Glossary
Performance marketing glossary
Every performance marketing term Carter Media uses with clients, defined in one sentence and expanded in two. Written for Australian and New Zealand business owners who want to read a media report without a decoder ring.
- Performance marketing
- 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. Our services.
- ROAS (return on ad spend)
- ROAS is revenue divided by advertising spend for a given period or campaign. A 4x ROAS means $4 of revenue per $1 spent. ROAS ignores cost of goods, shipping and fees, so profitable brands set a target ROAS derived from gross margin rather than chasing a generic benchmark.
- CAC (customer acquisition cost)
- Customer acquisition cost is total sales and marketing spend divided by the number of new 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. SaaS marketing.
- Cost per lead (CPL)
- Cost per lead is ad spend divided by the number of leads generated. It 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
- Performance Max is a Google Ads campaign type that serves a single 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. Google Ads agency.
- Advantage+ shopping campaigns
- Advantage+ shopping campaigns are Meta's automated campaign type that consolidates prospecting and retargeting into one budget with machine-selected audiences and placements. They perform best with a broad creative pool and a well-implemented Conversions API feed. Meta Ads agency.
- Conversions API (CAPI)
- 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 restrictions and cookie expiry, improving attribution and bidding accuracy.
- Offline conversion import
- 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.
- Answer engine optimisation (AEO)
- Answer engine optimisation is the practice of structuring web content so AI answer engines 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
- llms.txt is a plain-text file at a site'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.
- Incrementality
- 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.
- Blended ROAS
- 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
- Local Services Ads are Google's pay-per-lead format for licensed trades and local service businesses. Listings appear above standard search ads with a Google Guaranteed badge, and advertisers pay per qualified phone call or message rather than per click. Marketing for tradies.
- White-label paid media
- 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.
Looking for answers rather than definitions? Visit the answers hub or the AU/NZ paid media benchmarks.