Performance marketing is paid advertising bought against a measurable outcome — a sale, lead or booking — rather than impressions. This glossary answers the 15 questions Australian and New Zealand advertisers ask most, including what ROAS means, what counts as a good ROAS, how customer acquisition cost differs from cost per lead, and what Performance Max, Advantage+, the Conversions API, AEO and llms.txt actually do. Each answer is one sentence, then the detail.
Performance marketing is paid advertising bought against a measurable outcome — a sale, lead, install or booking — rather than impressions or brand awareness.
Budget decisions are made on cost per outcome and contribution margin, and campaigns are judged on tracked revenue instead of reach. In practice that means every channel carries a target cost per acquisition, and spend moves to whichever channel hits it at scale. Our services.
ROAS (return on ad spend) is revenue divided by advertising spend for a given period or campaign — a 4x ROAS means $4 of revenue for every $1 spent.
ROAS ignores cost of goods, shipping, payment fees and management fees, so it is a revenue efficiency metric rather than a profit metric.
A good ROAS is any figure above your break-even ROAS, which is 1 divided by your gross margin — a 40% margin business breaks even at 2.5x, so 3x–4x is healthy, while a 70% margin business can profit at 1.5x.
There is no universal benchmark. Across Australian and New Zealand e-commerce accounts we manage, Google Search and Shopping typically returns 3.1x–7.4x and Meta prospecting 1.8x–4.2x. Compare your number to your own margin first, then to category ranges. AU/NZ benchmarks.
Customer acquisition cost is total sales and marketing spend divided by the number of new paying customers acquired in the same period.
Unlike cost per lead, CAC counts only customers who actually paid, which makes it the correct number to compare against lifetime value. A healthy subscription business generally targets an LTV to CAC ratio of 3:1 or better. SaaS marketing.
Cost per lead is advertising spend divided by the number of leads generated, so $4,000 producing 50 enquiries is a $80 cost per lead.
CPL is only useful alongside lead quality: a $40 lead that converts at 30% beats a $15 lead that converts at 3%. Feeding lead-to-sale outcomes back into the ad platform makes bidding optimise for the former. Lead generation.
Performance Max is a Google Ads campaign type that serves one asset group across Search, Shopping, YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail and Maps using automated bidding.
It needs accurate conversion tracking and steady conversion volume to allocate budget sensibly. Without conversion value data or asset group segmentation it will drift toward the cheapest inventory. Google Ads agency.
Advantage+ is Meta's automated campaign type that consolidates prospecting and retargeting into a single budget with machine-selected audiences and placements.
Advantage+ shopping campaigns perform best with a broad creative pool and a well-implemented Conversions API feed, because the algorithm needs both creative variety and clean event data to find incremental buyers. Meta Ads agency.
The Conversions API is a server-to-server connection that sends conversion events from your website or CRM directly to Meta, independent of the browser pixel.
It restores event data lost to ad blockers, iOS tracking restrictions and cookie expiry, which improves attribution accuracy and gives the bidding algorithm more complete signal.
Offline conversion import sends downstream outcomes — qualified lead, booked job, closed deal — from your CRM back to Google or Meta against the original click ID.
Bidding then optimises for revenue-producing enquiries instead of any form submission, which is the single highest-impact change most lead generation accounts can make.
Answer engine optimisation is the practice of structuring web content so AI answer engines like ChatGPT Search, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews can extract and cite it.
Core requirements are server-rendered HTML, question-form headings, self-contained answer passages, consistent entity-level structured data and an llms.txt file summarising the site. Answers hub.
llms.txt is a plain-text file at a website's root that summarises the organisation, its services and its key URLs in a format large language models can read cheaply.
It functions like robots.txt for meaning rather than access, helping AI assistants describe a business accurately instead of inferring details from scattered page copy.
Incrementality is the additional revenue an advertising channel produces that would not have occurred without it.
It is measured with geo holdouts, conversion lift studies or spend-shift tests, and it routinely differs from platform-reported attribution — branded search and retargeting are the two channels most often over-credited.
Blended ROAS is total business revenue divided by total advertising spend across every channel.
Because it cannot be inflated by overlapping platform attribution, it is the most reliable top-level indicator that scaling spend is actually growing the business.
Local Services Ads are Google's pay-per-lead format for licensed trades and local service businesses, where you pay per qualified phone call or message rather than per click.
Listings appear above standard search ads with a Google Guaranteed badge, and ranking is driven by review volume, response time and proximity rather than bid alone. Marketing for tradies.
White-label paid media is campaign delivery performed by a specialist agency under another agency's brand.
The delivery partner never contacts the end client directly, and reporting is issued in the reselling agency's branding. Agency partners.
