, not just acquisition.

Marketing that touches the whole funnel including product and retention, not just acquisition.

The point where someone signals they are ready to act.

The same idea over a longer horizon, usually including non-marketing touches.

Credit by search term. Increasingly incomplete as platforms hide low-volume queries.

Credit by entry page. The fastest way to see which page is worth traffic.

Buying contact details. Cheap when the bar is low, expensive when sales sets the bar.

How long a lead has sat untouched. Conversion odds fall sharply within hours, not days.

Collecting contact details from people who might buy later. Volume is easy, quality is the job.

Staying useful to a lead who is not ready yet. Mostly email, mostly patience.

Deciding whether a lead is worth a salesperson time.

Returning unworked or rejected leads to nurturing instead of discarding them.

Getting each lead to the right person fast. Speed to first contact beats almost every other optimisation.

Ranking leads by how likely they are to buy. Only as good as the behaviour data behind it.

How fast qualified lead volume is growing month on month. A leading indicator of revenue.

Messaging matched to where someone is in their relationship with you, from first visit to winback.

The general practice of crediting marketing activity for outcomes.

A general term for how much of the result marketing produced. Meaningless without a stated model.

The stages before a lead is handed over.

Pipeline where marketing appeared anywhere in the path. Usually two to three times larger than sourced.

A lead marketing considers ready. The definition drifts constantly, which is why the handover rate matters more than the count.

Revenue traced back to leads marketing qualified.

The share of pipeline that began with a marketing touch. Agree the definition before anyone reports it, because the two teams rarely mean the same thing.

Money from customers marketing touched at some point.

Money from customers marketing found first.

Credit by type of traffic such as cpc, organic or email.

The consideration stage, where people know you and are comparing.

Middle of funnel. Consideration activity, judged on engagement and assisted conversions.

Credit by which promotion or offer drove the sale. Often a bigger lever than targeting.

The share of opportunities that become customers.

Turning a qualified lead into a deal in the pipeline.

The share of leads that become opportunities.

Budget tied to results delivered rather than hours worked or impressions served.

Credit based on the full sequence of touches a customer made.

A commercial model where the vendor gets paid only on results. Aligns incentives, and invites credit-grabbing on attribution.

Marketing bought on a measurable outcome rather than on exposure. Everything is judged against a cost per result.

The paid channels bought on measurable response. Search, social and shopping usually, display sometimes.

How much of the pipeline a channel or campaign produced.

The share of pipeline value that becomes revenue. Use it to sanity-check any forecast.

Creating qualified opportunities rather than raw leads. The number B2B teams live on.

Opportunities marketing touched somewhere along the way, including ones sales found first.

Opportunities marketing created from scratch.

How fast deals move through the pipeline. Improve it and revenue rises without a single extra lead.

Credit by where the ad ran. Exposes the placements quietly eating budget.

A user whose behaviour in the product shows they are ready to buy. Common in self-serve software.

The final stretch of that route, from intent to payment.

The transaction itself, and everything that can break during it.

Any activity judged by the reaction it produces rather than by reach.

Work aimed at keeping customers rather than finding new ones. Usually cheaper per unit of revenue than acquisition.

What happens after the first purchase, and where lifetime value is won or lost.

Assigning revenue back to the marketing that produced it. Always a model, never a measurement.

The share of total revenue a channel accounts for under your chosen model.

Revenue closed against revenue available in the pipeline.

Revenue from deals marketing touched at any point. The generous definition, and the one that gets quoted in board decks.

Marketing measured on revenue produced instead of leads delivered. Forces the team to care what happens after the handover.

Revenue from deals that marketing originated. The strict definition, and the smaller number.

A lead sales agreed to work. The first honest checkpoint after marketing hands over.

The share of qualified prospects that buy.

The pipeline stages a deal passes through, usually owned by sales rather than marketing.

A lead sales confirmed as a real opportunity.

Revenue from opportunities sales accepted. The cleaner of the two, since sales had to agree.

Revenue where a salesperson intervened rather than the customer self-serving.

An existing customer support has identified as ready to upgrade.

Credit by where the visit came from, matching the utm_source value.

Top of funnel. Awareness activity, judged on reach and cost per thousand, never on last-click return.

Credit spread across individual interactions rather than a single one.

Buying or earning visits. The first step, and the easiest one to mistake for progress.

The app world term for the same thing, usually measured on installs and post-install events.

Deals won divided by deals closed. Small improvements here beat large improvements in lead volume.