Advertising and sales terms
Each term has a definition of one or two sentences, a formula and an example.
Attribution (tying a lead to its ad)
Attribution is tying a lead or a sale to the ad that brought it: the campaign, the ad set and the ad. Without it, spend sits in the ad account, sales sit in the CRM, and nobody can see which creative brings in money.
CAC (customer acquisition cost)
CAC (customer acquisition cost) is what it costs to win one customer: spend divided by the number of sales in the same period. Ad-spend CAC holds ad spend only; a full CAC adds the other marketing and sales costs.
Conversions API (CAPI)
The Conversions API (CAPI) is Meta’s server-side interface: a business sends events from its website or CRM — a lead, a qualified lead, a sale — straight from a server to Meta, with no browser involved. Meta uses these signals to measure and optimise Facebook and Instagram ads.
CPL (cost per lead)
CPL (cost per lead) is what one lead costs: ad spend divided by the number of leads in the same period. It shows what the ads pay to get one request, and says nothing about whether that lead will ever buy.
CPQL (cost per qualified lead)
CPQL (cost per qualified lead) is what one qualified lead costs: ad spend divided by the number of leads the sales team has confirmed as qualified in the CRM. Unlike cost per lead (CPL), it counts only the people who passed qualification, not every submitted form.
Event Match Quality (EMQ)
Event Match Quality (EMQ) is Meta’s score, out of 10, of how effective the customer information sent with a server event may be at matching that event to a Meta account. It is shown in Meta Events Manager and measures matching, not the quality of a lead.
Lead
A lead is a person who has shown interest in a product or service and left contact details, usually a phone number, so the business can reach them. A lead is not yet a customer: it becomes a sale only after the sales team follows up and closes.
Lead form (Meta instant form)
A lead form (Meta instant form) is a request form that opens inside a Facebook or Instagram ad: a person leaves a name, a phone number and answers to questions without visiting a website. Meta stores every submission under its own lead ID.
Meta Pixel (Facebook Pixel)
The Meta Pixel (formerly the Facebook Pixel) is a piece of JavaScript placed on a website’s pages: it runs in the visitor’s browser and sends what happens on the site — a page view, a button click, a form submission — to Meta as events. What happens off the site, the Pixel does not see.
Qualified lead
A qualified lead is a lead the sales team has contacted and confirmed as a possible buyer. The ad account does not decide this, the CRM does: a lead becomes qualified the moment it reaches the stage marked as “qualified”.
ROAS (return on ad spend)
ROAS (return on ad spend) is the revenue that advertising brought, divided by what the advertising cost. A ROAS of 5.99× means every $1 of ad spend came back as $5.99 of revenue, not profit.
Sales funnel
A sales funnel is the sequence of stages a person goes through from first seeing an ad to paying; fewer people remain at each stage, hence the name. In a CRM the funnel, or pipeline, is the list of stages a lead or a deal moves through.
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