The Digital Marketing Dictionary

Welcome to the Digital Marketing Dictionary!

We know what it's like. Digital Marketing has its own dialect, and sometimes the acronyms and English terms feel like a foreign language. We want you to feel confident reading your reports, so we put together this cheat-sheet dictionary. You'll find what every metric means in simple, everyday language, so you can see at a glance how your investment is performing, no translator required.

Definitions

1. Core performance & revenue indicators

  • Conversions / Key Events: The desired actions you want a user to take on your site. Could be a completed purchase (Purchase), a contact form submission (Form Submit) or a phone call (Call Tracking).
  • Conversion Rate: The percentage of site visitors who completed a conversion. Calculated by dividing conversions by total visits. (E.g. if 2 out of 100 visitors buy, the rate is 2%.)
  • ROAS (Return on Ad Spend): The return on your advertising spend. Tells you how many euros you earn for every €1 spent on ads. A ROAS of 5 means €5 of revenue per €1 spent.
  • CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) / CPL (Cost Per Lead): The average amount spent on ads to drive one new sale (CPA) or one new lead (CPL).
  • Cost: Total ad spend for the period.
  • Conv. value / Revenue: Total revenue from sales through the site.

2. Traffic & behaviour (Google Analytics 4)

  • Sessions: Total visits to your site over a given period. A session starts when the user lands on the site and ends after 30 minutes of inactivity.
  • Users: The number of unique people who visited your site. One user can have multiple sessions.
  • Engaged Sessions: Visits where the user actually engaged with the site (e.g. stayed for over 10 seconds, viewed more than 2 pages or made a purchase).
  • Add to Cart / View Cart: The number of times a user added a product to their cart or viewed it.
  • Begin Checkout: The number of times users started the checkout process.

3. Advertising terms (Google Ads & Meta Ads)

  • Impressions: Total number of times your ad appeared on a user's screen.
  • Clicks / Link Clicks: How many times users clicked your ad.
  • CTR (Click-Through Rate): A core metric showing how engaging an ad is. Clicks ÷ impressions. If an ad shows 100 times and is clicked 5, the CTR is 5%.
  • Avg CPC (Cost per Click): The average cost paid each time someone clicks your ad.
  • Page Engagements: Total actions users took with your social media ads (likes, comments, shares, clicks).
  • Performance Max (PMax): A "smart" and very effective Google campaign type. Uses AI to show your ads across Google's entire network simultaneously (Search, YouTube, Maps, Gmail, etc.) targeting the most sales possible.
  • Search Network: Google's network where text ads appear when someone searches for keywords you care about.
  • Remarketing: Ads shown only to users who have previously visited your site, reminding them to complete a purchase.

4. Traffic sources (where customers come from)

In reports the source is usually shown as "Source / Medium" (e.g. google / cpc).

  • google / cpc & facebook / cpc: Visitors who arrived by clicking paid ads (cpc = Cost Per Click) on Google or Facebook respectively.
  • google / organic: Visitors who found you "organically" (free) by searching on Google and clicking the unpaid results, not an ad.
  • direct / (none): Visitors who typed your site's address directly into the browser or had it bookmarked.
  • inbox / email: Visitors who clicked a link in a newsletter you sent.
  • chatgpt.com / referral: Visitors who arrived via a link suggested by ChatGPT in response to a question.