The education page

Every term on this site, explained the way we would over coffee.

Jargon is how an industry keeps outsiders paying for translation. We would rather you understood everything: the whole site links back to this page whenever a term appears, and every entry comes with a concrete South African example. Read it end to end and you will follow any agency conversation in the country. That is the point.

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Two habits make this page more useful. First, when any other page on this site uses a term, it links here, so you never have to hold a definition in your head while reading an argument. Second, every definition ends where marketing should: at the money. If you cannot see how a metric connects to rands in or rands out, keep reading until you can, or ask us to explain it better.

Part one

The money metrics: what ads cost and what they return

CTR: click-through rate: The percentage of people who saw your ad or listing and clicked it. If 1 000 people in Durban see your plumbing ad and 20 click through, your CTR is 2%. It measures whether your message stopped the scroll, not whether it made money. A high CTR on an ad that never sells is an expensive round of applause.
CTA: call to action: The specific instruction that tells a reader what to do next: "Request a quote", "Book a table", "WhatsApp us". A Stellenbosch guesthouse whose site says "Welcome to our lovely home" has a greeting; one whose site says "Check availability for December" has a CTA. Every page, ad and email should carry exactly one: more than one is a fork in the road, and forks lose travellers.
CPC: cost per click: What you pay each time someone clicks your ad. If an attorney in Pretoria pays R5 000 for 250 clicks, the CPC is R20. Competitive industries such as law, insurance and medical aid carry high CPCs because many firms bid for the same searches. CPC only matters in context: a R40 click that becomes a R40 000 client is cheap; a R2 click that becomes nothing is not.
CPM: cost per thousand impressions: The price of showing your ad a thousand times, whether or not anyone clicks. (The M is the Roman numeral for a thousand.) CPM is the natural currency of awareness campaigns: a Cape Town coffee roastery paying to be seen by ten thousand locals is buying familiarity, not clicks. Compare CPMs across platforms to see where attention is currently cheap: it moves.
Impressions & reach: An impression is one showing of your ad; reach is the number of different people who saw it. If your Garden Route lodge's ad was shown 30 000 times to 10 000 people, that is 30 000 impressions, a reach of 10 000, and a frequency of three. Reach tells you how wide the net was; frequency tells you when familiarity is tipping into irritation. Watch both, because the platforms will happily sell you the same person forever.
CPA: cost per acquisition: What it costs, in total, to win one customer or lead. If a Johannesburg gym spends R12 500 on ads in a month and signs up 25 new members from them, the CPA is R500. This is the metric that connects marketing to the business: if a member is worth R6 000 over their lifetime, a R500 CPA is a bargain, and knowing that requires knowing your numbers, which is what your CRM is for.
ROAS: return on advertising spend: Revenue generated per rand of ad spend, written as a multiple. An online biltong shop that spends R10 000 on ads and traces R40 000 of sales to them has a ROAS of 4. Beware the seduction: ROAS counts revenue, not profit, and it depends entirely on attribution being honest. A high ROAS on numbers nobody can verify is a story, not a result, which is why our clients watch theirs live.
Conversion: The moment a visitor does the thing you actually wanted: submits the enquiry form, phones, buys, books. For a Bloemfontein panel beater the conversion is not a website visit: it is the request for a quote. Everything upstream (clicks, likes, views) is only a means to this end. Define your conversion first, before spending a rand, or you will optimise enthusiastically toward nothing.
Pixel & Conversions API: A pixel is a snippet of code on your website that tells ad platforms which visitors converted, so the platforms learn who to find more of. The Conversions API does the same job server-to-server, more reliably now that browsers restrict tracking. Together they are your campaign's memory: a Randburg dentist who loses her pixel in an agency breakup loses the learning her spend paid for, the exact scenario our asset ownership standard exists to prevent.
Quality Score: Google's rating of how relevant and useful your ad and landing page are for a given search, driven by expected click-through, ad relevance and landing-page experience. It matters because Google effectively charges better ads less: a relevant ad pointing at a fast, matching page can pay less per click than a sloppy competitor for the same position. A slow website drags it down, which is why we fix the site before the spend.
Hook rate: The share of viewers who watch past the first few seconds of a video, the first fence your content must clear before anything else can happen. A Soweto restaurant's video that opens on the sizzling shisanyama grill hooks; one that opens on the logo does not. On short-form platforms the hook decides nearly everything downstream, which is why we treat the first three seconds as the headline.
Attribution: The attempt to credit the right marketing touchpoint for a sale. A George homeowner sees your solar ad on Facebook, hears you on a podcast, then Googles you and buys. Which channel gets the credit? Every attribution model answers differently, and none sees everything (that podcast listen left no trail). Be honest: attribution is partly measurement, partly faith. Anyone selling perfect attribution is selling perfect fiction, a claim we expand on across the advertising page.

Part two

Audiences, platforms and principles

Target audience: why "everyone" is not one: The specific group of people your marketing is built to reach. "Everyone" fails because a message written for everyone moves no one: the ad that speaks to a Polokwane farm manager cannot also speak to a Sea Point pensioner without becoming wallpaper. Choosing an audience is choosing what to say and, harder, what not to say. Narrow first; the platforms will widen for you (see broad targeting).
Lookalike & broad targeting: A lookalike audience asks a platform to find people who resemble your existing customers: upload your best hundred clients, and Meta finds thousands of statistical cousins. Broad targeting goes further: you hand the platform your creative and conversion signal and let its AI find buyers wherever they are. The modern pattern is broad delivery steered by strong creative: the creative is the targeting now.
Retargeting: Showing ads specifically to people who already engaged with you: visited your site, watched your video, abandoned a cart. The East Rand tile showroom "following you around the internet" is retargeting at work. Done with restraint, it is the highest-value spend in advertising, because warm attention converts far better than cold. Done obsessively, it curdles into stalking: frequency caps are a kindness that also protects the brand.
Landing page: The specific page a person arrives on after clicking your ad: not your homepage, the page built for that click. A Centurion solar installer advertising "backup power for townhouses" should land visitors on a page about exactly that, with one clear CTA, not on a homepage about everything. Mismatched or slow landing pages quietly tax every click through Quality Score, which is why we audit the page before the ad.
E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust: The framework Google's quality guidelines use to judge whether content deserves visibility: has the author actually done the thing (Experience), do they know the field (Expertise), do others cite them (Authoritativeness), and can the reader verify it all (Trust)? A Knysna boat builder writing from thirty years in the yard outranks a content mill precisely because of it. It is why we cite sources like academics.
AI Overviews / answer engines: Search results that answer the question directly, composed by AI from sources it judges credible, often before any link is clicked: Google's AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity and kin. When someone asks "best accountant for a small trucking firm in Gauteng?", an engine names names. Your job is to be parseable and citable so it names yours accurately: structured pages, consistent facts, real evidence. Your brand will be described either way: feed the machines.
Google Business Profile (GBP): Your free listing on Google Search and Maps: the panel with your hours, photos, reviews and phone number. For local businesses it is often the highest-value property they own and the most neglected: a Port Elizabeth electrician with a complete, actively answered profile will out-earn a better electrician who never claimed his. It is the front door of local search, and tending it is a discipline, not a task.
CRM: customer relationship management: The system that records every lead, conversation and deal in one place: who enquired, from which ad, who called back, what it became. Without one, a Nelspruit security company's leads live in seven WhatsApp threads and a diary; with one, the owner can see which marketing actually produced revenue. Ours is self-hosted and client-owned, which turns it into an audit tool: you watch our work produce results, or fail to, in real time.
POPIA: in marketing terms: The Protection of Personal Information Act, South Africa's data-protection law. For marketing it boils down to three habits: consent, meaning people must have chosen to hear from you, so a bought database of Durban cellphone numbers is a liability, not an asset; minimisation, meaning collect only what you need; purpose limitation, meaning data gathered for deliveries may not quietly become a marketing list. Compliance is also positioning: treating data with respect is part of how trust is built.
Reputation management vs brand management: Reputation management is what people find when they look you up: reviews, ratings, search results, the answers engines give about you. Brand management is what people feel when your name comes up: the expectations, associations and trust accumulated over time. A Pietermaritzburg school can have a fine brand and a neglected reputation, or the reverse; one unanswered review cluster is all it takes. You need both hands: what they find, and what they feel.
Organic vs paid: Organic is attention you earn without paying the platform: search rankings, shared posts, your Google Business Profile, word of mouth. Paid is attention you buy: ads. Organic compounds slowly and keeps working after you stop; paid starts instantly and stops the moment the budget does. A Free State agri-supplier needs both: paid to be found this month, organic to be found for free in three years. The mix is strategy; either alone is a limp.

Missing a term you have met in the wild? Tell us and we will add it: this page grows the way the industry does. And if a provider ever uses jargon at you as a pressure tactic, remember: the explanation is always simple, or the person explaining does not understand it either.

Putting it together

How these terms line up in a weekly report

Definitions are only useful once you can hear them in a sentence. Every weekly advert report we send uses the vocabulary above in a fixed order, because each metric answers one question and hands the next question on. The mechanics are on the pricing page. Read down this table and you have read the anatomy of an honest report.

Each reporting metric, the question it answers, and what a healthy reading looks like qualitatively
Metric	The question it answers	What healthy looks like
CPM	What did attention cost us this week?	Stable or falling for the same audience; spikes explained, not ignored
Hook rate	Did the creative earn a hearing?	Improving as weak openings are retired and strong ones multiplied
CTR	Did the message move anyone to act?	Judged against your own history, not a mythical industry number
CPC	What did each visitor cost?	Falling as Quality Score and creative improve, or honestly flagged when the market hardens
Conversions	Did visitors become enquiries and sales?	Counted from your pixel and confirmed against your CRM, not read off a platform dashboard alone
CPA & ROAS	Was the week worth it, in rands?	Beating what a customer is worth to you, with attribution's limits stated, not hidden

Notice what the right-hand column keeps refusing to do: quote you a universal benchmark. Healthy CTR for a Midrand forklift dealer and healthy CTR for a Camps Bay restaurant are different animals, and anyone who quotes one number for both is reading from a script. The honest yardstick is your own history, verified in a CRM you own, which is why we built the whole reporting system on it.

One clear next step

Ask the question the glossary didn't answer.

Send us the term, the acronym or the claim from a competitor's proposal that made you frown. We will explain it in plain language, for nothing, whether or not you ever become a client: an educated market is good for everyone who does honest work in it, and this hive runs on exactly that.

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Or see the terms in action: our pricing uses every one of them, in public.