Glossary
The terms that come up in briefs, test plans and weekly reports, defined the way we use them.
- Angle
- A reason to buy, stated from the customer’s side: it saves time, it’s gentle, it replaces three products. Tests are built around angles.
- AOV
- Average order value: revenue divided by the number of orders.
- Attribution window
- How long after someone clicks or views an ad a purchase can still be credited to it, for example seven days after a click.
- CAC
- Customer acquisition cost: everything spent to win a new customer, divided by the number of new customers.
- Concept
- One creative idea for an ad, before it’s made into variations.
- CPA
- Cost per acquisition: ad spend divided by conversions. When the conversion is a sale, it’s cost per purchase.
- CPC
- Cost per click: ad spend divided by clicks.
- CPI
- Cost per install: ad spend divided by app installs.
- CPM
- Cost per thousand impressions. What the platform charges for reach.
- Creative fatigue
- When an ad performs worse the more the same people see it: frequency rises, click-through falls, cost per customer climbs.
- CTR
- Click-through rate: clicks divided by impressions.
- CVR
- Conversion rate: purchases divided by clicks or visits.
- Demand Gen
- A Google Ads campaign type that runs on YouTube, including Shorts, as well as Discover and Gmail.
- Execution
- How an ad is made: presenter to camera, demo, hands only, product hero. The same angle can be made several ways.
- Frequency
- The average number of times each person has seen an ad.
- Hold rate
- Of the people who watched the first three seconds, the share who kept watching. Definitions vary; we agree one with you.
- Hook
- The first two or three seconds of an ad: the part that decides whether the rest gets seen.
- Hook rate
- Three-second video views divided by impressions. Also called thumb-stop rate.
- Incrementality
- Sales that wouldn’t have happened without the ads. Measured by comparing people who saw them with a held-out group who didn’t.
- IPM
- Installs per thousand impressions. A quick read on how well an ad turns views into installs.
- Iteration
- A new version of an ad that keeps what worked, often the hook, and changes one thing.
- LTV
- Lifetime value: the revenue or profit a customer brings in over their whole relationship with your brand.
- MER
- Marketing efficiency ratio: total revenue divided by total marketing spend, across every channel.
- MMP
- Mobile measurement partner: the tool that credits app installs, trials and purchases to the ads that led to them.
- Placement
- Where an ad appears: Reels, Stories, Feed, the For You feed, Shorts, in-stream.
- ROAS
- Return on ad spend: revenue attributed to ads divided by what the ads cost.
- Safe zone
- The part of the frame that platform buttons, captions and profile details don’t cover.
- Spark Ads
- A TikTok format that runs an organic post, from the brand’s account or a creator’s with permission, as an ad.
- Spec ad
- An ad made speculatively, without a client brief or payment, to show what a studio can do. Ours are labeled as spec.
- Trial-to-paid
- The share of free trials that turn into paying subscriptions.
- UGC
- User-generated content: video that looks like a real person filmed it on a phone. UGC-style ads borrow the look.
- Variant
- One version of an ad within a test. A twenty-ad sprint has twenty variants.
Want to see what we’d test first?
Tell us what you sell and what you’re running now. We’ll come back with the angles we’d test first and what it costs.