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24 terms

Glossary

Marketing jargon often exists to hide the fact that nothing is happening. Here is what the terms we use actually mean — one sentence each, then in detail.

01

Performance

PPCpay per click

A paid advertising model where the advertiser pays per click, not per impression.

Short for pay per click. Used in Google Ads, Meta Ads, Sklik and on marketplace platforms. The advantage is paying only for expressed interest; the drawback is that click prices rise with competition and in some sectors now exceed CZK 100.

The most common mistake with PPC is optimising for the click rather than what happens after it. A click on its own has no value.

See alsoCPA — cost per acquisition · ROAS — return on ad spend · Conversion

CPA — cost per acquisition

The average amount spent to acquire one conversion.

Calculated as total cost divided by number of conversions. The usefulness of the figure stands or falls on what counts as a conversion — an order for one e-shop, an add-to-cart for another, giving two incomparable numbers.

CPA alone says nothing until it is set against margin. A cost of CZK 800 is excellent on a product with CZK 3,000 margin and ruinous on one with CZK 500.

See alsoROAS — return on ad spend · PPC · Conversion

ROAS — return on ad spend

The ratio of revenue generated by advertising to the amount spent on it.

A ROAS of 4 means every koruna spent returned four in revenue. The metric is popular because it is easy to calculate, but it works with revenue rather than profit — which is its main weakness.

Across a range with varying margins, optimising for ROAS leads to selling most of whatever earns least. That is why we pass margin into measurement and steer campaigns by it.

See alsoCPA — cost per acquisition · Margin · PPC

Remarketing

Advertising again to people who have already visited the site.

It is usually the cheapest part of a campaign because the audience already knows the brand. That is precisely why its results are easily overrated — some of those people would have bought anyway and the campaign takes credit for a settled outcome.

It is sensible to set a frequency cap and a time window. Following someone for a month with ads for a product they have already bought does the brand more harm than good.

See alsoConversion · Attribution · GDPR and cookie consent

CTR — click-through rate

The share of people who clicked an ad out of those who saw it.

A quick indicator of whether message and targeting fit each other. A high CTR earns nothing on its own — an ad promising something the site does not deliver often has excellent click-through and no revenue.

It can only be compared within one format and placement. Between search and display the figures differ by an order of magnitude and the comparison is meaningless.

See alsoPPC · CPA — cost per acquisition · Landing page

02

Measurement

Conversion

An action by a visitor that the advertiser treats as the campaign goal.

It can be an order, a submitted inquiry, a phone call or a document download. What matters is that the definition matches what actually brings the business money.

For service businesses it pays to separate an inquiry, a qualified inquiry and a signed contract. The gap between the first and last figure is routinely tenfold, and a campaign steered by the wrong one spends on uninteresting leads.

See alsoCPA — cost per acquisition · Attribution · Server-side tracking

Attribution

The rule by which credit for a conversion is assigned to individual channels.

A customer usually encounters a brand several times — sees a spot, later clicks a search ad, and finally arrives directly. The attribution model decides which of those steps gets credited.

Last-click attribution systematically overvalues search and undervalues channels at the start of the journey. So budget for brand campaigns cannot be steered by it alone.

See alsoConversion · Server-side tracking · Post-buy analysis

Server-side tracking

Sending conversion data from your own server rather than from the visitor’s browser.

As cookies are restricted and scripts blocked, a share of browser-measured conversions is lost. Server-side tracking reduces that loss because the merchant’s own system sends the data.

It is not a way around consent. Consent to processing is still required and server-side tracking changes nothing about that — it only improves data quality for visitors who granted it.

See alsoConversion · Attribution · GDPR and cookie consent

03

Media

Reach and frequency

How many people see a campaign and how many times each of them sees it.

Two figures competing for the same budget. Broad reach with low frequency fails to make the message stick; high frequency on a narrow audience starts to irritate after a few exposures.

Brand campaigns typically aim for an effective frequency of three to five contacts. The exact figure varies with message complexity and existing brand awareness.

See alsoPost-buy analysis · OOH — out-of-home

Post-buy analysis

A comparison of what the media plan promised against what actually ran.

It checks which spots ran, at what times, and with what actual reach. Deviations from plan are settled through compensation from the media owner.

Agencies often skip this step because it adds nothing to revenue. It is, however, the only place where you verify the client got what they paid for.

See alsoReach and frequency · OOH — out-of-home

OOH — out-of-home

Advertising formats in public space, from billboards to street furniture.

Short for out-of-home. It covers billboards, citylights, transit formats and digital screens. Its strengths are reach and visibility; its weaknesses are targeting precision and measurability.

Frequency decides with OOH. One site for a month is wasted spend; twenty sites over three weeks has a measurable effect on branded search.

See alsoReach and frequency · Post-buy analysis

CPM — cost per millecost per mille

The price an advertiser pays for one thousand ad impressions.

The basic unit in which media space is traded. An impression does not mean anyone noticed the ad, which is why digital adds viewability — whether the placement entered the browser window at all.

Comparing CPM across channels is treacherous. A thousand impressions on television, on a billboard and in a mobile app are three contacts of very different intensity, and the same number means something different in each.

See alsoGRP — gross rating point · Reach and frequency · OOH — out-of-home

GRP — gross rating pointgross rating point

The total reach of a campaign expressed as a percentage of the target group.

One hundred GRPs means the campaign reached the target group once over in total — say fifty percent of people twice, or a hundred percent once. The number alone therefore does not say how many people saw the ad.

That is exactly why a plan is never built on GRPs alone. Alongside them you track net reach — how many distinct people the campaign met at least once — and average frequency.

See alsoCPM — cost per mille · Reach and frequency · Post-buy analysis

Programmatic buying

Automated buying of ad space through an auction held while the page loads.

Instead of negotiating with a specific outlet, you buy an audience across thousands of sites. The system evaluates in real time how valuable a given user is to the advertiser and bids accordingly.

Its weakness is transparency. Several intermediaries sit between advertiser and publisher and each takes a cut, so noticeably less of the budget reaches the publisher than was spent. That is why a plan should also include direct buys with the outlets you actually want.

See alsoCPM — cost per mille · Attribution · Share of voice

Share of voice

A brand’s share of total advertising activity within its category.

It is measured in money or in reach. It is useful compared against market share: a brand with a smaller voice than its share usually loses share over time, and the reverse also holds.

The figure is meaningful only relative to competitors, never on its own. In a thinly contested category a fraction of a budget buys a loud voice that elsewhere would go unnoticed.

See alsoGRP — gross rating point · Positioning · CPM — cost per mille

04

Business

Margin

The difference between the selling price and the cost of acquiring or making the goods.

In marketing this is the most important number that most often never reaches the campaigns. Without it, optimisation targets revenue and the campaign pushes the least profitable goods.

For e-shops we recommend passing margin into conversion tracking. It is extra work at setup and a difference in profitability within a single quarter.

See alsoROAS — return on ad spend · CPA — cost per acquisition

05

Brand

Tone of voice

The settled way a brand speaks — vocabulary, sentence construction and level of formality.

This is not a slogan or a list of banned words. It is a set of decisions by which you can tell whether a text sounds like the brand even without a logo on it.

A tone of voice guide is only useful when it contains good and bad examples from real situations. Abstract adjectives like “friendly but professional” help nobody.

See alsoPositioning · Brand architecture

Positioning

The place a brand occupies in the customer’s mind relative to competitors.

Positioning is not what a brand claims about itself but what people think of it. Work on it therefore begins by establishing the current state, not by writing aspirations.

The hardest part is not finding what makes the brand distinctive, but agreeing what it gives up. A brand that wants to be for everyone is for no one.

See alsoTone of voice · Brand architecture

Brand architecture

The rules governing relationships between a parent brand, sub-brands and products.

It settles when the shared umbrella should be visible and when it gets in a sub-brand’s way. The most common failure in company groups is that each division gradually starts communicating its own way.

OMNIA GROUP solves this by keeping the wordmark always monochrome and differentiating only through the entity’s colour rule. The group stays recognisable without the subsidiaries blurring together.

See alsoPositioning · Tone of voice

Brand lift

The measured increase in brand awareness or favourability caused by a campaign.

It is established by surveying two groups — those exposed to the campaign and a control group that was not. The difference in answers is attributed to the campaign.

It is one of the few ways to evidence the effect of brand advertising, where conversions cannot be measured. The measurement must be set up before launch, though; you cannot assemble a control group retrospectively.

See alsoPositioning · GRP — gross rating point · Attribution

06

Web

Landing page

The page an ad brings a visitor to first.

The most common mistake in paid campaigns is sending all traffic to the home page. Someone who clicked a specific offer then has to find it again — and mostly will not.

A landing page has to deliver on the ad’s promise within seconds and offer one clear action. The more options it presents, the fewer people take the one that matters.

See alsoCTR — click-through rate · Conversion · Core Web Vitals

Web accessibility

The property of a website that lets people with visual, hearing or motor impairments use it.

In practice it means sufficient colour contrast, keyboard operability, labelled form fields, text alternatives for images and a meaningful heading hierarchy.

Since June 2025 the European Accessibility Act has made these recommendations obligations for many commercial websites. As it happens, these are exactly the properties search engines reward too.

See alsoGDPR and cookie consent · Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals

A set of Google metrics assessing a page’s load speed, responsiveness and visual stability.

It comprises three indicators: largest contentful paint, interaction to next paint, and cumulative layout shift — content jumping around as it loads.

The effect on search rankings is indirect, but the effect on conversions is direct and measurable. With paid traffic, every extra second feeds straight into cost per acquisition.

See alsoWeb accessibility · CPA — cost per acquisition

07

Law

GDPR and cookie consent

European rules requiring prior consent before visitors may be tracked for marketing purposes.

Marketing and analytics cookies may only be set after consent is given. Pre-ticked boxes and banners without a reject option breach the rules and are fineable.

Refusing must be as easy as accepting. From a measurement standpoint that means accepting that some data simply will not exist — and not trying to work around it.

See alsoServer-side tracking · Web accessibility

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