Paid Social Glossary

MER is a blended efficiency metric used to evaluate the overall performance of paid marketing spend against total revenue.

CAC measures ad spend divided by new customers acquired. It is essential for judging acquisition efficiency and payback reality.

Creative fatigue happens when an ad loses its ability to attract attention or convert because the audience has seen it too often.

CPA measures spend divided by acquisitions. It is used to evaluate conversion efficiency, but needs economic context to be useful.

CPM measures the cost of buying reach or attention and is useful for understanding auction pressure and distribution cost.

CPC measures traffic acquisition cost and is often paired with CTR and conversion rate to evaluate attention and click efficiency.

Break-even ROAS is an economic threshold derived from contribution margin and is essential for interpreting efficiency correctly.

Contribution margin gives performance metrics economic meaning by showing how much revenue is available to cover acquisition and growth costs.

Payback period helps operators understand how quickly acquisition cost is recovered and whether growth remains sustainable.

Hook rate is used to evaluate whether an ad opening is strong enough to stop scrolling and earn early attention.

Landing page views are often more useful than clicks because they reflect traffic that successfully reached the page.

View-through attribution is used to measure ad influence beyond clicks, especially in discovery-heavy environments like paid social.

Click-through attribution is a stricter model that emphasizes clicked interactions instead of non-click exposure.

Blended ROAS helps operators understand overall marketing efficiency when platform-specific reporting is noisy or incomplete.

Blended CAC helps operators understand overall acquisition efficiency beyond any single platform view.