Understand the term. Use the idea.
Common marketing and growth terms, with practical definitions and the decisions they help you make.
- 0-to-1 marketing
- Finding early evidence that a specific audience will buy and benefit from a specific offer. Use it to prioritize learning and first customers before scale.
- ICP
- Ideal customer profile: characteristics of the account or customer that best fits the offer. Use it to focus acquisition and qualification; verify assumptions with actual customers.
- Persona
- A research-informed picture of a user or buyer’s goals, behavior, and decision context. Use it to improve relevance, not invent demographic stereotypes.
- Positioning
- How you want a specific audience to understand the offer relative to alternatives. It guides the promise, evidence, and reasons to choose you.
- GTM
- Go-to-market: how an offer reaches, converts, and serves its intended customers. It connects audience, pricing, distribution, sales, onboarding, and delivery.
- TOFU
- Top of funnel: useful discovery and awareness activity for potential customers. Track relevant reach and downstream quality, not just impressions.
- MOFU
- Middle of funnel: evaluation and learning that helps an interested buyer judge approaches and fit. Guides, demonstrations, and credible examples can support it.
- BOFU
- Bottom of funnel: decisions close to purchase. Clear service scope, pricing, proof, proposals, and consultation can help resolve buying questions.
- CTA
- Call to action: a clear invitation to the next useful step. Match it to the reader’s current question and the destination’s actual promise.
- MQL
- Marketing-qualified lead: a lead meeting documented marketing qualification criteria. This is a team-defined stage, not a universal label for every download.
- SQL
- Sales-qualified lead: a prospect accepted against agreed sales criteria. Define the distinction from a lead, booked call, and real opportunity.
- SEO
- Search engine optimization: helping people and search engines understand relevant pages. It supports organic discovery; it cannot guarantee a rank.
- AEO
- Answer engine optimization: a variable industry term for improving content usefulness in answer-oriented discovery. Measure visibility and outcomes cautiously; inclusion is not guaranteed.
- GEO
- Generative engine optimization: practices intended to help content appear in generative search answers. Definitions overlap with AEO and change across platforms.
- PPC
- Pay per click: an advertising buying model. Click cost is a delivery metric; acquisition success still depends on conversion quality and economics.
- CTR
- Click-through rate = clicks / impressions × 100. Use the same campaign and period. A high CTR does not establish purchase intent or profitability.
- CPC
- Cost per click = ad spend / clicks. It helps compare traffic cost, but low-cost clicks may still be poor-fit visits.
- CPM
- Cost per thousand impressions = ad spend / impressions × 1,000. It measures exposure cost rather than customer acquisition.
- CPL
- Cost per lead = spend / leads. Define lead and cost scope. Compare cost per qualified lead when raw lead quality differs.
- CPA
- Cost per acquisition or action = cost / the explicitly named action. Always state whether the action means a lead, signup, purchase, or customer.
- CAC
- Customer acquisition cost = agreed sales and marketing acquisition costs / new customers acquired. Label media-only, channel, or blended scope and account for sales-cycle lag.
- CVR
- Conversion rate = defined conversions / eligible opportunities for that action. State whether the denominator is clicks, sessions, users, leads, or another cohort.
- CRO
- Conversion rate optimization: improving the experience that helps qualified people take a useful action. It includes research, clarity, usability, experimentation, and measurement.
- ROAS
- Return on ad spend = attributed revenue / ad spend. It is not profit and does not alone prove the revenue was incremental.
- ROI
- Return on investment = (return minus investment cost) / investment cost under a stated model. Be explicit about included costs and the time horizon.
- Attribution
- A rule or model assigning credit for conversions to touchpoints. It describes credited outcomes; it does not automatically measure causal lift.
- Incrementality
- The additional outcome caused by an activity relative to what would have happened without it. Use credible experiments or causal methods where practical.
- Activation
- The defined first meaningful value milestone. Calculate activation for an eligible cohort within a stated time window; a signup alone may not indicate value.
- Time to value
- Elapsed time until a customer reaches the defined useful outcome. Use it to locate friction and compare comparable onboarding cohorts.
- Cohort
- A group sharing a defined starting event or period. Cohort analysis helps separate retention and quality from changes in the volume of new customers.
- Customer churn
- Customers lost from a defined starting cohort / customers in that cohort. State timing and cancellation policy. New customers do not change the denominator.
- MRR
- Monthly recurring revenue: recurring revenue normalized to a month. It is a run-rate measure, not cash receipts, all monthly sales, or automatically recognized revenue.
- ARR
- Annual recurring revenue: commonly annualized recurring run-rate, MRR × 12. State the convention; do not annualize one-time projects as recurring contracts.
- Expansion
- Additional recurring revenue from existing active customers, such as upgrades or added seats. Keep it separate from new-customer revenue.
- Contraction
- Reduced recurring revenue from customers who remain active, such as downgrades or fewer seats. It reduces gross and net revenue retention under the stated cohort convention.
- Churned MRR
- Recurring revenue lost when an active customer or subscription cancels under the reporting policy. Distinguish full-account churn from partial subscription contraction.
- Reactivation
- Recurring revenue from a previously inactive customer returning. Keep it separate in the company bridge and document whether a retention report includes it.
- GRR
- Gross revenue retention: opening-cohort recurring revenue after contraction and churn, excluding upside, divided by opening revenue. It highlights losses before expansion masks them.
- NRR
- Net revenue retention: recurring revenue retained from the defined existing-customer cohort after expansion and losses, divided by opening revenue. Exclude new customers and document reactivation treatment.
- Net new MRR
- New + expansion + reactivation − contraction − churn for the period, after any separately identified adjustments. It must reconcile opening and closing recurring revenue.
- ARPA
- Average recurring revenue per account = MRR / active paying accounts under a consistent definition. Use a relevant segment when projecting new-account value.
- LTV
- Lifetime value: expected customer value over the relationship. Prefer observed cohort contribution where possible. Simplified churn formulas can mislead for small, changing, or expanding cohorts.
- CAC payback
- Time to recover acquisition cost through customer gross profit. A simple monthly estimate is CAC / monthly gross profit per acquired account; use consistent cohorts and cost scope.
- Pipeline
- Potential future sales opportunities. Stage, qualification, amount, and probability are assumptions or commercial estimates; pipeline is not earned or recurring revenue.
- Forecast
- An estimate of future outcomes based on evidence and assumptions. Show the period, method, scenarios, and confidence; keep it separate from actual results.
- Contribution margin
- Revenue minus the defined variable costs of delivering those sales. It helps assess channel economics; specify refunds, fees, fulfillment, and service delivery costs included.