Glossary — Adropic

Definitions only get you so far; what matters is which decision a term supports. Each entry says what it means and what it is good for.

A–C

Term	Meaning	What it decides
Ad set	The level holding audience, placement, budget and schedule	Where signal concentrates or fragments
Attribution window	How long after a click or view a conversion is credited	How much of the result you can see
AOV — average order value	Revenue divided by orders	How much you can afford per order
Bid strategy	The rule the platform follows when bidding	Cost control versus volume
Blended CAC	Total marketing spend divided by all new customers	Whether the business is profitable, not the campaign
Broad targeting	Leaving audience selection to the model	Whether creative or targeting drives delivery
CAC — customer acquisition cost	Cost to acquire one paying customer	Whether growth is affordable
Contribution margin	Revenue minus variable costs, per order	The real budget available for acquisition
Conversion rate	Conversions divided by clicks	Whether the page delivers on the ad
Cost cap	Maximum average cost the platform may pay per result	Protecting efficiency while scaling
CPA — cost per acquisition	Spend divided by conversions	Campaign-level efficiency
CPC — cost per click	Spend divided by clicks	Ad relevance and competition
CPM — cost per thousand impressions	Spend divided by impressions × 1000	Competition and creative quality, read together
Creative fatigue	Decay from repeated exposure to the same audience	When to refresh rather than re-bid
CTR — click-through rate	Clicks divided by impressions	Whether the promise motivates action

D–L

Term	Meaning	What it decides
Dayparting	Restricting delivery to certain hours or days	Rarely useful; usually costs learning
Dynamic creative	Platform assembling assets into combinations	Fast variant testing, weak concept testing
Frequency	Average impressions per person	Fatigue risk and audience exhaustion
Funnel	The stages between not knowing you and buying	Which message a given ad should carry
Hold rate	Longer-view rate on video	Whether content sustains the hook
Hook rate	Early-view rate on video	Whether the opening earns attention
Impression	One delivery of an ad	The unit everything is priced against
Incrementality	Sales that would not have happened without the ad	The only measure of real ad value
Learning phase	Period until delivery is optimized for an ad set	Why frequent edits raise costs
Lookalike audience	Model-built audience resembling a seed list	Retargeting-adjacent prospecting
LTV — lifetime value	Total margin a customer produces over time	The ceiling on what you may pay to acquire

M–R

Term	Meaning	What it decides
MER — marketing efficiency ratio	Total revenue divided by total ad spend	Whether the account works as a whole
Modelled conversion	An estimated, not observed, conversion	How much of the report is inference
Objective	The outcome the campaign optimizes for	What the algorithm will actually chase
Payback period	Time until a customer repays acquisition cost	How aggressively you can fund growth
Placement	The surface where the ad appears	Format requirements and cost differences
Prospecting	Advertising to people who do not know you	Whether the funnel refills
Retargeting	Advertising to people who already engaged	Harvest, not growth
ROAS — return on ad spend	Revenue divided by ad spend	Campaign efficiency, in platform terms

S–Z

Term	Meaning	What it decides
Server-side tracking	Sending events from your server, not the browser	Signal quality under consent limits
Statistical significance	Confidence a difference is not chance	When a test may be called
Thumb stop	The moment a scroll halts	The job of the first frame
UGC — user-generated content	Creative made in a real-user register	Trust and cost at the top of the funnel
Unit economics	Per-order revenue, cost and margin	Whether spending more helps or hurts
View-through conversion	Conversion after seeing, not clicking	How much credit to discount

Two terms are worth keeping apart: ROAS is measured inside the platform and counts what the platform can attribute; MER is measured in your bank account. When they disagree, MER is the one that pays salaries.