Marketing, SEO, and Business Glossary

The path from visitor to paying customer.

How well consumers recognize a brand.

A long-term plan for building brand identity.

A detailed, semi-fictional profile of a target buyer based on real customer data.

How long it takes to recover the cost of acquiring a customer.

Unsolicited personalized emails to start business conversations.

Creating valuable content to attract audience.

Total cost to acquire one new paying customer.

Overall brand perception across all touchpoints.

Complete experience from awareness to post-purchase advocacy.

Emotional commitment leading to repeat business.

Creating awareness and interest.

Commercial messages for nurturing and retention.

Rapid experimentation to identify the most effective growth strategies.

Partnering with influential people.

A standalone web page designed to convert visitors into leads or customers for a specific campaign.

Attracting and converting prospects.

Building relationships with prospects through personalized communication.

Total revenue (or profit) a customer generates over the entire relationship.

The ratio of customer lifetime value to customer acquisition cost.

Dividing a market into distinct buyer groups.

The factor that sets a product apart from competitors.

The clickable text of a hyperlink.

A link from one website to another, treated by search engines as a vote of confidence.

An HTML tag that tells search engines which version of a page is the original.

Preferred URL version for indexing.

An online mention of a business's name, address, and phone (NAP), with or without a backlink.

Google's metrics for measuring real-world page experience.

A standard link that passes ranking value (PageRank) from the linking site to the destination.

A third-party score (0-100) predicting how well a website will rank in search results.

Content that appears identical or very similar on multiple URLs.

Google's framework for evaluating content quality and credibility.

A summary answer Google displays at the top of search results.

Free Google business listing that appears in Maps and Local Pack results.

Free local business listing on Google.

Free Google tool for monitoring search presence.

A link from one page on a website to another page on the same website.

The time it takes for the largest visible element to render on a page.

The map and three-result box Google shows for location-relevant searches.

Optimization focused on ranking in local search results (Google Maps, Local Pack, local organic).

Business name, address, and phone number — must be consistent across all online listings.

A page-level score (0-100) predicting how well a specific URL will rank.

How quickly a webpage loads and becomes interactive.

A file that tells search engine crawlers which pages they can or cannot access.

Structured data added to a webpage that helps search engines understand its content.

The practice of optimizing websites to rank higher in organic search results.

The page Google (or another search engine) shows in response to a search query.

Format providing page info to search engines.

A file listing a website's URLs to help search engines discover and crawl pages.

Topics that could impact a user's health, finances, safety, or wellbeing — held to higher quality standards by Google.

Google Ads' formula for determining which ads appear and in what order.

The percentage of people who see your ad or link and click it.

The cost to acquire one conversion (lead, signup, sale) through advertising.

Cost for each completed conversion from advertising.

The price you pay each time someone clicks your ad.

Amount paid each time a user clicks an ad.

The cost per 1,000 ad impressions.

Paid messages through digital channels.

Google's advertising platform for search, display, video, and shopping ads.

An ad targeting model that finds new users similar to your existing customers.

An advertising model where advertisers pay each time their ad is clicked.

Google Ads' rating (1-10) of the quality and relevance of your keywords, ads, and landing pages.

Showing ads to people who have previously visited your website or interacted with your brand.

Ads to people who previously visited your site.

Revenue generated per dollar of advertising spend.

Revenue generated per dollar spent on advertising.

The process of assigning credit for conversions to the marketing touchpoints that contributed.

Determining which marketing channels contribute to conversions.

Data analysis for business decisions.

The percentage of visitors who complete a desired action.

Measuring and attributing actions to campaigns.

Examining data to draw conclusions and inform decisions.

Extracting insights from data using scientific methods and algorithms.

Data a company collects directly from its own customers and audiences.

Web analytics for tracking traffic and conversions.

Google's current analytics platform, replacing Universal Analytics in 2023.

A free Google tool for deploying and managing marketing tags and scripts without code changes.

Visual of user clicks, scrolls, and hovers on a page.

Measurable value for business objectives.

Forecasting outcomes based on historical data using ML.

Video of individual user sessions showing interactions.

An experiment that compares two versions of a webpage, email, or ad to see which performs better.

Comparing two versions to determine which performs better.

Sequence of steps from first interaction to conversion.

The practice of increasing the percentage of website visitors who take a desired action.

A visual representation of where users click, scroll, or hover on a webpage.

A standalone page designed for a single conversion goal.

Testing multiple variables simultaneously.

Iterative delivery through cross-functional teams.

Entry point managing API requests.

Application Programming Interface connecting systems.

A defined way for software systems to communicate with each other.

Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery automation.

Moving applications and data to cloud infrastructure.

Packaging software with dependencies for consistent deployment.

A network of distributed servers that cache content closer to users.

Software that lets non-developers create, edit, and manage website content.

A unified database that combines customer data from multiple sources for analysis and activation.

A system for managing interactions with customers.

Protecting systems, networks, and data from attacks.

Metadata tool for finding and understanding data.

Inventory of data assets with metadata.

Unified data architecture across hybrid environments.

Managing data availability, usability, integrity, and security.

Repository for raw data in native format.

Combines data lake flexibility with warehouse reliability.

Decentralized data architecture with domain ownership.

Moving data from source to destination.

Central repository for analytics data.

Combining development and operations for faster delivery.

Restoring IT systems after a disruptive event.

Processing data near the source rather than in the cloud.

Data integration from sources to targets.

Central repository for ML features across models.

A query language for APIs that lets clients request exactly the data they need.

Software architecture where the frontend (head) is separated from the backend.

Managing user identities and access permissions.

Cloud computing service that provides virtualized computing resources over the internet.

Managing infrastructure through configuration files.

Container orchestration platform for automated deployment and scaling.

Software that automates repetitive marketing tasks.

Independent services forming an application.

Applying DevOps to ML for reliable AI deployment.

Understanding system state through metrics, logs, and traces.

A cloud computing model where the vendor provides hardware and software tools over the internet.

A standard architectural style for designing APIs based on HTTP and resources.

Agile framework with defined roles.

Cloud execution model where provider manages infrastructure.

Applying engineering to operations for reliable systems.

Software delivered over the internet on a subscription basis.

Cloud-hosted software accessed by subscription.

Designing products that provide meaningful user experiences.

Designing visual interfaces.

A database optimized for storing and searching vector embeddings using similarity.

An automated message sent from one app to another when a specific event occurs.

Security model that never trusts, always verifies.

An iterative project management approach emphasizing flexibility and continuous improvement.

Planning for operations during disruptions.

Creating new products, services, or business models.

Changing how a business creates, delivers, and captures value.

Structured approach to transitioning people through organizational change.

Evaluating competitor strengths and strategies.

A plan for delivering exceptional experiences across all touchpoints.

Human-centered problem solving.

Plan for using technology to achieve goals.

Integrating digital technology into all business areas.

Part-time executive providing senior expertise.

Plan for bringing a product to market.

Plan for expanding market share and revenue.

A visual workflow management method emphasizing continuous delivery.

Advisory improving organizational performance.

A plan for entering a new geographic market.

Establishing a brand's unique place relative to competitors.

The simplest version of a product that delivers core value and can be tested with users.

The single metric that best reflects the core value a company delivers to customers.

The single metric that best captures customer value.

A goal-setting framework that pairs ambitious objectives with measurable key results.

Goal-setting with objectives and measurable results.

Guiding a product from concept to continuous improvement.

The point at which a product satisfies a strong market demand.

Product satisfies strong market demand.

Operating in accordance with laws and regulations.

Aligning sales, marketing, and service for revenue growth.

Ability to grow without performance degradation.

The portion of TAM you can realistically serve with your current product and reach.

The realistic share of SAM you can win in the planning period (usually 3-5 years).

A goal-setting framework: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound.

Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats.

The total revenue opportunity available for your product or service.

MRR multiplied by 12 — the normalized annual value of recurring revenue.

Annualized recurring revenue from subscription customers.

The rate at which a company spends cash, typically expressed monthly.

Determining economic value of a business.

The percentage of customers who cancel in a given period.

Revenue minus all variable costs, expressed in dollars or as a percentage.

Total cost to acquire one new customer.

Investigation before a transaction.

Revenue minus cost of goods sold, expressed as a percentage of revenue.

Total profit from one customer over the entire relationship.

Consolidation through mergers and acquisitions.

The normalized monthly value of all recurring revenue contracts.

Recurring revenue from existing customers, including expansion and churn.

Capital for established companies to acquire and restructure.

The percentage of customers (or revenue) retained over a period — the inverse of churn.

A SaaS health metric: revenue growth rate + profit margin should equal 40% or more.

The number of months a company can operate before running out of cash at current burn rate.

A measure of sales and marketing efficiency: net new ARR added per dollar of S&M spend.

The segment of TAM reachable through current channels.

Total revenue opportunity for a product or service.

Equity financing for early-stage startups.

Percentage of customers who stop doing business with a company.

Keeping existing customers through value delivery.

A description of the type of customer that gets the most value from (and gives the most value to) your product.

A lead that has shown enough interest to be considered worth contacting by sales.

The total dollar value of in-progress sales opportunities at various stages.

The total time from first prospect touch to closed-won deal.

Providing sales teams with tools and content to close deals.

The process from first awareness to becoming a customer.

A lead that sales has confirmed is worth actively pursuing.

An AI system that can autonomously plan and execute multi-step tasks to achieve a goal.

Evaluating capabilities for AI adoption.

A plan for leveraging AI to achieve business objectives.

A technique that encourages step-by-step reasoning for complex tasks.

AI that interprets visual information from images and video.

Multi-layer neural networks for complex patterns.

A numerical representation of text, images, or other data that captures semantic meaning.

A numerical vector representing data that captures semantic meaning for search.

Creating ML features from raw data.

The process of further training a pre-trained AI model on specific data to specialize it.

Further training a pre-trained model on a smaller dataset for a specific task.

AI that creates new content instead of just analyzing data.

A neural network trained on vast text data to understand and generate human language.

A neural network trained on vast text data to understand and generate language.

A memory-efficient fine-tuning method that trains injected parameters instead of the full model.

Systems that learn and improve from data without explicit programming.

Assessing ML model performance with metrics.

AI that understands and generates human language.

The practice of crafting effective inputs to AI models to produce desired outputs.

Designing inputs to elicit desired outputs from language models.

Reducing model precision to decrease memory usage and speed up inference.

Agent learns through environment interaction and rewards.

A technique that combines LLMs with retrieval of external information to ground responses in facts.

An AI architecture that retrieves relevant documents before generating a response.

Search that understands query meaning and intent, not just keyword matches.

A database optimized for storing and searching high-dimensional vector embeddings.