Marketing terms made simple: PPC, ROAS, CPC and more

Marketers love acronyms. When your agency says "ROAS dropped but CPA is on target", you have every right not to understand. Here's a glossary of the most common terms, explained so anyone can follow.

Ads and payments

PPC (pay per click): you only pay when someone clicks your ad.

CPC (cost per click): the price of one click. If you spent €50 and people clicked 100 times, your CPC is €0.50.

CPM (cost per mille): the price per thousand ad impressions. It tells you what it costs for a thousand people to see your ad.

Auction: how ad platforms decide whose ad appears. Both the bid and the ad's quality matter.

Budget: the maximum amount to spend on ads per day or per campaign.

Campaign: a group of ads with one goal and budget (for example "Christmas sale").

Results and numbers

Conversion: the action you want people to take: a purchase, a completed form, a call, a sign-up.

Conversion rate: the percentage of visitors who convert. If 2 out of 100 visitors buy, the conversion rate is 2%.

CPA (cost per acquisition): what one customer or one lead costs. Money spent divided by the number of conversions.

ROAS (return on ad spend): how many euros of revenue one euro in ads brought in. Spend €100 and sell €400 worth, and your ROAS is 4 (or 400%).

CTR (click-through rate): the percentage of people who saw your ad and clicked it. It tells you whether the ad is interesting.

Margin: how much you keep from a sale after the cost of goods. Your margin determines the ROAS you need to be profitable.

The customer and their journey

Customer journey: all the steps a person takes from first contact with you to purchase. For example: sees a video on Instagram → visits the website → signs up for emails → buys a week later. (In marketing it's sometimes called a "sales funnel".)

Remarketing (retargeting): ads for people who've already visited your website. They remind them of what they looked at.

Audience: the group of people an ad is shown to.

Landing page: the page people arrive on after clicking an ad. It should follow on exactly from the ad.

Lead: a potential customer's contact details (email, phone) that someone left you voluntarily.

Lead magnet: something useful for free (a guide, e-book, checklist) in exchange for an email.

Tracking

Pixel: a small piece of code on your website that records when someone from an ad buys or fills in a form.

Server-side tracking (Conversions API): more reliable tracking where your website sends the data directly, not the visitor's browser.

UTM tags: suffixes after a page address that tell Google Analytics where a visitor came from.

Attribution: deciding which ad "deserves" the sale when someone saw several ads in different places.

Content and creative

Creative: the ad content itself (image, video, copy).

Hook: the first seconds of a video or the first sentence, meant to grab attention.

UGC (user-generated content): content that looks as if it was filmed by an ordinary customer, not a company.

A/B test: comparing two versions (e.g., two headlines) to see which works better.

Summary

You don't have to be a marketer to understand your ad results. Knowing a few terms is enough, above all conversion, CPA and ROAS. With them you can judge whether your ads make money. And if an agency can't explain something simply, that's a warning sign. We speak plain language.