Analytics & ecommerce terms

A randomized controlled experiment that splits traffic between a control and a variant so the difference in a pre-declared primary metric can be read as the causal effect of the change.

Also known as: A/B Testing, AB Test, Split Test, Split Testing, Bucket Test, Online Controlled Experiment

ABC analysis is an inventory-classification practice that segments a SKU catalog into three tiers — A, B, and C — by each SKU's contribution to a chosen output metric, so operational attention scales with economic importance.

Also known as: ABC Inventory Analysis, ABC Classification, Pareto Inventory Analysis, 80/20 Inventory

Add-to-cart rate (ATC rate) is the share of sessions — or product detail page (PDP) views, depending on the denominator a brand uses — that result in at least one item being added to the cart.

Also known as: ATC Rate, Cart Add Rate, Add to Cart Rate

Average Order Value (AOV) is gross revenue divided by the number of orders in a defined period, measuring how much a customer spends per transaction.

Also known as: Average Order Value

App Tracking Transparency (ATT) is the iOS framework, introduced in iOS 14.5 (April 2021), that requires apps to obtain explicit user permission via a system prompt before accessing the device's IDFA for tracking across other apps.

Also known as: ATT, iOS 14.5, ATT Framework, IDFA Opt-In, Ask App Not To Track

Attach rate is the share of orders containing a primary product (or category) A that also include a specified secondary product or category B, expressed as a percentage.

Also known as: Product Attach Rate, Accessory Attach Rate, Cross-Sell Rate

The process of assigning credit for a conversion to one or more marketing touchpoints.

Also known as: marketing attribution, multi-touch attribution

An attribution window (also called a lookback window) is the bounded time period after a user's interaction with an ad — a click, view, or engagement — within which a subsequent conversion is credited to that interaction.

Also known as: Lookback Window, Conversion Window, Attribution Lookback, Click Window

Audience overlap is the share of users present in two or more of a brand's actively-targeted ad audiences at the same time, within a single platform or across platforms.

Also known as: Ad Audience Overlap, Audience Duplication, Cross-Audience Overlap

Average Selling Price (ASP) is net revenue divided by units sold over a defined period, measuring the average price a brand actually realizes per unit.

Also known as: ASP, Avg Selling Price, Average Unit Selling Price, Net ASP

Backorder rate is the share of orders a storefront accepts that cannot be fulfilled immediately from on-hand inventory and are instead promised to ship once stock arrives, most commonly calculated as backordered orders divided by total orders accepted in a defined period.

Also known as: Backorder Percentage, Backordered Order Rate, Back-Order Rate

BOPIS (Buy Online, Pick up In-Store) is an omnichannel fulfillment pattern where the customer purchases on the digital storefront and collects the order at a physical retail location — the brand's own store, a partner location, or a curbside or locker handoff.

Also known as: Buy Online Pick up In-Store, Click and Collect, Click & Collect, In-Store Pickup, Curbside Pickup

Bounce rate is the share of sessions that ended after a single pageview with no further interaction — the legacy Universal Analytics formulation; in GA4 the concept is inverted as `1 − engagement rate`, where an engaged session lasts ≥10 seconds, fires a conversion, or visits ≥2 pages.

Also known as: Bounce Percentage, Single-Page Session Rate

The causally-measured incremental change in upper-funnel brand outcomes — ad recall, awareness, consideration, message association, purchase intent, favorability — attributable to a media campaign, measured by a randomized exposed-vs-control survey.

Also known as: Brand Lift Study, Brand Lift Test, Brand Lift Measurement, BLS

Branded search queries name the brand (or an unambiguous variant); non-branded queries describe the product or need without it, and the two represent fundamentally different demand.

Also known as: Branded Search, Non-Branded Search, Brand Keywords, Generic Keywords, Brand vs Generic Search

The total marketing and sales spend required to acquire a new customer in a given period, calculated as acquisition spend divided by new customers acquired.

Also known as: Customer Acquisition Cost

Cart abandonment rate is the share of shopping carts created but never converted into a completed purchase, calculated as `1 − (completed purchases / carts created)` and expressed as a percentage.

Also known as: Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate, Abandoned Cart Rate, Cart Abandonment

Cash conversion cycle (CCC) is the number of days between a brand paying suppliers for inventory and collecting cash from the customer who eventually buys it — the working-capital cycle expressed in days.

Also known as: CCC, Cash Cycle, Net Operating Cycle, Cash-to-Cash Cycle

Churn rate is the share of active subscribers who cancel or fail to renew within a defined period, calculated as subscribers lost in period divided by subscribers active at the start of period.

Also known as: Customer Churn Rate, Subscriber Churn, Subscription Churn, Cancellation Rate

Click-to-open rate (CTOR) is the share of email opens that produced at least one click, calculated as `unique clicks / unique opens` for a campaign or flow, isolating in-email engagement from list quality and subject-line performance.

Also known as: CTOR, Click to Open Rate, Email CTOR

COGS (Cost of Goods Sold) is the direct landed cost of the units sold in a period — supplier or manufacturing cost plus inbound freight and import duties — calculated as `beginning inventory + purchases - ending inventory`.

Also known as: Cost of Goods Sold, Cost of Sales, Product Cost

The methodology of grouping customers by a shared acquisition event — most commonly first-order month — and tracking that fixed group's behavior over time, rather than reading metrics in aggregate across a mixed-tenure population.

Also known as: Customer Cohort Analysis, Acquisition Cohort Analysis

Consent Mode is Google's page-level signaling system — four parameters (`ad_storage`, `analytics_storage`, `ad_user_data`, `ad_personalization`) that a consent management platform sets based on the visitor's choice and that Google's tags read at fire time, adjusting their behavior and feeding Google's modeling layer when consent is denied.

Also known as: Google Consent Mode, Consent Mode v2, GCM, GCM v2

Contact rate is the share of orders (or shipments) in a period that generate at least one inbound customer-service contact across the brand's support channels, calculated as support contacts divided by orders over the same window and usually reported as a percentage.

Also known as: Customer Contact Rate, Tickets per Order, CPO, CX Contact Rate, Support Contact Rate

Contribution margin is the per-order profit remaining after variable costs, calculated as `revenue - variable costs` in dollars or `(revenue - variable costs) / revenue` as a percentage.

Also known as: Unit Contribution Margin, Contribution Margin per Order

The conversion funnel is the sequenced set of micro-steps a visitor traverses between landing on a storefront and completing a purchase, where each adjacent step is measured as a step-level conversion rate.

Also known as: Ecommerce Funnel, Purchase Funnel, Marketing Funnel, Sales Funnel

A randomized controlled experiment, almost always run inside an ad platform (Meta Conversion Lift, Google Conversion Lift, TikTok Lift), that measures the incremental conversions caused by a campaign by withholding ad exposure from a randomly assigned control group and comparing conversion rates between the exposed and unexposed groups.

Also known as: Conversion Lift Test, Conversion Lift Study, Lift Test, Meta Conversion Lift, Google Conversion Lift

Conversion rate (CVR) is the share of sessions — or unique visitors — that complete a defined goal action, almost always a purchase for a DTC storefront, within a given period.

Also known as: CVR, CR, Ecommerce Conversion Rate, Site Conversion Rate

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is the practice of systematically improving the share of storefront sessions that convert — diagnosing funnel leaks with analytics, forming hypotheses, testing changes against a control, and measuring lift to statistical significance.

Also known as: CRO, Ecommerce CRO, Site Optimization, Conversion Optimization

The Conversions API (CAPI) is a server-to-server endpoint an ad platform exposes for receiving conversion events directly from a brand's backend, bypassing the browser-side pixel.

Also known as: CAPI, Meta Conversions API, Facebook Conversions API, Server-to-Server Conversions, Enhanced Conversions

Core Web Vitals (CWV) are Google's three field-measured page-experience metrics — LCP, INP, and CLS — each with a published "Good" threshold at the 75th-percentile session, used as both a search ranking signal and a storefront conversion diagnostic.

Also known as: CWV, LCP, INP, CLS, Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint, Cumulative Layout Shift, Page Experience Signals

The average ad-platform-reported cost to drive one optimized-for conversion event in an ad account over a defined period, calculated as ad spend divided by conversions.

Also known as: Cost per Acquisition, Cost per Action, CPA (Cost per Acquisition)

The average cost an advertiser pays for each click on an ad over a defined period, calculated as ad spend divided by clicks.

Also known as: Cost Per Click, Cost-Per-Click, Average CPC, Avg CPC

The price an advertiser pays for one thousand ad impressions on a paid-media platform, calculated as total spend divided by impressions, multiplied by 1,000.

Also known as: Cost per Mille, Cost per Thousand Impressions, Cost per 1000 Impressions

Creative fatigue is the performance decay that sets in when the same audience sees the same ad creative repeatedly, observable on a given ad set as rising CPM and frequency, falling CTR and CVR, and rising CAC even when bid, budget, and targeting are unchanged.

Also known as: Ad Fatigue, Ad Creative Fatigue, Audience Fatigue

CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score) is a post-interaction survey metric that asks a customer to rate a specific experience on a short scale, reported as the share of respondents at the top of the scale.

Also known as: Customer Satisfaction Score, Customer Satisfaction, CSAT Score

Click-through rate (CTR) is the share of ad impressions or messaging sends that produced a click to the destination, calculated as clicks / impressions for paid media or clicks / sends for email and SMS.

Also known as: Click-Through Rate, Click Through Rate, Clickthrough Rate

A Customer Data Platform ingests customer events and attributes from every source a brand operates, resolves them to a persistent customer identity, and exposes the unified profile and segmented audiences to downstream activation tools.

Also known as: CDP, Customer Data Platforms, Composable CDP, Packaged CDP

Customer Effort Score (CES) is a single-question post-interaction survey that asks how easy a specific experience was, on a 5- or 7-point scale, used to diagnose friction in touchpoints like returns, support, and checkout.

Also known as: CES, Customer Effort Score (CES), Effort Score

A data clean room is a privacy-preserving compute environment where two parties — typically a brand and an ad platform, or a brand and a retailer — run joint analyses across their datasets without either side exporting row-level customer data to the other.

Also known as: Clean Room, Data Cleanroom, Privacy Clean Room

Data-Driven Attribution (DDA) is a class of attribution models that assigns conversion credit to each touchpoint on a converting path using a model trained on observed paths, rather than a fixed rule like last-click or linear.

Also known as: DDA, Data Driven Attribution, Algorithmic Attribution, Machine-Learning Attribution

Days Inventory Outstanding (DIO) is the average number of days a brand holds inventory before selling it, calculated as `(average inventory at cost / COGS) × days in period`.

Also known as: DIO, Days Inventory On Hand, Days Sales of Inventory, DSI, Inventory Days

DIM weight (dimensional weight) is the parcel-carrier billing convention that charges the shipper on whichever is greater — the package's actual scale weight, or a calculated weight derived from its volume divided by a carrier-specific divisor.

Also known as: Dimensional Weight, Dimensional Pricing, Volumetric Weight, DIM Weight Pricing

DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance) is an email authentication protocol — published as a TXT record at `_dmarc.<domain>` — that tells receiving mail servers what to do with messages claiming to be from the domain when those messages fail SPF or DKIM checks, and that requires the visible From header to align with the authenticated domain.

Also known as: Domain-based Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance, DMARC Policy, DMARC Record

DPO (Days Payable Outstanding) is the average number of days a brand takes to pay its suppliers after receiving inventory or services, calculated as `(accounts payable / COGS) × days in period`.

Also known as: Days Payable Outstanding, Payables Days, Days Payables

Dropshipping is a fulfillment model in which the brand sells from its own storefront but never holds inventory; orders route to a supplier who picks, packs, and ships each parcel directly to the customer, and the brand keeps the difference between the customer price and the wholesale cost.

Also known as: Drop Shipping, Drop-Shipping, Dropship Model

Days Sales Outstanding is the average number of days between recording a sale and the cash from that sale landing in the bank, calculated as (accounts receivable / revenue) × days in period.

Also known as: Days Sales Outstanding, Days Receivable, Receivables Days

Dunning is the automated sequence of retry attempts, customer-facing messages, and card-update prompts a subscription or stored-card business runs after a scheduled charge fails, with the goal of recovering the payment before the customer is involuntarily cancelled.

Also known as: Dunning Management, Payment Recovery, Failed Payment Recovery, Card Decline Recovery, Smart Dunning

Dynamic pricing is the programmatic adjustment of product prices in response to inputs that change frequently — demand, inventory, competitor prices, time of day, customer segment, or channel — instead of a static price list updated on a manual cadence.

Also known as: Algorithmic Pricing, Real-time Pricing, Demand-based Pricing, Surge Pricing, Repricing

An estimated dollar value assigned to unpaid brand exposure — influencer posts, press mentions, organic reach — by multiplying impressions or engagements by the paid-media CPM or CPE the brand would have had to pay for the same reach.

Also known as: EMV, Media Value, Influencer EMV, PR Value

EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization) is a measure of operating profitability that adds those four items back to net income to approximate cash generated from operations, independent of capital structure, tax jurisdiction, and historical capex.

Also known as: Earnings Before Interest Taxes Depreciation and Amortization, Operating Earnings, EBITDA Margin

The ad platform's estimate of what one thousand impressions of a given ad opportunity would earn it — the auction's ranking number, which lets bidders on different goals (CPC, CPA, CPM, ROAS) compete for the same impression.

Also known as: Effective Cost per Mille, Effective CPM, Effective Cost per Thousand Impressions

Email deliverability is the share of sent messages that reach a folder the recipient actually checks (the primary inbox or a tab like Promotions or Updates) rather than the spam folder or a gateway rejection — distinct from the sender-side "delivery rate" that only confirms the message was not bounced.

Also known as: Deliverability, Inbox Placement, Email Inbox Placement Rate

Email open rate is the share of delivered emails that registered an open event, calculated as `unique opens / delivered` for a campaign or flow, where an "open" is logged when the recipient's email client loads a 1×1 tracking pixel embedded in the message body.

Also known as: Open Rate, Unique Open Rate, Email Opens, MPP Open Rate

Engagement rate is the share of sessions that meet at least one GA4 engagement criterion — lasting longer than 10 seconds (configurable), firing a conversion event, or including two or more pageviews — calculated as engaged sessions divided by total sessions.

Also known as: Engaged Session Rate, GA4 Engagement Rate, Session Engagement Rate

Fill rate is the share of customer demand a brand fulfills directly from on-hand inventory in a defined period, without backorder, substitution, or cancellation — most commonly computed as units shipped divided by units ordered.

Also known as: Order Fill Rate, Line Fill Rate, Unit Fill Rate, Case Fill Rate, In-Stock Rate

First-party data is the customer and behavioral data a brand collects directly from its own surfaces — storefront, app, checkout, customer service, email and SMS programs, and loyalty — under a direct consent relationship with the customer.

Also known as: 1P Data, First Party Data, Owned Data

The cart subtotal at which a storefront stops charging the customer for shipping, set deliberately above current AOV so a meaningful share of orders are nudged upward rather than receiving free shipping by default.

Also known as: Free Shipping Minimum, Shipping Threshold, Free Ship Minimum, FST

A frequency cap is a campaign- or ad-set-level constraint on how many times a unique user can be served an impression of a given ad within a defined window, enforced by the ad platform's delivery system.

Also known as: Frequency Capping, Impression Cap, Ad Frequency Limit

A quasi-experimental method that turns a media channel on in one set of geographic markets and holds it out in matched control markets, reading the revenue delta — adjusted for the pre-period trend — as the channel's incremental contribution.

Also known as: Geo Lift, Geo Experiment, Geo-Based Lift Test, Geo Holdout, Matched Market Test

Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) is the total dollar value of orders transacted through a storefront or marketplace over a defined period, before deductions for refunds, discounts, cancellations, shipping, taxes, or platform fees.

Also known as: Gross Merchandise Value, Gross Merchandise Volume, GMV (Gross Merchandise Value)

Gross margin is the share of revenue remaining after the cost of goods sold (COGS), calculated as `(revenue - COGS) / revenue` as a percentage or `revenue - COGS` in dollars (gross profit).

Also known as: Gross Profit Margin, GM, Gross Margin Percent

Gross Revenue Retention (GRR) is the share of recurring revenue retained from an existing customer cohort over a defined period before any expansion revenue is counted, calculated as (starting MRR − churned MRR − contracted MRR) / starting MRR.

Also known as: GRR, Gross Retention, Gross Dollar Retention

Gross-to-net is the line-by-line bridge — usually shown as a waterfall — between a brand's gross demand at list price and the net revenue that lands in the P&L, with each step subtracting a named deduction category (discounts, returns, fees, taxes) the finance team can read as an early-warning signal.

Also known as: Gross to Net, GTN, Net Revenue Bridge, Gross-to-Net Waterfall, Net Sales Waterfall

Headless commerce is an ecommerce architecture in which the storefront — the pages a customer sees — is built and deployed as a separate application from the commerce backend that owns catalog, cart, checkout, and orders, with the two communicating over APIs.

Also known as: Headless Ecommerce, Composable Commerce, Decoupled Storefront, API-First Commerce

A randomized experiment that withholds a marketing treatment from a share of the audience to measure its incremental lift.

Also known as: Holdout Group, Holdout Experiment, Control Group Test, Suppression Test, Audience Holdout

Hook rate is a video-ad creative-effectiveness metric calculated as 3-second video plays / impressions, expressed as a percentage, that isolates how well the opening of a creative stops the scroll independent of how the rest of the asset performs.

Also known as: 3-Second Hook Rate, Video Hook Rate, Creative Hook Rate

For a DTC brand, an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is a single empirical profile of the customers already most valuable to the business — assembled from the brand's own order data by isolating the attributes that correlate with high LTV, repeat purchase, and low return rates.

Also known as: ICP, Ideal Customer, Best Customer Profile, Core Customer Profile

Identity resolution is the function that unifies the fragmented signals a single customer generates across devices, sessions, channels, and identifiers into one persistent customer record — typically represented as an identity graph where each node is a person and each edge is a known association between identifiers.

Also known as: Identity Stitching, Customer Identity Resolution, Cross-Device Identity, Identity Graph

Incremental ROAS (iROAS) is the ratio of causally incremental revenue to ad spend, measured by an experiment that compares a treated group exposed to ads against a randomized control, calculated as (treated revenue − control revenue) / treated ad spend.

Also known as: iROAS, True ROAS, Causal ROAS, Lift ROAS

Incrementality is the share of attributed conversions that would not have happened without the marketing activity being measured — calculated as (revenue with the campaign running) − (revenue that would have occurred anyway), where the second term is the unobservable counterfactual that every measurement method tries to estimate.

Also known as: Incremental Lift, Incremental Revenue, Incrementality Testing, Lift Testing

Inventory turnover is the number of times a brand sells through and replaces its average inventory over a defined period — usually a year — calculated as `COGS / average inventory at cost`.

Also known as: Inventory Turns, Stock Turn, Stock Turnover, Inventory Turn Rate

Last-click attribution is the attribution model that assigns 100% of conversion credit to the final marketing touchpoint — typically the last click recorded before the conversion event — within the platform's lookback window.

Also known as: Last Click Attribution, Last-Touch Attribution, Last Touch Attribution, Last Interaction Attribution

Lead time is the elapsed time between a brand issuing a purchase order to a supplier and the inventory becoming sellable in the fulfillment network — manufacturing, transit, customs, and 3PL receiving combined.

Also known as: Supplier Lead Time, Replenishment Lead Time, Order Lead Time, Manufacturing Lead Time

A lookalike audience is an algorithmically-generated ad-platform audience built by modeling the shared characteristics of a seed list — typically a brand's purchasers, high-value customers, or email subscribers — and finding other users on the platform whose profiles resemble that seed.

Also known as: Lookalike, LAL, Similar Audience, Look-Alike Audience

A lookback window is the trailing time horizon a system uses to decide which historical events count toward a measurement or audience-building decision — most commonly attribution credit or audience eligibility.

Also known as: Conversion Lookback Window, Audience Lookback Window, Retargeting Lookback Window, Lookback Period

The total revenue a customer is expected to generate over their entire relationship with a brand.

Also known as: CLV, Customer Lifetime Value

The cost of acquiring the next customer at a brand's current spend level — the slope of the spend-vs-new-customers response curve at the current operating point, distinct from blended CAC, which averages spend across every tier already deployed.

Also known as: Incremental CAC, Marginal Customer Acquisition Cost, Marginal Cost per Acquisition, Next-Dollar CAC

Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) is a top-down statistical method that regresses aggregate revenue against marketing spend by channel and non-marketing drivers — seasonality, promotions, price, competitive activity — to estimate each input's contribution and produce per-channel response curves with diminishing returns at scale.

Also known as: MMM, Media Mix Modeling, Marketing Mix Model, Econometric Modeling

Marketing Efficiency Ratio (MER) is total revenue divided by total marketing spend over a defined period, an attribution-free, channel-agnostic measure of whether marketing in aggregate is pulling its weight.

Also known as: Marketing Efficiency Ratio, Blended ROAS, Media Efficiency Ratio

A micro-conversion is a lower-value, higher-frequency storefront action — a newsletter signup, add-to-cart, or initiate-checkout — that signals purchase intent without being the purchase itself.

Also known as: Micro Conversion, Secondary Conversion, Soft Conversion, Intermediate Conversion

The smallest true lift an A/B test could reliably call statistically significant given its sample size, baseline conversion rate, statistical power, and significance level — the floor of what the experiment can see, not a prediction of what it will produce.

Also known as: MDE, Minimum Detectable Lift, MDL, Detectable Effect Size

MOQ (Minimum Order Quantity) is the smallest unit count a supplier will accept on a single purchase order — typically set per SKU and often layered with separate per-style, per-color, or per-order minimums.

Also known as: Minimum Order Quantity, Supplier MOQ, MOQ Threshold

Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) is the normalized monthly value of all active subscriptions at a point in time, computed by converting every subscription's billing cadence to a monthly equivalent — weekly plans × 4.33, quarterly ÷ 3, annual ÷ 12 — and summing across the active subscriber base.

Also known as: Monthly Recurring Revenue, Subscription MRR, Recurring Monthly Revenue

Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA) is the family of attribution models that distribute conversion credit across more than one touchpoint on the path to purchase, assigning each touchpoint a weight w_i where the weights sum to 1.0 across the converting path.

Also known as: MTA, Multi Touch Attribution, Multi-Touch Attribution Modeling, Algorithmic Attribution

An online experiment that varies two or more page elements simultaneously, exposing visitors to every combination so the main effect of each element and the interaction effects between elements can be read from a single test.

Also known as: MVT, Multivariate Test, Full Factorial Test, Multi-Variable Testing

Net Revenue Retention (NRR) is the share of revenue retained from an existing customer cohort over a defined period after expansion is added and contraction and churn are subtracted, calculated as (starting cohort revenue + expansion − contraction − churn) / starting cohort revenue.

Also known as: NRR, Net Dollar Retention, NDR, Net Revenue Retention Rate

A North Star Metric (NSM) is the single quantitative measure a brand picks to represent the customer value its business delivers, chosen so that moving the number sustainably corresponds to the business itself getting healthier.

Also known as: NSM, North-Star Metric, North Star KPI

NPS (Net Promoter Score) is a single-question survey metric — likelihood to recommend a brand on a 0–10 scale — reported as the percentage of promoters (9–10) minus the percentage of detractors (0–6), yielding a score between -100 and +100.

Also known as: Net Promoter Score

Omnichannel is a commerce operating model in which a brand sells across multiple customer-facing channels while maintaining a unified view of inventory, customer, and order data across them.

Also known as: Omnichannel Commerce, Omnichannel Retail, Omni-Channel

Pause rate is the share of active subscribers who temporarily suspend their subscription within a defined period, calculated as subscribers who paused in period divided by subscribers active at the start of the period.

Also known as: Subscription pause rate, Box pause rate

The number of months of contribution margin from a newly acquired customer cohort needed to recover the CAC that brought them in, calculated as `CAC / monthly contribution margin per customer`.

Also known as: CAC Payback, CAC Payback Period, Customer Payback Period

A product detail page (PDP) is the single-product URL on a storefront that presents one SKU or variant group along with the imagery, copy, price, variant selectors, reviews, and add-to-cart control needed to support the purchase decision.

Also known as: Product Detail Page, Product Page, Product Display Page

A single-question form — most commonly "How did you hear about us?" — shown to customers immediately after checkout, used as a zero-party, self-reported attribution input alongside platform data and incrementality methods.

Also known as: PPS, Post Purchase Survey, How Did You Hear About Us Survey, HDYHAU, Post-Checkout Survey, Attribution Survey

Price elasticity of demand is the percentage change in units sold divided by the percentage change in price — a unit-free sensitivity number that says how much demand bends when price moves.

Also known as: Price Elasticity of Demand, Demand Elasticity, PED

Promo depth is the average percentage discount across a defined period, calculated as total discount dollars divided by gross pre-discount revenue, blending the intensity of markdowns and their share of demand into one read.

Also known as: Discount Depth, Average Discount Rate, Promotion Depth, Markdown Depth, Effective Discount Rate

The average number of orders placed per customer over a defined period, calculated as total orders divided by unique customers transacting in that period.

Also known as: Average Order Frequency, Orders Per Customer, Buying Frequency, Order Frequency

Reach is the number of unique people, devices, or accounts exposed to an ad or campaign at least once during a defined period — the deduplicated complement to impressions.

Also known as: Unique Reach, Audience Reach, Net Reach, Ad Reach

Repeat Purchase Rate (RPR) is the share of customers in a defined cohort who place a second or Nth order within a stated time window, calculated as customers with two or more orders divided by customers acquired in the cohort.

Also known as: RPR, Repeat Customer Rate, Returning Customer Rate

Retail media is the advertising category in which brands buy placements on a retailer's owned digital surfaces — sponsored product listings, category-page banners, checkout-flow display, and off-site programmatic powered by the retailer's first-party purchase data — with the retailer acting as both the media owner and the primary attribution source.

Also known as: Retail Media Networks, RMN, Commerce Media, Onsite Retail Media

Retargeting is the practice of serving paid ads to people who have already interacted with a brand's owned surfaces — visited the storefront, viewed a product page, started checkout, or joined the email list — but did not complete the conversion the brand wants.

Also known as: Remarketing, Retargeting Ads, Behavioral Retargeting, Site Retargeting, Pixel Retargeting

Return rate is the share of orders, units, or revenue returned to a brand within a defined return window, calculated as returns divided by the matching denominator over the same period — with the choice of numerator and window length materially changing what the number means.

Also known as: Refund Rate, Return Ratio, Product Return Rate, Gross Return Rate, Net Return Rate

Revenue Per Visitor (RPV) is the average revenue a storefront earns per visitor — or per session, depending on the denominator a brand uses — over a defined period, calculated as total revenue divided by total visitors (or sessions).

Also known as: RPV, Revenue Per Session, RPS, Revenue Per Visit, Visitor Value

Revenue-based financing (RBF) is a non-dilutive capital structure in which a brand takes an upfront cash advance and repays it as a fixed percentage of monthly revenue until a predetermined total-repayment cap is hit, with no fixed maturity date.

Also known as: RBF, Revenue Share Financing, Royalty-Based Financing, Revenue-Linked Capital

Reverse ETL is the practice of syncing modeled data out of a cloud data warehouse into operational SaaS tools — ad platforms, ESPs, CRMs, support systems — so one warehouse-resident audience definition drives every downstream destination.

Also known as: rETL, Reverse Extract Transform Load, Operational Analytics, Data Activation, Warehouse Activation

RFM segmentation is a customer-segmentation methodology that scores every customer on three behavioral dimensions — Recency, Frequency, and Monetary value — and groups customers by their combined score into actionable lifecycle segments such as champions, loyal, at-risk, hibernating, and lost.

Also known as: RFM, RFM Analysis, Recency Frequency Monetary, RFM Scoring

A scoring framework that ranks a backlog of initiatives by expected value per unit of effort, calculated as (Reach × Impact × Confidence) / Effort, where higher scores mean ship-sooner.

Also known as: RICE Framework, RICE Scoring, RICE Score, Reach Impact Confidence Effort

Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) is attributed revenue divided by ad spend over a defined period, expressed as a ratio that measures the gross revenue returned per dollar of media invested.

Also known as: Return on Ad Spend

Safety stock is the inventory a brand holds above expected lead-time demand to absorb the joint variance in demand and supplier lead time, sized so a chosen share of replenishment cycles complete without a stockout.

Also known as: Buffer Stock, Safety Inventory, Reserve Stock

Search intent is the underlying goal behind a query — what the searcher is trying to do, not the words they used — and modern ranking systems reward pages whose format matches that goal.

Also known as: Keyword Intent, User Intent, Query Intent, Searcher Intent

Sell-through rate is the share of received inventory sold during a defined period, calculated as units sold divided by units received over that window.

Also known as: Sell Through Rate, Sell-Through, STR, Inventory Sell-Through

Server-side tagging is the pattern where event collection and forwarding to ad platforms and analytics destinations happens from a server the brand controls, rather than from JavaScript running in the visitor's browser.

Also known as: Server-side tracking, Server-side GTM, sGTM, Server-side tag management

Share of voice (SOV) is a brand's share of total category presence in a defined competitive set and channel — its spend, impressions, or query volume divided by the category total, with the denominator changing by channel.

Also known as: SOV, Share of Voice (SOV), Excess Share of Voice, ESOV, Share of Search

A SKU (Stock Keeping Unit) is the unique alphanumeric identifier a brand assigns to each distinctly sellable variant in its catalog, used as the atomic unit of inventory, pricing, fulfillment, and reporting across every downstream system.

Also known as: Stock Keeping Unit, SKU Code, Product SKU

SKU velocity is the rate at which a single SKU sells through, expressed as units sold per day (or per week) over a defined window — calculated as `units sold / days in period`, sometimes normalized further per store or per visitor.

Also known as: Sales Velocity, Unit Velocity, Sell-Through Velocity, SKU Sell Rate

The threshold at which the observed difference between an A/B test's variant and its control is unlikely enough under the no-effect assumption to be treated as a real effect rather than random variation — conventionally a p-value below 0.05, equivalent to a 95% confidence level.

Also known as: Stat Sig, p-value, Significance Level, Confidence Level

Stockout rate is the share of a brand's catalog or its demand that was unavailable for purchase during a defined period, measured either as SKU-days out of stock divided by total SKU-days (an inventory-coverage view) or as lost demand units divided by lost-plus-fulfilled demand (a revenue-impact view).

Also known as: Out-of-Stock Rate, OOS Rate, Stockout Frequency

Subscription commerce is the DTC business model in which a customer authorizes recurring shipments of a product on a fixed cadence, with billing and fulfillment running automatically until the customer pauses, skips, or cancels.

Also known as: Subscribe and Save, Subscription DTC, Replenishment Subscription, Subscription Box, Auto-Ship

An incrementality-measurement design that alternately turns a treatment on and off across consecutive time windows for the same population, reading the on-vs-off difference in the outcome metric as the incremental effect of the treatment.

Also known as: Switchback Testing, Switchback Experiment, Time-Split Test, Temporal Holdout

Time to Second Order (T2) is the elapsed time between a customer's first and second purchase, read at the cohort level as a median or distribution shape rather than as an aggregate average across mixed-tenure customers.

Also known as: Time to Second Purchase, T2, Days to Second Order, Second Order Latency

Time-decay attribution is a multi-touch attribution model that assigns conversion credit to each touchpoint on a converting path on a decreasing curve — touchpoints closer in time to the conversion get more credit, with weight falling off exponentially by a configurable half-life.

Also known as: Time Decay Attribution, Time-Decay Model, Decay Attribution, Exponential Decay Attribution

Unit economics is the decomposition of revenue and cost down to a single repeatable transaction — typically per order or per customer for a DTC brand — used to determine whether the business model works at one unit and is therefore worth scaling.

Also known as: Per-Unit Economics, Per-Order Economics, Unit-Level Profitability, Order Economics

Units per transaction (UPT) is the average number of units in an order over a defined period, calculated as total units sold divided by total orders.

Also known as: UPT, Items Per Order, IPO, Average Units Per Order

UTM parameters are five conventional URL query-string tags — `utm_source`, `utm_medium`, `utm_campaign`, `utm_term`, `utm_content` — appended to a destination link so analytics tools can attribute the landing session to a specific traffic source.

Also known as: UTM, UTM Tags, UTM Codes, Urchin Tracking Module

A vanity metric is a number that looks impressive in a report but doesn't change a decision for the person reading it, doesn't move with the business's underlying health, and can't be acted on by the team it's shown to.

Also known as: Vanity Metrics, Vanity KPI, Surface Metric

A view-through conversion is a conversion credited to an ad impression the user saw but did not click, recorded when the same user later converts within the platform's view-through window.

Also known as: VTC, View-Through Attribution, Impression-Based Conversion, View-Based Conversion

The share of measured ad impressions that meet the industry standard for being potentially seen by a human — under the MRC standard, at least 50% of a display ad's pixels in the viewport for one continuous second, or 50% of a video ad's pixels for two continuous seconds.

Also known as: Viewable Impression, Ad Viewability, Viewability Rate, MRC Viewability Standard

WISMO ("where is my order") is the post-purchase customer-service ticket category covering any inbound contact about order status, shipping ETA, tracking, delivery delays, or a not-yet-received parcel — typically the single largest reason driver in DTC support volume.

Also known as: Where Is My Order, WISMO Tickets, Order Status Inquiry, Shipping Status Inquiry

A third-party logistics provider (3PL) is an outsourced operator that stores a brand's inventory, picks and packs orders received from the storefront, and hands parcels to a carrier for outbound delivery.

Also known as: Third-Party Logistics, Third Party Logistics, 3PL Provider