Marketing terms, defined without the sales pitch.
Twenty-five terms you will meet in any agency proposal, explained the way we would explain them on a call — including the ones that are usually used to impress rather than inform.
Why this page exists
Most marketing jargon exists to make ordinary work sound complicated. If you are reading a proposal and cannot tell whether a line item is essential or decorative, the vocabulary is doing its job and you are not being served.
Every definition below is written so that a business owner can use it to ask a better question of whoever is pitching them — including us.
AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation)
Structuring content so that answer engines — AI assistants and featured-snippet style results — can lift a correct, complete answer straight out of your page. In practice it means direct answers near the top, clear headings, and facts stated in full sentences rather than implied.
A/B test
Showing two versions of a page or ad to comparable groups of visitors to see which performs better. A test only means something once enough people have seen both versions for the difference to be unlikely to be chance.
Attribution
Deciding which marketing touchpoint gets credit for a sale. Every model is a simplification: last-click flatters whichever channel closes, first-click flatters whichever channel introduces. The honest use of attribution is as a directional guide, not a verdict.
Bounce rate
The share of visitors who leave without a second interaction. High bounce is only a problem in context — a visitor who found the phone number on a contact page and called you has "bounced" successfully.
CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost)
Total sales and marketing cost divided by the number of new customers it produced. The number that matters most for subscription businesses, and the one most often confused with cost per lead.
Canonical tag
An HTML tag naming the preferred URL when the same content is reachable at more than one address. It stops duplicate versions of a page competing with each other in search results.
Conversion rate
The share of visitors who take the action you care about. Always state which action: a 2% purchase rate and a 2% newsletter signup rate are entirely different businesses.
CPC (Cost Per Click)
What you pay each time someone clicks an ad. Set by auction, so it moves with competition and season rather than being a fixed rate card.
CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation)
Improving the share of existing visitors who act, rather than buying more visitors. Usually cheaper than acquisition, and it improves the economics of every channel at once because they all land on the same pages.
CTR (Click-Through Rate)
Clicks divided by impressions. Useful as a diagnostic for whether your ad or title matches what the searcher wanted; useless as a goal in itself.
Core Web Vitals
Google’s measurements of loading, interactivity and visual stability. They matter for ranking, but a fast page that answers the wrong question still will not rank.
GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation)
Making a site legible and quotable to generative AI systems such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity, so that it gets cited in their answers. Overlaps with SEO but adds structured data, machine-readable summaries such as llms.txt, and content written to survive being quoted out of context.
GA4 (Google Analytics 4)
Google’s current analytics platform, built around events rather than pageviews and sessions. Migrating from the old Universal Analytics thinking is where most GA4 setups quietly go wrong.
Google Business Profile
The free Google listing that puts a local business in Maps and the map pack, with hours, photos, reviews and a call button. For most local businesses it gets more views than their website does.
GTM (Google Tag Manager)
A container that lets you add and change tracking tags on a site without editing its code each time. It does not collect data itself; it decides which tools do.
Impression
One appearance of an ad or a listing on someone’s screen. The cheapest metric to move and the least connected to revenue.
Intent
What the searcher is actually trying to do — learn, compare, or buy. Matching intent is the single most useful idea in search marketing: a page that sells to someone still learning will lose to a page that teaches them.
LTV (Lifetime Value)
Total gross profit expected from a customer over the whole relationship. LTV compared against CAC decides how much you can afford to pay for a customer, which is why neither number means much alone.
llms.txt
A plain-text file at the root of a site, similar in spirit to robots.txt, that gives large language models a concise, structured summary of what the site contains and where the important pages are. SlydrTech publishes one at slydrtech.com/llms.txt.
Map pack
The block of three local business listings that appears above the regular results for location-based searches. Ranking in it depends on proximity, prominence and relevance — and proximity is the one nobody can optimise away.
Performance Max
A Google Ads campaign type that spends across Search, Shopping, YouTube, Display and Gmail from one campaign, with the platform deciding placement. It relies heavily on your product feed and creative assets, so the quality of those inputs sets its ceiling.
ROAS (Return On Ad Spend)
Revenue divided by ad spend. A 4x return is excellent on a 70% margin product and unsustainable on a 20% margin one, so ROAS without margin context is a vanity metric.
Schema markup (structured data)
A standardised vocabulary, written into a page as JSON-LD, that states plainly what the page is: a business, a product, a price, a set of questions. It is how a machine reads a page without guessing from the layout.
SERP
Search Engine Results Page. Increasingly it holds AI overviews, map packs, shopping carousels and question boxes rather than ten blue links, which is why "ranking first" means less than it used to.
Technical SEO
The part of SEO concerned with whether search engines can crawl, render and index a site at all: speed, structure, sitemaps, canonicals, redirects and markup. It rarely creates rankings on its own, but it can quietly prevent them.
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