- Conversion
- Someone doing the thing you wanted them to do — usually buying, but it can be signing up, booking a call, or adding to cart. Every "conversion" is just a visitor who said yes.
- Conversion rate (CVR)
- The share of visitors who convert. 100 people visit, 2 buy — that's a 2% conversion rate. It's the single most useful number for judging whether a store is actually working.
- ROAS (return on ad spend)
- For every $1 you spend on ads, how many dollars come back. A 4× ROAS means $1 in, $4 out. Above 1× you're technically making money on the ad — whether that's enough depends on your margins.
- AOV (average order value)
- The average amount a customer spends per order. Raise it — with bundles, a free-shipping threshold, the right upsell — and almost every other number gets easier.
- CAC (customer acquisition cost)
- What it costs, all in, to win one new customer: ad spend plus the tools and time that got them there, divided by the number of customers you got.
- LTV (lifetime value)
- How much a customer is worth over the whole time they buy from you, not just their first order. When LTV comfortably beats CAC, the business has room to grow.
- Scale
- Growing in a way your systems can actually handle — more orders, traffic, and products without everything breaking or each new sale costing more than the last. Scaling is growth that doesn't create a mess.
- Bounce rate
- The share of visitors who land on a page and leave without doing anything else. A high bounce rate usually means the page didn't match what the person came for.
- Click-through rate (CTR)
- Of the people who saw a link, ad, or email, the share who actually clicked. It measures interest, not sales — a great CTR with no conversions means the promise and the page don't match.
- Cart abandonment
- When someone adds to cart or starts checkout, then leaves without buying. Some of it is normal browsing; a lot of it is fixable — surprise shipping costs, a clunky checkout, or being forced to create an account.
- Attribution
- Deciding which marketing gets credit for a sale when a customer touched several things first — an ad, an email, a Google search. It's more art than science, which is why two tools rarely agree.
- Server-side tracking
- Sending analytics and ad data from your server instead of the shopper's browser. It's more reliable now that browsers and ad blockers quietly drop a growing chunk of the old browser-based tracking.
- Migration (re-platform)
- Moving a store from one platform to another — say WooCommerce or Magento to Shopify — and bringing the products, customers, orders, and SEO along without losing rankings or breaking links.
- SKU
- Stock keeping unit: the unique code for one specific sellable thing. A shirt in three sizes and two colours is one product but six SKUs.
- Organic vs paid
- Organic traffic arrives on its own — search, word of mouth, a shared link. Paid traffic is the traffic you buy with ads. Both matter; the mix between them is the strategy.
