Every ads dashboard on this page throws the same core vocabulary at you. Here's what it actually means, in plain language.
- CPC — Cost Per Click
- What you pay each time someone clicks your ad, regardless of what they do afterward. The default pricing model for Search ads.
- CPM — Cost Per Mille
- What you pay per 1,000 impressions (views), regardless of clicks. Standard for awareness-focused Display and Video buys.
- CPA — Cost Per Acquisition
- What you pay, on average, for each completed conversion (sale, signup, lead) — the metric that actually determines whether a campaign is profitable.
- CPV — Cost Per View
- What you pay for each qualifying video view (usually 30 seconds, or the full ad if shorter) — YouTube's default pricing for skippable in-stream ads.
- ROAS — Return on Ad Spend
- Revenue generated for every dollar spent on ads. A ROAS of 4 means $4 in revenue for every $1 spent — the single most-watched e-commerce ad metric.
- CTR — Click-Through Rate
- The percentage of people who saw your ad and clicked it. A key signal of creative and targeting relevance, and a direct input into Google's Quality Score.
- RTB — Real-Time Bidding
- The automated auction process that decides, in milliseconds, who wins each individual ad impression as a page loads.
- DSP — Demand-Side Platform
- The software advertisers (or their agencies) use to buy programmatic ad inventory across many publishers and exchanges at once.
- SSP — Supply-Side Platform
- The software publishers use to sell their ad inventory into programmatic auctions, the mirror image of a DSP on the sell side.
- DMP — Data Management Platform
- A system that collects, organizes and segments audience data, used to build the targeting lists DSPs then act on.
- Header Bidding
- A technique letting multiple ad exchanges bid on a publisher's inventory simultaneously, rather than one at a time — raises competition, and typically prices, on that inventory.
- Frequency Cap
- A limit on how many times the same person can be shown a specific ad within a given time window, protecting against ad fatigue and wasted spend.
- Viewability
- Whether an ad was actually visible on-screen (per IAB standards, typically 50% of pixels for 1+ second) — not just technically loaded on the page.
- Attribution
- The method used to decide which ad (or ads, across a multi-touch journey) gets credit for a resulting conversion.
- First-Party Data
- Data a business collects directly from its own customers and users — increasingly the backbone of targeting as third-party cookies fade out.
- Lookalike / Similar Audience
- A new audience a platform builds automatically by finding people who resemble an existing customer list you've uploaded.
- Retargeting vs. Remarketing
- Largely interchangeable in casual use — both mean showing ads to people who already interacted with your brand — though "remarketing" more often refers specifically to email re-engagement.
- A/B Testing
- Running two (or more) versions of an ad simultaneously to a similar audience, to measure which one actually performs better before scaling spend behind it.
- Creative Fatigue
- The performance decline that sets in once an audience has seen the same ad creative too many times — the reason fresh creative matters as much as good targeting.
- Ad Fraud
- Invalid traffic — bots, click farms, stacked/hidden ads — engineered to generate fake impressions or clicks and drain ad budgets without reaching real people.