Glossary

Every term, in plain English

No jargon, no fluff. Clear definitions of the marketing, analytics and development terms you'll hear from us — or from any agency you're evaluating.

Glossary

Paid ads metrics

CPC (Cost Per Click): Cost per click is the average amount you pay each time someone clicks your ad. It's set by an auction, so it varies enormously by market and keyword — a click in Indore may cost a fraction of the same click in Mumbai or Dubai.
CPL (Cost Per Lead): Cost per lead is ad spend divided by leads generated. It's far more useful than cost per click because it ties spend to actual prospects — but it still says nothing about lead quality, which is why cost per customer matters more.
CAC / CPA (Customer Acquisition Cost): Customer acquisition cost is what you spend in marketing to win one paying customer — cost per lead divided by your close rate. It's the number that decides whether a channel is genuinely profitable against your average order or deal value.
ROAS (Return on Ad Spend): Return on ad spend is revenue divided by ad spend. A 5X ROAS means ₹5 of revenue per ₹1 spent. It's a quick profitability gauge but it ignores margin, returns and management fees — so a high ROAS can still be a loss-making campaign.
CTR (Click-Through Rate): Click-through rate is the percentage of people who click your ad after seeing it. A higher CTR signals relevance, which on Google feeds into Quality Score and can lower your cost per click — so it's both an outcome and an input.
Conversion Rate (CVR): Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who take the action you want — a form, a call, a purchase. Raising it lowers your cost per lead without spending another rupee on media, which is why landing pages usually beat bid tweaks.
Quality Score: Quality Score is Google's 1–10 rating of how relevant your keyword, ad and landing page are to a search. Higher scores earn better positions at lower cost, making relevance one of the cheapest ways to cut wasted spend.
Impression Share: Impression share is the percentage of available impressions your ads actually received. A low share means competitors are showing when you aren't — usually a budget or bid limit — and points to demand you're leaving on the table.
MER (Marketing Efficiency Ratio): Marketing efficiency ratio is total revenue divided by total marketing spend across every channel. Unlike platform ROAS — where each channel claims credit for the same sale — MER gives a blended, honest view of whether marketing as a whole is working.
AOV (Average Order Value): Average order value is total revenue divided by number of orders. It sets the ceiling on what you can afford to pay for a customer, which is why raising AOV through bundling or upsells often does more for profitability than cutting ad costs.

Glossary

Paid ads tactics

Performance Max (PMax): Performance Max is a Google campaign type that runs across Search, Display, YouTube, Gmail, Discover and Maps from a single campaign. It's powerful but opaque — without accurate conversion tracking and firm guardrails it optimises toward cheap conversions rather than profitable ones.
Negative Keywords: Negative keywords tell Google not to show your ads for certain terms — 'free', 'jobs', 'salary', 'course'. A well-maintained negative list is usually the single largest source of savings in an inherited account, because it stops you paying for searches that could never convert.
Keyword Match Types: Match types control how closely a search must match your keyword before an ad shows. Broad match reaches the most searches and wastes the most budget; phrase and exact tighten relevance. The right mix depends on how much budget you have to learn with.
Smart Bidding (tCPA / tROAS): Smart Bidding lets Google set bids toward a target cost per acquisition or return on ad spend. It's only as good as the conversion data you feed it — feed it form views instead of real sales and it will efficiently buy you more form views.
Remarketing / Retargeting: Remarketing shows ads to people who already visited your site or engaged with your content. These audiences are warm, so they convert at a lower cost than cold traffic — making retargeting one of the most reliable ways to recover leads that would otherwise be lost.
Lookalike Audience: A lookalike audience asks the ad platform to find new people resembling your best existing customers. It's a core Meta tactic for scaling past your current audience, and its quality depends entirely on the quality of the seed list you give it.
Meta Pixel & Conversions API: The Meta Pixel is browser-side code that reports website actions back to Facebook and Instagram; the Conversions API sends the same events server-side. Running both matters because browser tracking alone now loses a material share of conversion signal to blockers and privacy limits.
Performance Marketing: Performance marketing is advertising bought and judged on measurable outcomes — leads, sales, bookings — rather than reach or impressions. It's the opposite of brand advertising in accountability, though in practice most businesses need some of both.

Glossary

SEO & local search

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation): SEO is improving a site's technical health, content and authority so it ranks higher in unpaid search results. Unlike ads, the traffic doesn't stop when you stop paying — but it takes months to compound, so it's a poor fix for an urgent revenue problem.
Local SEO & the Map Pack: Local SEO is optimising to appear for location-based searches and in the Google map pack — the three local listings shown alongside a map. It depends on a strong Google Business Profile, consistent citations and genuine reviews, and it's essential for any business with a physical catchment.
Google Business Profile (GBP): Google Business Profile is your free listing on Google Search and Maps. A complete, active profile with real photos, accurate hours and steady reviews is the highest-return local SEO asset most Indian businesses have — and the most commonly neglected.
Technical SEO: Technical SEO covers everything that affects whether search engines can crawl, render and index your site properly — site speed, structured data, canonical tags, sitemaps, redirects and crawl budget. It's the foundation content sits on; broken foundations waste content investment.
Core Web Vitals: Core Web Vitals are Google's metrics for real-world page experience: loading speed, interaction responsiveness and visual stability. They're a ranking factor, but more importantly a conversion factor — slow, shifting pages lose visitors before ranking ever matters.
Keyword Intent: Keyword intent is the goal behind a search — informational, commercial or transactional. Matching your page to intent is what turns rankings into revenue; ranking an informational blog post for a buying query converts far worse than a page built for the purchase.
Schema Markup / Structured Data: Schema markup is code that tells search engines what a page's content actually means — that this is a service, this is a price, this is an FAQ. It powers rich results, and increasingly it's how AI search engines decide what a business is and whether to cite it.
E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness are the qualities Google's raters assess, weighted most heavily for health, finance and legal content. In practice it means named authors with real credentials, verifiable claims, and a site that looks like a real business.
AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation): Answer engine optimisation is structuring content so AI systems — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI overviews — can extract and cite it. In practice that means direct answers near the top of a page, clean structured data, and factual claims a model can verify.

Glossary

Conversion & analytics

Conversion Tracking: Conversion tracking records the valuable actions visitors take — calls, forms, purchases — and attributes them to the campaign that drove them. Without it you're optimising blind, and it's the first thing we fix on almost every account we inherit.
Attribution: Attribution is how credit for a sale is divided across the touchpoints before it. Different models tell very different stories about the same data, which is why a blended measure like MER keeps budget decisions honest.
Landing Page: A landing page is where a visitor arrives after clicking an ad, built around one offer and one action. A focused, fast, message-matched landing page usually improves results more than any bidding change, because it lifts conversion rate for every campaign pointing at it.
CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation): Conversion rate optimisation is systematically improving the percentage of visitors who take action, through structured testing rather than opinion. It compounds: every gain applies to all future traffic, paid and organic alike.
A/B Test: An A/B test compares two versions of a page or ad by splitting traffic between them. It replaces argument with evidence — but only if the test runs long enough to reach significance, which is where most A/B testing quietly goes wrong.
Marketing Funnel: A funnel is the path from first awareness to purchase — typically awareness, consideration, decision. Mapping spend and content to each stage stops you expecting cold audiences to behave like warm ones, and shows where prospects actually leak out.
Lead Magnet: A lead magnet is something valuable offered in exchange for contact details — an audit, calculator, guide or sample class. It captures prospects who aren't ready to buy yet, so you can follow up rather than lose them to a competitor.
UTM Parameters: UTM parameters are tags added to a link — source, medium, campaign — so analytics can report which campaign drove a visit. Consistent UTM discipline is what makes multi-channel reporting trustworthy instead of guesswork.
Speed to Lead: Speed to lead is how quickly you respond to a new enquiry. Contacting a lead within minutes dramatically raises the odds of reaching and converting them compared to hours — which is why automated instant follow-up is usually the cheapest conversion win available.

Glossary

Web & app development

Headless CMS: A headless CMS stores and manages content but leaves presentation to a separate front end. It lets your team publish without touching code, and lets the site stay fast because the front end isn't constrained by the CMS's rendering.
SSR / SSG (Server-Side Rendering & Static Generation): Server-side rendering builds a page on the server for each request; static generation builds it once at deploy time. Both send finished HTML to the browser, which is why they rank and load far better than client-only rendering for content that matters to search.
Progressive Web App (PWA): A progressive web app is a website that behaves like an installed app — home-screen icon, offline support, push notifications — without an app store. For many businesses it delivers most of an app's value at a fraction of the cost.
React Native / Expo: React Native builds iOS and Android apps from one codebase, and Expo is the toolchain that makes building and shipping them practical. One team, one codebase, both stores — which is why cross-platform now beats native for most business apps.
ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning): An ERP unifies inventory, sales, finance, HR and operations into one system so every department works from the same numbers. Custom ERPs fit your actual process; off-the-shelf ones make you fit theirs — the right choice depends on how unusual your process really is.
API (Application Programming Interface): An API is a defined way for two systems to exchange data — your website telling your ERP about a new order, or your app fetching inventory. Good API design is what lets systems be replaced later without rebuilding everything around them.
Multi-Vendor Marketplace: A multi-vendor marketplace lets independent sellers list and sell through one platform, with the operator handling discovery, payments and commission splits. The hard parts are rarely technical — vendor onboarding, dispute handling and payout reconciliation are what make or break one.
Technical Debt: Technical debt is the future cost of a shortcut taken today. Some is a reasonable trade for shipping speed; the problem is debt nobody tracks, which compounds until routine changes become expensive and risky.

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