RBL Growth Glossary

Welcome! This document will share with you, in simple terms, some of the terms in performance marketing and growth so people can be better informed.

Growth FAQ

The definition of “Growth,” growth processes, and growth teams can be misunderstood.  Below is a list of key terms within the Growth ecosystem that can help shed light on a critical piece of product management, marketing, and modern businesses. 

This will define and demystify a lot of the jargon and terminology in performance marketing.

Much of this information is based on our experience with hundreds of clients working in-house in tech, DTC Ecomm, agencies, publicly available data, and our close involvement and appreciation for the Reforge community. If you are working in marketing, growth, and product, Reforge is a must-have training for serious practitioners.

So many acronyms and so little time! 

Collage of RBL client products/services

Referral Traffic

Refers to people who come to your domain from other sites without searching for you on Google. When someone visits a link from a social network or website and ends up on another site, tracking systems from Google recognize the visitor as a referral. Companies also use UTM codes to track precisely where these traffic sources come from.

Retention

Measuring, monitoring, enabling, and improving customer engagement and retention. Are they staying or going? Are they using the product at a valuable level for them and the business? 

SQL

A Sales Qualified lead or lead deemed qualified according to the sales team's predetermined standards. This term is frequently used in B2B SaaS and technology, lead Generation, and service-based businesses.

SSP: Supply Side Platform

An SSP focuses on helping publishers (website owners) sell ad space on their apps, websites, and other digital properties. Examples include Google Ad Manager, Amazon Publisher Services, OpenX, Verizon Media, Rubicon, Sovrn, and SpotX. The Demand Side Platform focuses more on advertisers placing programmatic ads onto the Supply side.

These platforms use automation to determine the optimal price for each ad space and sell to the best bidder. SSPs work with ad networks to connect publishers to a broader pool of advertisers.

Segmentation

Places affiliate partners into various segments or buckets to message based on activity, business model, payout, geography, or priority.

Story Maps

User story mapping is an exercise in which you visualize a user's journey through a product. It helps product teams better understand customers, identify friction points in the journey, and prioritize what will improve the user experience.

Thumb Stop Rate

3-second video plays divided by Impressions. The Thumbstop rate of your Meta ads can be a good indicator metric demonstrating how effectively your videos engage audiences as they scroll their social feeds.

Unique Clicks

Unique Clicks generally refer to the number of distinct individuals who have clicked on a particular link or advertisement within a given timeframe.

When a user clicks on a link or advertisement multiple times, each click is recorded as a separate event. However, unique clicks count only the first click made by each user, disregarding subsequent clicks from the same user within the specified timeframe. This helps accurately represent the unique individuals who have interacted with a specific link or advertisement.

Unique Value Proposition

In marketing, the unique selling proposition, also called the unique selling point or the unique value proposition in the business model canvas, is the marketing strategy of informing customers about how one's brand or product is superior to its competitors.

Usage

In the context of growth and marketing, the term "usage" refers to the extent to which customers or users engage with and use a particular product, service, or platform. It measures how frequently and intensively individuals interact with the offering.

Usage can be assessed through various metrics, such as the number of times a product is used, the duration of each session, the features or functionalities utilized, or the volume of content consumed. These metrics help marketers and growth teams understand customer behavior, identify patterns, and optimize strategies to increase engagement and adoption.

Analyzing usage data allows businesses to gain insights into how customers utilize their offerings and identify areas for improvement. It helps to identify successful features or aspects that attract users and can guide marketing efforts to emphasize those aspects to drive adoption and growth. Additionally, understanding usage patterns can highlight potential bottlenecks or areas where users may face challenges, enabling companies to address these issues and enhance the overall user experience.

Tracking and analyzing usage data is vital to growth and marketing as it provides valuable information for businesses to refine their strategies, improve user engagement, and drive sustainable growth.

User Acquisition

User acquisition (often shortened to UA) is gaining new users for an app, platform, or other service. On mobile, user acquisition is a strategy designed around generating installs, usually achieved by advertising campaigns and promotional offers.

View-through

This is often used to describe an action-driven after a user viewed an advertisement online versus a user who clicked on an ad.

Visits

Users that have visited your site: one user could visit your site 10 times, so each visit is typically represented in a click.

While Linear Channel

Is not a growth loop, it is a viable lever to acquire customers—for example, Paid Search, ConnectedTV, or Partner Marketing. The caveat is that Partner Marketing can be multi-channel. We often consider it a lever for your performance marketing team and a way to pay for valued outcomes rather than a “channel,” even though Partner, Influencer, and Affiliate marketing is often called a channel.