ROAS. CTR. CPC. CPM. SEO. CTA. Conversion rate. Retargeting.
Marketing has a wonderful habit of taking fairly simple ideas and giving them names that make everyone else feel like they missed an important meeting.
So we made this.
The Frenzii Marketing Jargon Translator is a plain-English guide to digital marketing terms, advertising terminology, social media metrics, SEO jargon and all those acronyms that marketers casually throw into meetings.
The 30-second version
If you only learn six marketing terms today, make them these:
| Marketing term | What it actually means |
|---|---|
| Lead | Someone who might become a customer |
| Conversion | Someone did the thing you wanted them to do |
| CPC | What you paid for one ad click |
| CPL | What you paid to get one lead |
| CPA | What it cost to get a particular action or customer |
| ROAS | How much revenue your ads made compared with what you spent |
That’s already enough to survive a surprising number of marketing meetings.
Now let’s translate the rest.
The marketing funnel, in numbers
Before we get into individual terms, this makes most marketing jargon much easier to understand.
Think of marketing roughly like this:
Most marketing metrics are simply measuring one part of that journey. For example:
- Impressions measure the top.
- CTR measures how many people moved from seeing to clicking.
- Conversion rate measures how many people moved from clicking to doing something.
- CPL measures what those leads cost you.
- ROAS looks at the money you made compared with the advertising money you spent.
Suddenly the alphabet soup makes slightly more sense.
What is ROAS?
ROAS = Return On Ad Spend.
For every R1 I spent on advertising, how much revenue did I make?
The calculation is: Revenue generated from ads ÷ advertising spend = ROAS
Google defines ROAS as conversion value divided by ad spend.
Is a 4x ROAS good?
Maybe.
And this is where marketing gets more complicated.
If you sell something for R1,000 but it costs you R900 to provide it, a 4x ROAS means something very different from a business with an 80% gross margin.
ROAS measures advertising revenue. It does not automatically tell you whether the business made a healthy profit.
Which brings us to…
What is ROI?
ROI = Return On Investment.
Was this actually worth the money?
ROI is broader than ROAS.
What did our advertising spend generate?
After considering the investment, what did we actually get back?
Google distinguishes the two as well: ROAS relates conversion value to ad spend, while ROI relates profit to spend.
ROAS vs ROI
| ROAS | ROI | |
|---|---|---|
| Question | Did the ads generate revenue? | Did the investment make money? |
| Focus | Advertising | Overall return |
| Useful for | Campaign performance | Business profitability |
| Same thing? | No | No |
This distinction matters.
A campaign can have an impressive-looking ROAS and still not be particularly profitable.
What is CPC?
CPC = Cost Per Click.
How much did I pay every time somebody clicked my ad?
Google calculates average CPC by dividing the total cost of your clicks by the number of clicks received.
Is a low CPC good?
Usually you’d rather pay R5 than R50 for a click.
But don’t become obsessed with cheap clicks. Imagine:
at R5 each
Zero customersat R20 each
Three customersWhich campaign would you rather have?
Exactly.
Cheap traffic isn’t necessarily good traffic.
What is CTR?
CTR = Click-Through Rate.
Of all the people who saw my ad, how many actually clicked it?
The formula: Clicks ÷ Impressions × 100 = CTR
Google defines CTR as clicks divided by impressions.
Why should I care?
CTR can help you understand whether people find your ad interesting or relevant enough to click.
But again: a high CTR doesn’t automatically mean successful marketing.
If everyone clicks because your ad says FREE FERRARI, you’re probably going to have an excellent CTR.
That doesn’t mean they’re going to buy your accounting services.
What are impressions?
An impression generally means your ad or piece of content was displayed.
It appeared on someone’s screen.
If your Facebook ad has 20,000 impressions, that does not mean 20,000 people visited your website.
It doesn’t even necessarily mean 20,000 different people saw it. It means the content was displayed 20,000 times.
What is reach?
How many different people saw the content?
This is different from impressions. Imagine your ad is shown to Sarah three times. That could roughly mean:
This distinction is particularly useful when looking at social media advertising.
What is frequency?
How many times, on average, is each person seeing my ad?
In other words, each person saw the ad approximately three times on average.
Frequency matters because sometimes people need to see you more than once. But there is also a point where…
“Oh, there’s that company again.”
“FOR THE LOVE OF EVERYTHING, I HAVE SEEN THIS AD 47 TIMES.”
What is CPM?
CPM = Cost Per Mille.
“Mille” means thousand.
Because apparently Cost Per Thousand was too easy.
How much am I paying for every 1,000 ad impressions?
Google describes average CPM as the average amount charged per 1,000 ad views/impressions when using CPM-based advertising.
CPM is especially useful when you’re looking at the cost of reaching people rather than immediately generating clicks or leads.
What is a conversion?
A conversion happens when someone takes an action you’ve decided matters.
Google describes a conversion as an action you’ve defined as valuable after someone interacts with your advertising or listing. That could be:
They did the thing we wanted them to do.
A conversion does NOT always mean a sale. That’s important.
What is conversion rate?
What percentage of people actually did the thing we wanted?
Google calculates conversion rate by dividing conversions by trackable ad interactions.
Conversion rate is one of the most useful numbers in marketing because sometimes the problem isn’t getting people to your website.
The problem is what happens after they arrive.
What is a lead?
A lead is a person or business that has shown enough interest to potentially become a customer. Examples:
Someone put their hand up.
Lead ≠ customer
This distinction matters enormously. If your agency tells you:
“We generated 200 leads!”
your next question should be:
“Great. How many became customers?”
What is CPL?
CPL = Cost Per Lead.
How much did it cost us to get one potential customer?
Simple.
But a cheap lead isn’t automatically a good lead.
We would rather generate ten people who genuinely need what you sell than 100 people who entered their details because they vaguely fancied winning something.
What is CPA?
CPA = Cost Per Action or, depending on the context, Cost Per Acquisition.
Google Ads defines cost per action as total cost divided by total conversions.
What did it cost us to get the result we care about?
Whether that’s brilliant or terrible depends entirely on what a customer is worth to your business.
CPC vs CPL vs CPA
This is where many business owners get confused.
| Metric | You’re paying / measuring | Example |
|---|---|---|
| CPC | A click | R8 |
| CPL | A lead | R120 |
| CPA | A completed action / acquisition | R850 |
Think of them as steps:
A R3 click means absolutely nothing if none of those people eventually become customers.
What is CAC?
CAC = Customer Acquisition Cost.
How much does it cost the business to get one new customer?
This can include more than advertising. Depending on how you’re calculating it, CAC can include:
This is a much more business-focused number than likes or followers.
What is LTV or CLV?
LTV = Lifetime Value. CLV = Customer Lifetime Value.
They broadly refer to the value a customer brings to your business over the course of their relationship with you.
What is one customer actually worth to us?
That customer is obviously worth much more than R2,000 to the business.
Understanding customer value helps you make much smarter decisions about what you’re prepared to spend to acquire one.
What is a CTA?
CTA = Call To Action.
Tell the person what to do next.
That’s it. Your CTA is simply the next action you want someone to take.
What is a landing page?
A landing page is a page designed around one particular campaign, audience, offer or action.
Instead of sending someone to your homepage and saying “Good luck. Have a wander around.”, you send them somewhere specifically designed to continue the conversation they were already having with your ad.
- Facebook adNeed more leads?
- Landing pageHere’s our lead generation service.
- CTATell us about your business.
Everything makes sense together.
What is a marketing funnel?
You’ve probably seen the colourful upside-down triangle.
It doesn’t need to be complicated.
The journey from “Who are you?” to “Where do I pay?”
Not everyone moves through marketing in this perfectly neat order.
Real people are considerably more annoying than diagrams.
But the concept is useful.
What is TOFU, MOFU and BOFU?
Yes. Unfortunately these are real marketing acronyms.
What is organic marketing?
Organic marketing generally means attracting attention without paying directly for the distribution of every impression or click. Examples include:
You earn the attention rather than buying the placement.
Organic does NOT mean free.
Someone still has to create the content, do the SEO, shoot the video, write the article and manage everything.
What is paid media?
Paid media is advertising.
You pay a platform to distribute your message. Examples:
You pay to get in front of people.
What is PPC?
PPC = Pay Per Click.
It’s an advertising model where clicks are the basis for what you’re charged.
Google Ads describes CPC pricing as sometimes being called PPC.
In everyday marketing conversation, people also often use “PPC” more broadly when referring to paid search advertising.
What is retargeting or remarketing?
Advertising again to people who already know you.
- You visit a company’s website
- You leave
- Tomorrow you’re scrolling Instagram
- There they areCoincidence? Usually not.
That’s retargeting.
The basic thinking is sensible: someone who has already interacted with your business may be more familiar with you than someone encountering you for the first time.
What is SEO?
SEO = Search Engine Optimisation.
Helping search engines understand your website so the right people have a better chance of finding it.
SEO can involve:
And importantly: actually answering what people are searching for.
Google says its systems aim to prioritise helpful, reliable, people-first content rather than pages created primarily to manipulate rankings.
So no, SEO isn’t simply putting “best marketing agency South Africa” into a paragraph seventeen times.
Thank goodness.
What is local SEO?
Local SEO focuses on helping a business appear when people search within a geographic area. For example:
For a business serving specific locations, local SEO can be particularly valuable because the person searching often has fairly strong intent.
What is SEM?
SEM = Search Engine Marketing.
The term is commonly used to refer to paid advertising on search engines, particularly Google Ads.
Paying to appear when someone searches for something relevant.
SEO and SEM are therefore not quite the same thing.
Earn organic search visibility.
Pay for search visibility.
What is a keyword?
A keyword is a word or phrase associated with what people search for and what your page or advertising is about. Examples relevant to us might include:
But modern SEO is not simply about stuffing one exact phrase into a page repeatedly.
The goal is to comprehensively answer the actual question behind the search.
What is search intent?
Search intent means: what does this person actually want when they type this into Google? Compare:
Same search engine. Very different intentions.
Understanding intent is incredibly important in both SEO and advertising.
What is a backlink?
A backlink is a link from another website to yours.
Another website points people towards your website.
Good, relevant backlinks can also help search engines understand the reputation and authority of a website.
But quality matters.
One genuinely relevant mention from a respected publication can be worth considerably more to your business than hundreds of dodgy links bought from random websites.
What is domain authority?
Here’s an important one.
Domain Authority is not a Google ranking score.
It’s a third-party metric developed to estimate a website’s relative ranking potential. Different SEO tools have their own authority metrics.
It can be a useful comparison number. It is not your Google report card.
Don’t build your entire marketing strategy around making this number go up.
What is bounce rate?
Bounce rate is an analytics metric relating to visits where users don’t meaningfully continue engaging.
Its exact calculation depends on the analytics platform you’re using.
Someone arrived and essentially went: “Nope.”
But context matters enormously.
If someone lands on your contact page, gets your phone number and calls you immediately, a simplistic engagement metric might not tell the whole business story.
Always interpret metrics in context.
What is engagement?
Engagement is interaction with your content. Depending on the platform this might include:
People did something rather than simply scrolling past.
Engagement can be useful.
But engagement is not revenue.
A post with 700 likes and zero enquiries may be less commercially useful than a boring-looking post that generated three customers.
It depends on the goal.
What is engagement rate?
Engagement rate measures engagement relative to things like reach, impressions or followers.
The exact formula can vary depending on the platform and report.
Of the people who could interact with this, how many actually did?
Be careful when comparing engagement rates from different reports because they may not be calculated in exactly the same way.
What is attribution?
Attribution is marketing’s attempt to answer: which marketing activity deserves credit for this customer? For example, someone:
- Sees your Instagram post
- Googles your businessthree days later
- Reads an article
- Leaves
- Clicks a retargeting adnext week
- Signs up
Which channel “got” the customer? Instagram? Google? The article? The ad?
The answer is often: several of them helped.
That’s why attribution can become complicated very quickly.
What is a KPI?
KPI = Key Performance Indicator.
One of the numbers that actually tells us whether we’re making progress.
Not every metric deserves to be a KPI. If your objective is generating enquiries, useful KPIs might include:
Follower count might be interesting.
But it isn’t automatically the number that matters most.
What is a vanity metric?
A vanity metric is a number that looks impressive but doesn’t necessarily tell you much about business performance. Examples can include:
None of these are inherently useless.
The problem is treating them as business results when they aren’t.
A simple test: ask “And then what happened?”
“We reached 200,000 people.”
And then what happened?
“We got 8,000 website visits.”
And then what happened?
“We generated 120 leads.”
And then what happened?
“Twenty became customers.”
Now we’re getting somewhere.
What is A/B testing?
A/B testing means testing two versions to see which performs better. For example:
Or: Image A versus Image B. Headline A versus Headline B. Landing page A versus Landing page B.
Instead of arguing about which idea is better, test it.
What is a pixel?
A marketing pixel is a piece of tracking technology used to understand actions people take after interacting with marketing.
You’ve probably heard of the Meta Pixel.
It helps connect things happening on your website with your advertising measurement.
- Someone clicked an ad
- Visited your website
- Bought something
- Your advertising platform can potentially record that journeywhen tracking is configured appropriately
Tracking has become more complex as privacy protections have increased, so a pixel isn’t magic and doesn’t necessarily see everything.
What is UTM tracking?
UTM parameters are little pieces of information added to a URL so analytics tools can better identify where traffic came from.
yourbusiness.co.za/offer?utm_source=facebook&utm_campaign=october&utm_content=ad-bInstead of only knowing someone visited the website, you can potentially know: they came from Facebook → from our October campaign → from Ad B.
Labels for your links.
They’re boring.
They’re also incredibly useful.
What is a CRM?
CRM = Customer Relationship Management system.
Examples include systems used to store leads, customers, sales activity and follow-ups.
The place where you keep track of the humans who might give you money.
Because:
is not an ideal sales system.
What is a qualified lead?
Not every lead is a good lead.
A qualified lead is someone who meets meaningful criteria that make them a realistic potential customer. Maybe they:
A lead that might actually go somewhere.
This is why we care far more about lead quality than simply making the lead number as large as possible.
What is lead generation?
Lead generation is marketing designed to generate potential customers for a business. It could happen through:
Getting the right people to put their hands up and say, “I’m interested.”
But good lead generation doesn’t stop there. You still need:
- Attention
- Interest
- Lead
- Follow-up
- Sales conversation
- Customer
A business can have excellent lead generation and terrible sales follow-up.
Marketing can’t fix a lead that’s been sitting unanswered in someone’s inbox for nine days.
The marketing metrics business owners should actually understand
You do not need to become a marketing analyst.
But if you’re paying someone to market your business, we think you should understand enough to ask sensible questions. Start here:
| Metric | Ask yourself |
|---|---|
| Reach | Are enough relevant people seeing us? |
| CTR | Are they interested enough to click? |
| CPC | What are those clicks costing us? |
| Conversion rate | Does the page turn traffic into action? |
| CPL | What does a lead cost? |
| Lead quality | Are these actually potential customers? |
| CPA / CAC | What does a customer cost us? |
| Customer value | What is that customer worth? |
| ROAS | What revenue did the advertising generate? |
| ROI | Was the whole thing actually worth it? |
And there’s an important pattern here.
The further down that table you go, the closer you generally get to the actual business.
Don’t let a marketing report impress you with the wrong numbers
This is probably the most important part of this entire article. Imagine your monthly marketing report says:
But you’re a business owner. You are allowed to ask:
- How many leads did we get?
- How many were good leads?
- How many became customers?
- What did those customers generate?
- What did we spend to get them?
Marketing metrics aren’t there to make a PowerPoint look impressive.
They’re supposed to help you make better business decisions.
The Frenzii rule for marketing jargon
If someone can’t explain a marketing concept to you in normal English, keep asking questions.
You do not need to know every acronym.
You hired marketers because marketing isn’t your full-time job.
But you should understand what you’re paying for, what success looks like and which numbers matter to your business.
At Frenzii, we work across marketing strategy, branding, websites, social media marketing, paid advertising, lead generation, SEO and digital marketing for established businesses in South Africa.
And one of the things we care about most is making marketing make sense.
Because you shouldn’t need a dictionary to understand whether your marketing is working.
Quick marketing jargon cheat sheet
Bookmark this bit.
| Acronym / term | Meaning | Human translation |
|---|---|---|
| ROAS | Return on Ad Spend | Revenue back from advertising |
| ROI | Return on Investment | Was the investment worth it? |
| CPC | Cost Per Click | Cost of one click |
| CPL | Cost Per Lead | Cost of one lead |
| CPA | Cost Per Action/Acquisition | Cost of getting the desired result |
| CAC | Customer Acquisition Cost | Cost of getting a customer |
| CTR | Click-Through Rate | % who saw and clicked |
| CPM | Cost Per Thousand Impressions | Cost to show an ad 1,000 times |
| CVR | Conversion Rate | % who took the desired action |
| CTA | Call To Action | What you want someone to do next |
| SEO | Search Engine Optimisation | Helping people find you through search |
| SEM | Search Engine Marketing | Usually paid search advertising |
| PPC | Pay Per Click | Advertising charged by clicks |
| CRM | Customer Relationship Management | System for managing leads/customers |
| KPI | Key Performance Indicator | A number that actually matters |
| LTV / CLV | Lifetime/Customer Lifetime Value | What a customer is worth over time |
| TOFU | Top of Funnel | They’re discovering you |
| MOFU | Middle of Funnel | They’re considering you |
| BOFU | Bottom of Funnel | They’re close to buying |
| UTM | Urchin Tracking Module | Labels added to links for tracking |
| Lead | Potential customer | Someone raised their hand |
| Conversion | Desired action | They did the thing |
| Retargeting | Advertising to previous visitors/audiences | “Oh, these guys again.” |
| Impression | Content/ad displayed | It appeared on a screen |
| Reach | Unique people reached | How many different people saw it |
| Frequency | Average repeat exposure | How often each person saw it |
| Attribution | Assigning conversion credit | What actually helped cause the sale? |
Still not sure which numbers matter for your business?
Maybe your CPC is great.
Maybe your ROAS is terrible.
Maybe you’re getting plenty of leads but nobody is buying.
Maybe your social media engagement looks healthy but you have no idea whether it’s contributing anything to the business.
Or maybe you’ve reached the point where you’ve got seventeen dashboards open and would simply like someone to tell you:
“This matters. This doesn’t. Start here.”
That’s exactly what our Clarity Call is for.
We spend 90 minutes looking at your actual business and marketing with you, work out where the gaps are and help you decide what deserves your attention next. Or, if your business has grown but your brand, website and marketing haven’t quite kept up, explore Brand Refresh.