From AOV to View-Through: The Performance Marketing Vocabulary That Dominates 2025 Boardrooms

Performance marketing has developed a vocabulary that is dense, acronym-heavy, and unforgiving to outsiders. A chief marketing officer who confuses ROAS with ROI, or who cannot explain why a vendor's blended CAC looks suspiciously low, risks losing credibility in the exact rooms where budgets are decided.

This glossary compiles the terms most likely to surface in 2025 planning cycles, agency QBRs, and vendor pitches. Each entry includes a working definition and a brief illustration of how the term functions in practice.

Core Efficiency Metrics

ROAS (Return on Ad Spend). Revenue generated divided by advertising cost. A campaign that produces $400,000 in revenue on $100,000 of spend delivers a 4:1 ROAS. Because it ignores margins, ROAS can flatter unprofitable campaigns — a critical caveat when evaluating e-commerce performance.

ROI (Return on Investment). Unlike ROAS, ROI accounts for costs beyond media, including product costs and fulfillment. A 4:1 ROAS on a 30% margin product is, in fact, a money-losing proposition.

CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost). Total sales and marketing spend divided by new customers acquired. Boards increasingly scrutinize the ratio of CAC to LTV as a proxy for sustainable growth.

CPA (Cost per Acquisition/Action). The media cost of generating a single conversion, whether a purchase, signup, or lead.

CPC (Cost per Click). Spend divided by clicks. Foundational to paid search and social auction dynamics.

CPM (Cost per Mille). The price of one thousand impressions. The default currency of programmatic display and video buying.

CPL (Cost per Lead). Spend divided by qualified leads. Widely used in B2B demand generation, where lead volume without quality is meaningless.

AOV (Average Order Value). Total revenue divided by order count. Rising AOV often signals successful bundling or upselling strategies.

Conversion and Funnel Terms

Conversion Rate. The percentage of users who complete a target action. Benchmarks vary wildly by industry, so comparisons should be made within category, not across it.

Attribution. The methodology for assigning credit to touchpoints along the customer journey. First-click, last-click, linear, and data-driven models each tell a different story about which channels deserve budget.

MQL / SQL (Marketing-Qualified / Sales-Qualified Lead). Stages in the B2B funnel. An MQL meets marketing's scoring threshold; an SQL has been validated by sales as worth pursuing.

Retargeting (Remarketing). Serving ads to users who previously engaged with a brand. Typically among the highest-converting audiences available.

Lookalike Audiences. Prospecting segments built by platforms to resemble existing high-value customers.

Frequency. The average number of times an individual sees an ad. Excessive frequency drives waste and brand irritation.

View-Through Conversion. A conversion attributed to a user who saw (but did not click) an ad. Useful for upper-funnel video, but easily inflated — treat with healthy skepticism.

Measurement and Testing

Incrementality. The lift a campaign produces beyond what would have occurred organically. The gold standard question in performance marketing: did this ad create the sale, or was it going to happen anyway?

Holdout Test. A controlled experiment in which a segment of the audience is deliberately excluded from advertising to measure incremental impact.

A/B Test. A randomized comparison of two variants to determine which performs better on a defined metric.

Statistical Significance. The probability that a result is not due to random chance. Many teams ship "winners" from tests that never cleared this bar.

Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM). A statistical approach that uses historical data to estimate channel contributions. Revived in earnest after privacy changes limited user-level tracking.

Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA). User-level attribution across multiple touchpoints, increasingly constrained by signal loss but still viable in walled-garden environments.

Media Mix Shift. Deliberate reallocation of budget across channels, typically informed by MMM or incrementality findings.

LTV (Customer Lifetime Value). The projected revenue a customer will generate over the full relationship. Essential context for judging whether CAC is acceptable.

Privacy, Signal, and Platform Terms

Signal Loss. The degradation of measurement data caused by cookie deprecation, iOS privacy features, and consent requirements.

First-Party Data. Information collected directly from customers with consent — now the most valuable asset in most performance stacks.

Walled Garden. A platform (Google, Meta, Amazon) that keeps its audience and performance data closed to outside measurement.

Server-Side Tracking. Moving data collection to controlled server infrastructure to improve accuracy and durability against browser restrictions.

Consent Mode / Privacy Compliance. Frameworks governing how data may be collected and used under regulations such as CCPA and state-level privacy laws now active across the US.

Clean Room. A privacy-safe environment where two parties match and analyze data without exposing raw user-level records.

Creative and Channel Terms

Creative Testing. Systematic experimentation with ad variations. In 2025, creative is widely regarded as the largest remaining performance lever.

UGC (User-Generated Content). Creator-style, lo-fi creative that often outperforms polished studio assets on paid social.

Demand Capture vs. Demand Generation. Capturing existing search demand (paid search) versus creating new demand (social video, CTV, sponsorships). Confusing the two is a common strategic error.

CTV (Connected TV). Streaming inventory bought programmatically, increasingly performance-oriented with QR codes and attributed conversions.

Geo-Testing. Rolling campaigns out region by region to isolate incremental lift — a practical workaround when user-level data is unavailable.

Putting the Vocabulary to Work

Fluency in these terms is not academic. When an agency reports a strong ROAS but declines to discuss incrementality, that is a conversation. When a platform claims view-through conversions that exceed click-based results several times over, that is a number to interrogate. The executives who consistently outperform are not necessarily the most technically sophisticated — they are the ones who know which questions each term is designed to answer, and which answers the term conveniently obscures.

Bookmark this page. The vocabulary will keep evolving, and Marketing Dictionary will keep pace.