Marketing Analytics Glossary

AOV — Average Order Value

Total revenue divided by total orders over a period. Improved via cross-sell, upsell, and bundle recommendations. See: Recommendation Engine.

Attribution Model

A rule for assigning conversion credit across touchpoints. Common: last-click, first-click, linear, time-decay, position-based, data-driven. See: MMM vs MTA.

CAC — Customer Acquisition Cost

Total acquisition spend divided by new customers acquired. The denominator of CAC payback. Compare against CLV.

Campaign Analytics

Unified reporting across paid channels (Meta, Google, TikTok, email) for performance, spend efficiency, and creative insight. See: Campaign Analytics.

Churn Rate

The percentage of customers who stop purchasing in a defined period. Often modeled at the cohort or individual level. See: CLV.

CLV — Customer Lifetime Value

The total revenue (or profit) a customer generates over their lifetime with the brand. Predictive CLV models project 12, 24, and 36-month value. See: CLV Subscription.

Cohort Analysis

Grouping customers by a shared characteristic (often acquisition month) and tracking metrics over time. Critical for CLV and retention work.

Conversational AI

AI agents that handle voice or chat interactions on phone, WhatsApp, web, or in-app. See: Conversational AI.

CRM — Customer Relationship Management

Software for managing customer interactions and data. Common platforms: Salesforce, HubSpot, Klaviyo (for ecommerce). The source of truth for customer-level data used in CLV and segmentation.

First-Party Data

Data you collect directly from your customers — transactions, email engagement, on-site behavior, CRM data. The basis for privacy-safe modeling. See: Lookalike Modeling.

Incrementality

The portion of revenue that wouldn't have happened without a given marketing activity. The actual question MMM tries to answer.

Lookalike Audience

An audience built to resemble your existing best customers across behavioral and demographic features. See: Lookalike Modeling.

MMM — Marketing Mix Modeling

Top-down econometric measurement of channel-level incremental revenue contribution. Privacy-safe. See: MMM Subscription.

MTA — Multi-Touch Attribution

Bottom-up journey-based attribution that credits multiple touchpoints in the conversion path. See: MTA Subscription.

P&L — Profit & Loss

Statement of revenue, costs, and resulting profit over a period. Marketing ROI is most credible when tied to P&L impact, not just attributed revenue.

Personalization

Tailoring content, recommendations, or offers to individual users based on their behavior or profile. See: Recommendation Engine.

Recommendation Engine

A model that surfaces relevant products to a customer on-site or in-email, increasing AOV and repeat purchase rate. See: RE Subscription.

RFM — Recency, Frequency, Monetary

A classical segmentation approach scoring customers on how recently they purchased, how often, and how much. See: Customer Segmentation.

ROAS — Return on Ad Spend

Revenue divided by ad spend. The headline efficiency metric in paid marketing. Platform-reported ROAS often overstates true contribution (see Incrementality).

Segmentation

The practice of dividing customers into groups based on behavior, demographics, or value, to enable targeted marketing. See: Customer Segmentation.

Walled Garden

A platform (Meta, Google, TikTok) that keeps its user data inside its own ecosystem. Each walled garden over-credits itself in self-reported attribution.