Where every click is a journey and every impression counts.
The practice of positioning yourself as an expert by posting obvious observations on LinkedIn with the confidence of someone discovering fire. It's how CEOs turn shower thoughts into 47-slide decks and speaking engagements.
Cost Per Mille, meaning cost per thousand impressions, because apparently saying per thousand wasn't pretentious enough so they used Latin. You pay for a thousand eyeballs to theoretically see your ad while actually staring at their phone during a meeting.
The percentage of visitors who land on your website and immediately leave, like someone who walks into a party, sees their ex, and moonwalks right back out the door. A high bounce rate is your website's way of telling you it has the personality of a damp towel.
Return On Investment, the single most asked-about metric in any boardroom, and the one most likely to be fudged in a PowerPoint presentation. Every executive wants to know the ROI, and every department has a creative interpretation of what counts as a return.
When content spreads across the internet faster than a rumor in a high school cafeteria. Every marketer wants their content to go viral, despite the fact that you can't plan virality any more than you can plan to be struck by lightning while winning the lottery.
The industry-wide hallucination of 2017 where every publisher fired their writers to make videos nobody asked for. It was based on Facebook video metrics that turned out to be inflated by up to 900%, making it the Fyre Festival of content strategy.
The number of times your content was displayed on someone's screen, regardless of whether they actually saw it or were asleep with their phone on. It's the marketing equivalent of counting how many people were in the building when you sneezed.
A problem that a customer or employee has, rebranded as something clinical so you can charge money to fix it. Every pain point is someone's job security -- if the pain goes away, so does the consulting contract.
The part of a webpage visible before scrolling, borrowed from newspaper terminology by people who have never actually held a newspaper. Marketers treat it like sacred real estate, cramming it with CTAs like a clown car at the circus.
The psychological phenomenon where people do things because other people are doing them, weaponized by marketers since the dawn of the testimonial. It's why every landing page has a section that says "Trusted by 10,000+ companies" next to logos you've never seen.
An imaginary funnel that describes how thousands of potential customers enter at the top and approximately three of them actually buy something at the bottom. It's called a funnel because your hopes narrow dramatically at each stage.
Any interaction a customer has with your brand, from seeing an ad to calling customer service to rage-tweeting about your product. Marketers love counting touchpoints because it makes a seven-touch sale sound strategic instead of exhausting.
Ads disguised as real content, like a wolf in sheep's clothing except the wolf is trying to sell you mattresses. The tiny 'Sponsored' label is the advertising industry's version of whispering the side effects at the end of a pharmaceutical commercial.
The internet's way of following you around like a persistent salesperson after you looked at one pair of shoes for three seconds. You'll see ads for those shoes on every website for the next six months, long after you've already bought them from a competitor.
The art of selling things to people by pretending you're not selling things to people. You write a helpful blog post about productivity tips, and somehow by the end, the reader is buying your project management software.
The total number of unique people who saw your content, which sounds impressive until you realize most of them were scrolling past it at the speed of light. Reach is the vanity metric that other vanity metrics aspire to be when they grow up.
A fancy way of explaining why someone should give you money instead of your competitor. It's the corporate pickup line -- it sounds rehearsed, slightly desperate, and works about 10 percent of the time.
A fictional character representing your ideal customer, complete with a stock photo name and backstory more detailed than most Netflix characters. Marketing teams create them to feel like they understand their audience, then ignore them completely when making actual decisions.
Traffic that comes from private channels like texts and DMs where marketers can't track it, making it the speakeasy of social sharing. It sounds sinister, but it's really just your aunt forwarding articles in the family group chat.
The magical moment when your product actually solves a problem people are willing to pay for, which happens far less often than startup founders would have you believe. Finding product-market fit is like finding a parking spot downtown: everyone says they have a strategy, but mostly it's just luck.
The science of figuring out which marketing channel deserves credit for a sale, which is basically like five people arguing over who actually scored the goal. Every team claims they were the crucial touchpoint, and nobody can prove otherwise.
Showing ads to people who have already visited your website, because apparently the first impression wasn't creepy enough. It's the digital equivalent of a store clerk following you home and taping their business card to your front door.
A button or phrase designed to make someone do something immediately, like a digital drill sergeant screaming BUY NOW at your eyeballs. The entire internet is just an arms race of increasingly desperate calls to action.
Return On Ad Spend, a metric that tells you how many dollars you made for every dollar spent on advertising. It sounds simple until you realize the attribution model is held together with duct tape and wishful thinking.