Glossary
Every term on this site, defined plainly
Marketing runs on jargon, and a fair amount of that jargon exists to make simple things sound purchasable. These are the 47 terms that actually come up in a conversation about getting more work, defined without the sales varnish and with the catch attached where there is one.
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In short
A glossary of 47 UK marketing and paid search terms as they apply to trade and local service businesses, each defined in plain English with the practical consequence stated rather than just the definition.
Paid search
Cost per click
What you pay when somebody clicks your ad. It is set by an auction, not a price list, so it moves with how many competitors are bidding and how relevant Google thinks your ad and landing page are. A high cost per click is only a problem relative to what a job is worth.
Cost per lead
Total spend divided by the number of genuine enquiries, including the spend that produced nothing. Agencies that quote a flattering cost per lead have usually divided by the campaigns that worked.
Cost per acquisition
The same sum, but divided by jobs actually won rather than enquiries received. This is the number that decides whether advertising is profitable, and most firms never calculate it because it needs the quote outcome fed back in.
Conversion rate
The share of clicks that became a defined action. Meaningless without knowing what the action is: a site counting brochure downloads will always beat one counting booked jobs, and be worth less.
Quality Score
Google's one-to-ten estimate of how relevant your keyword, ad and landing page are to each other. A higher score lowers what you pay for the same position, which is why landing page work is a bidding lever and not just a design job.
Search terms report
The list of what people actually typed, as opposed to the keywords you bought. Reading it weekly is the single highest-value habit in account management and the one most often skipped.
Negative keyword
A term you refuse to appear for. Every trade has its own pollution — job seekers, training courses, DIY suppliers, people wanting the work done free — and the list should exist before launch, not after the first invoice.
Match type
How loosely Google may interpret your keyword. Broad match reaches the most people and wastes the most money; exact match is tightest. Broad match without a disciplined negative list is the commonest way a trade budget disappears.
Performance Max
A Google campaign type that spends across search, display, YouTube, Gmail and Maps with limited visibility into where. It can work well with strong conversion data behind it, and it can quietly become a display campaign wearing a search campaign's name.
Ad extensions
The extra lines under an ad: phone number, location, site links, prices. They cost nothing extra, raise click-through rate and take up more of the screen, so leaving them unconfigured is free ground given away.
Dayparting
Adjusting bids by time of day and day of week. For trades this usually means bidding harder when somebody can actually answer the phone, because an enquiry nobody picks up is worse than no enquiry.
Organic search
SEO
The work of earning search positions rather than renting them. Slower than advertising and cumulative rather than instant, which is why starting with it when cash flow is the problem is usually the wrong sequence.
Local pack
The map and three business listings that appear above the ordinary results for local searches. Getting into it depends heavily on your Google Business Profile, your reviews and your proximity to the searcher, and it often matters more than the blue links beneath.
Google Business Profile
The free listing that feeds Google Maps and the local pack. Categories, service areas, opening hours, photos and reviews all affect what it shows and to whom. For a local trade it is frequently the highest-value unpaid asset there is.
Core Web Vitals
Google's measures of loading speed, responsiveness and visual stability. They are a real ranking input but a small one; a fast site that answers the question still beats a faster site that does not.
Server-side rendering
Sending complete HTML from the server so a crawler sees your content on the first pass. The alternative, building the page in the browser with JavaScript, means the crawler's first look at your page is an empty shell. This site is server-rendered for exactly that reason.
Canonical tag
A line in the page source naming the preferred URL when the same content is reachable more than one way. Get it wrong across a large site and Google picks its own winner, which is how pages vanish without anybody deleting them.
Crawl depth
How many clicks a page sits from the homepage. Pages buried deep, or reachable only from the XML sitemap, get crawled rarely and indexed reluctantly. Every page on this site is within two clicks of the front door on purpose.
Scaled content abuse
Google's term, introduced in March 2024, for producing many pages at scale primarily to manipulate rankings rather than to help anybody. It is why generating a page for every service in every town is now a liability rather than a tactic.
Doorway page
A page built to catch a search and funnel the visitor somewhere else, typically one of hundreds that differ only by a place name. Explicitly against Google's guidelines and, more practically, a reliable way to get a whole site treated as low quality.
Structured data
Machine-readable markup describing what a page is: a service, a business, a set of questions and answers. It does not lift rankings by itself, but it is how a page becomes eligible for richer results and how AI answer engines work out what you do.
E-E-A-T
Experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust: the qualities Google's human quality raters are asked to assess. Not a direct ranking factor, but a fair description of what the ranking systems are trying to approximate. Named authors, real proof and stated limitations are how it shows up on a page.
Paid social
CPM
Cost per thousand impressions. The base currency of social advertising, and the number that rises when more advertisers chase the same audience — which is why costs climb every November whatever you do.
Retargeting
Advertising to people who have already visited your site. Cheap relative to cold traffic and worth most where the buying decision is slow, which in trades means windows, extensions and anything a homeowner thinks about for six weeks.
Lookalike audience
An audience built by asking the platform to find people resembling your existing customers. Only as good as the list you seed it with, and close to useless seeded with a few dozen records.
Lead form
A form that opens inside Facebook or Instagram rather than on your site. It lowers cost per lead and lowers lead quality at the same time, because a form that takes two taps attracts people who were not really deciding anything.
Attribution window
How long after seeing or clicking an ad a platform will still claim credit for the sale. Different platforms use different windows, which is why Google and Meta will both confidently claim the same job.
Measurement
Conversion tracking
The code and configuration that tells the ad platform something worth counting happened. Without it working correctly an account is optimising towards nothing, and every decision after that is guesswork with a dashboard attached.
Call tracking
Using distinct phone numbers, or a dynamic number that changes by traffic source, to tie phone calls back to the campaign that caused them. Essential in trades, where most enquiries are calls and the default reporting sees none of them.
Offline conversion import
Feeding the outcome of an enquiry — quoted, won, value — back into the ad platform so it optimises towards jobs rather than phone calls. The step that separates an account chasing volume from one chasing revenue.
Attribution model
The rule deciding which touchpoint gets credit when somebody saw an ad, searched your name a fortnight later and then called. Every model is a simplification and none of them is the truth.
Last-click attribution
Giving all the credit to the final interaction. Simple, universally understood and systematically unfair to whatever created the demand in the first place, which is usually the channel it then recommends cutting.
Incrementality
Whether the advertising caused the sale or merely appeared next to it. Brand-name search is the classic case: much of it would have found you anyway, so a chunk of what it reports is credit rather than contribution.
Speed to lead
How long between an enquiry arriving and a human responding. One of the few variables a small firm can fix in a week, and one of the few with research behind it — though the research is older than most people quoting it realise. See benchmarks.
Money
Gross margin
What is left of a job after the direct cost of doing it, before overheads. The number that decides what an enquiry is allowed to cost, and the one most often replaced by turnover in these conversations.
Close rate
The share of quotes that become work. Sector-specific and unflattering: one in five is normal in domestic driveways, and a firm assuming one in two will badly over-value every enquiry it buys.
Lifetime value
Total gross profit from a customer across every job they ever give you, including referrals where you can attribute them. In recurring businesses — IT support, cleaning contracts, storage — it is the only sane basis for a lead cost.
Break-even cost per lead
Gross profit per job multiplied by close rate. Spend more than this per enquiry and you are buying work at a loss, however good the dashboard looks. Every campaign should start with this number written down.
Payback period
How long before the profit from a customer covers what it cost to win them. Instant for a one-off trade job, and often many months for a contract business, which changes how much upfront loss is rational.
Management fee
What the agency charges to run the work, as distinct from the ad spend that goes to Google or Meta. A percentage-of-spend fee rewards an agency for spending more of your money, which is why this one is flat and the spend goes on your own card.
Website and follow-up
Landing page
The page an ad click arrives on. Sending every campaign to the homepage is the most common and most expensive conversion mistake, because the homepage answers nobody's specific question.
Above the fold
What is visible before scrolling. For a trade site the phone number, the area covered and what you actually do all need to be there, because a meaningful share of visitors decide within seconds.
Missed-call text-back
An automatic text to anyone whose call you could not answer, usually within a minute. Cheap, unglamorous, and frequently the single highest-return change a busy trade business can make.
CRM
One place where every enquiry lives with its status, so nothing depends on somebody remembering. For most small firms the value is not the software, it is finally being able to see how many quotes are sitting unanswered.
Pipeline
The set of enquiries in progress, grouped by stage. The reason the word is in this company's name: the problem is almost never a shortage of marketing ideas, it is that work arrives in lumps and enquiries leak between stages.
Nurture sequence
Automated follow-up to somebody not ready to buy. Valuable where the decision is genuinely slow, actively damaging where it is not, and the reason a lot of people now ignore anything that smells like a sequence.
Where these turn into decisions
Definitions on their own do not settle anything. The three that decide whether advertising is worth doing at all are gross margin, close rate and break-even cost per lead, in that order, and they should be worked out before an account is built rather than argued about in month three. The methodology page shows how they are used; the benchmarks page shows what published data does and does not say about the numbers around them.
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