Know Exactly What the Work Means.

Attribution

Also used: conversion credit

A rule or model for assigning credit for an outcome across marketing interactions.

Attribution describes how credit is distributed; it does not by itself prove that a channel caused the outcome.

First user source / medium

Also used: first touch, user acquisition

The source and medium associated with a user's first recognized acquisition in GA4.

This is user-scoped. It answers where the recognized user was first acquired, not what brought the user back during a later session.

Session source / medium

Also used: session acquisition, traffic acquisition

The source and medium associated with the start of a particular GA4 session.

This is session-scoped. It is useful for understanding visits and return behavior, including retargeting and branded search.

Key event

A GA4 event marked as important to the business and made available for conversion-oriented reporting.

The label does not guarantee the event is implemented correctly. Validate the trigger, deduplication, and business meaning before using it for optimization.

Conversion event

An event used by an advertising or analytics platform to represent a valuable action.

Platforms use different naming conventions. The important check is whether the event fires only when the claimed action actually occurs.

Data layer

A structured object used to pass page, user, commerce, or event information to a tag-management system.

A data layer creates a stable contract between the website and measurement tools. It should not be treated as an ungoverned dumping ground.

Google Tag Manager

Also used: GTM

A tag-management system used to configure and deploy measurement and marketing scripts.

GTM controls how tags fire, but it does not repair an unclear event definition or unreliable source data.

Google Analytics 4

Also used: GA4

Google's event-based analytics platform for measuring website and application behavior.

GA4 reports are shaped by identity, consent, event configuration, attribution settings, and reporting scope.

UTM parameters

Also used: UTMs, campaign parameters

Query-string parameters used to identify campaign traffic in analytics tools.

The common fields are source, medium, campaign, term, and content. Their value depends on consistent naming and preservation through redirects.

Campaign taxonomy

A controlled naming system for campaign, channel, audience, creative, geography, and other operating dimensions.

A taxonomy should support the decisions and joins the organization actually needs, not encode every possible attribute.

Search term

The query a person actually entered before an ad was shown or clicked.

A search term is observed behavior. It is not the same thing as the keyword used by the advertiser to enter the auction.

Negative keyword

A rule intended to prevent an ad from serving for an unwanted search query or query pattern.

Negative keywords require human review because an apparently irrelevant term can contain valuable intent in another campaign or match context.

Match type

A platform rule controlling how closely a search query must relate to a paid-search keyword.

Match types influence reach but do not replace search-term review, conversion validation, or campaign routing rules.

Paid social

Paid advertising delivered through social platforms such as Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok, or Pinterest.

Paid-social measurement often combines platform-reported conversions, analytics sessions, CRM outcomes, and incrementality evidence.

Retargeting

Advertising aimed at people who previously interacted with a site, app, content, or customer list.

Retargeting can help return known prospects, but its session-level results should not be mistaken for first-touch acquisition.

Lifecycle stage

A governed classification describing where a person or company sits in the customer journey.

Lifecycle stages should have explicit entry, progression, regression, and exception rules rather than being inferred differently in every report.

Lead status

An operational field describing the current sales follow-up state of a lead.

Lead status is usually more tactical than lifecycle stage and may include states such as new, working, connected, unqualified, or open deal.

Marketing-qualified lead

Also used: MQL

A lead that meets an organization's documented threshold for marketing qualification.

The threshold may combine fit, behavior, consent, and exclusions. The acronym alone does not provide a universal definition.

Sales-qualified lead

Also used: SQL

A lead accepted or qualified for active sales evaluation under a documented process.

An SQL should reflect an agreed handoff or qualification rule, not simply a form submission or scoring threshold.

Source of truth

The designated system or governed dataset considered authoritative for a specific fact.

There may be different sources of truth for spend, identity, lifecycle, and revenue. The phrase is useful only when ownership and precedence are explicit.

Marketing Mix Model

Also used: MMM, marketing mix modeling

A statistical model that estimates how marketing inputs and other factors relate to an aggregate business outcome over time or across markets.

A useful MMM requires a defined decision, stable data grain, credible controls, validation, and honest uncertainty—not merely a fitted regression.

Media Mix Model

A term often used interchangeably with Marketing Mix Model, usually with stronger emphasis on paid-media allocation.

The labels overlap heavily. The practical distinction depends on scope, inputs, outcome, and decisions rather than the acronym.

Incrementality

The additional outcome caused by an intervention compared with what would have happened without it.

Observed conversions and attributed conversions are not automatically incremental. Experiments and causal models attempt to estimate the missing counterfactual.

Adstock

A transformation representing the idea that advertising effects can persist after the original exposure period.

The assumed carryover pattern should reflect the channel, buying cycle, time grain, and available evidence rather than a default setting.

Saturation

The tendency for additional marketing investment to produce diminishing marginal returns.

Saturation curves help describe response, but their shape can be weakly identified when spend has little historical variation.

Control variable

A variable included to account for a plausible non-media influence on the modeled outcome.

Controls should represent real causal alternatives such as price, promotions, distribution, seasonality, or economic conditions—not decorative columns.

Application programming interface

Also used: API

A documented way for software systems to request data or trigger actions in another system.

An API defines available operations and contracts. Authentication, rate limits, pagination, retries, and data governance still need to be designed.

Advertising API

An API provided by an advertising platform for campaign management, reporting, audiences, or related operations.

Advertising APIs can remove manual work, but automated outputs still require validation, access controls, and platform-specific exception handling.

Apps Script

Google's JavaScript-based automation environment for Google Workspace products and connected services.

Apps Script is useful for lightweight workflows involving Sheets, Drive, Gmail, forms, scheduled jobs, and external APIs.

Webhook

An event-driven HTTP message sent from one system to another when a defined action occurs.

Webhooks reduce polling, but reliable implementations still need authentication, idempotency, retry handling, and failure visibility.

ETL

Also used: extract transform load, ELT

A data workflow that extracts information, transforms it into a usable structure, and loads it into a destination.

Some systems use ELT instead, loading before transformation. In either case, grain, ownership, lineage, and failure recovery matter.

Consent management platform

Also used: CMP

Software used to collect, store, and enforce user consent choices for cookies and related data processing.

A CMP must be implemented against the site's real scripts, regions, purposes, and policy decisions; installing a banner alone is not the full job.

First-party data

Information an organization collects directly through its own interactions with customers, prospects, users, or audiences.

First-party does not mean unrestricted. Collection, consent, access, retention, and intended use still require governance.

Server-side tagging

A tagging architecture in which selected measurement requests are processed through a controlled server environment.

It can improve control and resilience, but it does not override consent, restore data never collected, or make poor event definitions trustworthy.

Identity resolution

The process of linking records or interactions believed to belong to the same person, household, or organization.

Identity resolution can use deterministic or probabilistic signals. Its limitations should remain visible, especially across devices and consent states.