The marketing glossary.
Every term StrateQX uses across Learn, Diagnose, and the tools — defined in plain English, no circular definitions.
A
AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)
Optimizing content to win the direct answer to a question — featured snippets, People-Also-Ask, voice results, and AI answer boxes — by making the answer extractable, complete, and self-contained.
AI Overview
Google's AI-generated summary shown above traditional search results, synthesized from multiple sources rather than linking to just one.
Attribution
The method used to credit a conversion to the marketing touchpoint(s) that influenced it — last-click, first-click, and multi-touch models each tell a different story about what's actually working.
AOV (Average Order Value)
Total revenue divided by number of orders — a lever for e-commerce growth that's often cheaper to move than acquiring new customers.
B
Bounce Rate
The percentage of visitors who leave after viewing only one page, without any further interaction.
C
CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost)
Total sales and marketing spend divided by the number of new customers acquired in that period — the denominator every other growth metric gets compared against.
CAC Payback Period
How many months of revenue from a customer it takes to recover the cost of acquiring them — shorter is better, and it's a stronger health signal than CAC alone.
Churn Rate
The percentage of customers (or revenue) lost over a given period — the metric retention strategy exists to fight.
Conversion Rate
The percentage of visitors or leads who complete a desired action — a purchase, a form fill, a booked call.
CPL (Cost Per Lead)
Total spend on a campaign divided by the number of leads it generated.
CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization)
The discipline of systematically testing and improving a site or funnel to convert more of the traffic it already has, rather than buying more traffic.
CTR (Click-Through Rate)
The percentage of people who see a link, ad, or search result and click it.
CWV (Core Web Vitals)
Google's three measured page-experience metrics: LCP (loading speed), INP (interactivity), and CLS (visual stability) — all three affect both search ranking and real conversion.
D
Demand Generation
Marketing aimed at creating and educating a market before it's actively searching — as opposed to lead generation, which captures demand that already exists.
E
Entity SEO
Optimizing so search engines and AI systems understand your brand as a distinct, well-defined entity in their knowledge graph — not just a set of ranked pages.
E-E-A-T
Google's framework for content quality: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness — increasingly relevant to AI search as well as traditional SEO.
G
GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)
Optimizing to be included and favorably represented in AI-generated answers from tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews.
GTM (Go-to-Market)
The coordinated plan for how a product or service reaches its target customers — channel, message, pricing, and sequencing, bundled into one strategy.
I
ICP (Ideal Customer Profile)
A specific description of the type of account or customer that gets the most value, closes fastest, and stays longest — derived from real existing customers, not aspiration.
Impression Share
The percentage of eligible ad impressions your ads actually received, out of all the impressions they were eligible for.
J
JTBD (Jobs-To-Be-Done)
A framework that explains purchases by the progress a buyer is trying to make in their life or business, rather than by demographic profile.
K
Knowledge Graph
A structured database of entities (people, places, organizations) and the relationships between them, used by search engines and AI systems to understand and represent the world.
L
LCP (Largest Contentful Paint)
A Core Web Vital measuring how long it takes for the largest visible element on a page to load — a direct proxy for perceived loading speed.
Lead Scoring
Ranking leads by fit (do they match your ICP) and intent (how engaged are they), to route the right leads to sales at the right time.
LLMO (LLM Optimization)
Shaping how large language models represent your brand or entity in their training data and retrieval-grounded knowledge, so they describe you accurately when asked.
LTV (Lifetime Value)
The total revenue a business can expect from a customer over the life of the relationship — the number CAC has to stay profitably below.
LTV:CAC Ratio
Lifetime value divided by acquisition cost — a ratio of 3:1 or higher is a commonly cited health benchmark, though it varies by business model.
M
MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead)
A lead judged ready to be handed from marketing to sales, based on fit and engagement signals — the step before an SQL.
MMM (Marketing Mix Modeling)
A statistical approach to measuring the incremental impact of each marketing channel on revenue, using aggregate data rather than individual-level tracking.
N
North Star Metric
The single metric a business treats as the best proxy for the value it delivers to customers — chosen to be a leading indicator, not just a lagging one.
NRR (Net Revenue Retention)
The percentage of recurring revenue retained from existing customers over a period, including expansion and minus churn — above 100% means existing customers are growing revenue on their own.
O
Organic Traffic
Visitors who arrive via unpaid search engine results, as opposed to paid ads or direct/referral traffic.
P
Positioning
The specific, defensible place a product occupies in a customer's mind relative to alternatives — what makes it the obvious choice for a specific someone.
PMax (Performance Max)
A Google Ads campaign type that uses automated bidding and creative optimization across all Google inventory from a single campaign, in exchange for less manual control.
Programmatic SEO
Generating large numbers of search-optimized pages from a structured data source (like a product catalog or location list) — powerful at scale, risky without real per-page value.
R
ROAS (Return on Ad Spend)
Revenue generated per unit of ad spend — a 4x ROAS means ₹4 in revenue for every ₹1 spent.
S
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
The practice of improving a site's visibility in organic (unpaid) search results through technical, content, and authority signals.
Share of Voice
A brand's visibility relative to its competitors across a channel — search rankings, ad impressions, or (increasingly) AI answer citations.
SQL (Sales Qualified Lead)
A lead that sales has accepted as worth actively pursuing, based on fit, intent, and timing.
Structured Data
Machine-readable markup (typically Schema.org / JSON-LD) added to a page so search engines and AI systems can understand its content precisely, not just parse the visible text.
T
TAM/SAM/SOM
Total Addressable Market, Serviceable Addressable Market, and Serviceable Obtainable Market — a nested framework for sizing a business opportunity from broadest to realistic.
Topical Authority
A search engine's assessment of how comprehensively and credibly a site covers a given subject — built through breadth and depth of related content, not just a single ranking page.
TOFU / MOFU / BOFU
Top-, Middle-, and Bottom-of-Funnel — shorthand for how far along the buying journey a piece of content or a channel is designed to meet a prospect.
Z
Zero-Click Search
A search query that gets fully answered on the results page itself (via a featured snippet or AI overview), with no click to any website required.
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