The marketing words that cost you money if you get them wrong.
36 terms, each written for somebody running a business rather than somebody running an agency. Every one says what the word means, why it matters to you, and the mistake people make with it.
There are no benchmarks anywhere in here. We have no source for what a typical UK cafe’s email open rate is, so you will not find one quoted as though we did.
Money and measurement
Cost per lead
What you pay in marketing for each person who gets in touch. Your spend divided by your enquiries.
Cost per click
What you pay, on average, each time somebody clicks your ad. Spend divided by clicks.
Click-through rate
What share of everyone who was shown your ad went on to tap it. A read on whether the message landed, not on whether it sold anything.
Conversion rate
The share of visitors who did the thing you wanted: booked, bought, called or filled in the form.
Customer acquisition cost
Everything you spent on marketing in a period, divided by the number of people who actually paid you in it. Enquiries do not count.
Lifetime value
What one customer is worth over the whole time they keep coming back, not just on the first visit.
Payback period
How long a new customer takes to earn back what you spent winning them. Measured in months, not sales.
Return on ad spend
Sales generated for every pound of advertising. A ratio of revenue to spend, and it ignores your costs.
Attribution
Deciding which piece of marketing gets the credit for a sale, when the customer saw several.
Impressions
How many times your ad or post appeared on a screen. Counts appearances, not people.
Reach
How many different people saw your content at least once. Always smaller than impressions.
Engagement rate
The share of people who did something with your post: liked, saved, shared, commented or tapped.
Holdout test
Deliberately leaving a slice of your audience out, so you can see what the marketing actually added.
A/B test
Running two versions side by side with real customers and keeping whichever one does better.
Getting found
Google Business Profile
The free listing that puts your name, hours, photos and reviews into Google Search and Maps.
NAP consistency
Your name, address and phone number written identically everywhere they appear online.
Local pack
The map and short list of nearby businesses Google shows above the ordinary results for local searches.
Structured data
Machine-readable labels in your page's code that spell out your hours, address, prices and reviews.
llms.txt
A plain text file at the root of your site that tells AI assistants, in order, what matters on it.
Answer engine optimisation
Being the source a search engine quotes when it answers the question itself, instead of listing links.
Generative engine optimisation
Making sure AI assistants can reach, read and correctly describe your business when somebody asks.
Alt text
A short written description of an image, read aloud by screen readers and read literally by machines.
Ads, pages and audiences
Retargeting
Advertising to people who already visited you and did not book, rather than to strangers.
Organic reach
The people who see your posts without you paying for it. Free, unpredictable, and not owed to you.
Landing page
The page somebody arrives on after clicking your ad or link. Its only job is the next step.
Call to action
The specific instruction telling somebody what to do next: book a table, get a quote, ring us today.
Marketing funnel
The shape of the journey from stranger to customer: many notice you, fewer engage, fewer buy.
UTM tracking
Extra labels stuck on the end of a link so your analytics can say exactly where a visitor came from.
Open rate
The share of people who appeared to open your email. A far less reliable number than it used to be.
Soft opt-in
The UK rule that lets you email your own customers about similar things without prior consent.
Bounce rate
Two completely different measurements share this name: one about undelivered email, one about website visits.
Craft
Brand voice
How your business sounds in words: the vocabulary, the rhythm, and the things you never say.
Proof point
A specific, checkable fact about your business you can safely put in your marketing.
Reading age
How hard your writing is to read, measured by sentence length and word length rather than by taste.
Or skip the reading and see it on your own business
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