Glossary
Plain definitions of the terms used on this site and in the weekly table, in the sense Datarithms uses them.
- Paying customer
A person or company whose payment reached you and was not refunded within 14 days. Sign-ups, trials and leads are not paying customers.
- Cost per paying customer
A campaign's spend in a period divided by the paying customers matched to it in the same period.
Worked example: how to calculate it.
- CAC
Customer acquisition cost: everything spent to win new customers divided by the number won. Cost per paying customer is the paid-ads part of CAC for one campaign.
- Conversion
The action an ad platform is told to count, such as a sign-up, a lead or a purchase. What counts is set in each ad account.
- Attribution
The rule that decides which ad gets credit for a result. Different rules give different answers from the same data.
- Attribution window
How many days after an ad click or view a result can still be credited to that ad. Each platform sets its own.
- Last click
Attribution that gives the whole credit to the last ad clicked before the result. Datarithms uses the last click within 90 days before payment.
Compared with platform rules: last click vs platform attribution.
- View-through conversion
A conversion credited to an ad the person saw but did not click. Datarithms does not credit views.
- Click identifier
A code an ad platform can add to the landing page address when someone clicks, such as gclid, fbclid, ttclid or li_fat_id; some need a setting turned on. Stored at sign-up, it ties a customer to a click.
- UTM tags
Labels added to a landing page address (source, medium, campaign) that tell your own systems where a visitor came from.
- Unmatched customer
A paying customer who cannot be tied to any ad click inside the matching window. Shown as their own line, never spread across campaigns.
- Refund window
The period after payment during which a refund removes the customer from the count. Datarithms uses 14 days.
- ROAS
Return on ad spend: revenue credited to ads divided by ad spend. It depends entirely on how revenue is credited, so it inherits every attribution problem.
- MQL
Marketing-qualified lead: a lead that marketing judges likely to buy, by its own criteria. It is not a customer.
- SQL
Sales-qualified lead: a lead that sales has accepted for active follow-up. Still not a customer until a deal closes and pays.
- Closed-won deal
A deal marked as won in a CRM such as HubSpot, where Closed won is a default deal stage. For companies that sell through sales, Datarithms can use it in place of the payment.
Source: HubSpot Knowledge Base, deal pipelines and stages.
- Too few to tell
The verdict for a campaign with fewer than 30 paying customers in the period. It gets no position in the table.
- Re-check
Measuring paying customers again 28 days after an approved change, and comparing with the 28 days before it.