Marketing and growth

The commercial vocabulary around search — what an auction actually reports, who your real competitors are, how attention turns into revenue, and the frameworks used to decide what to write next.

111 termsAll terms

What this category covers

The other four categories are about being found and being counted. This one is about the decisions either side of that: what to spend on, who you are actually competing with, and what a visitor is worth once they arrive. It is the vocabulary a marketer needs when the conversation stops being technical and starts being about money.

Paid search: auctions, invalid clicks, creative performance
Competitor intelligence — who shares your results page, and at what price
Monetisation: traffic, leads, arbitrage and where each breaks
Frameworks for deciding: jobs-to-be-done, SWOT
Price and positioning as things that can be watched
The line between a competitor and a company that merely ranks near you

Why these words matter

A SERP competitor is rarely the competitor you named

The brands beside you in results are chosen by a search engine, not by your market map. Half of them do not sell what you sell, and one of them is quietly taking your buyers.

Paid and organic share one page and one intent

An auction report and a ranking report are describing the same reader. Reading them separately is how a brand outbids itself for traffic it already had.

Most growth arguments are definitional

"Our leads are down" and "our lead quality is up" are compatible. These terms are what let two people in one meeting mean the same thing by a word.

Who needs this vocabulary

Paid search

Auction insights, invalid clicks, and creative that has to work in an answer as well as an ad.

Competitive intelligence

Watching who appears beside you and what they charge, without mistaking noise for a rival.

Growth teams

Choosing what to build from what people are trying to finish, not from what they clicked.

Affiliates and publishers

Turning attention into revenue, and knowing which of the four ways is failing.

Founders

Deciding positioning with a framework rather than with a favourite adjective.

Agencies

Explaining to a client why the competitor set in the report is not the one in their head.

Terms in this category111 terms

Ad Exchange5 min read Ad Fatigue3 min read Ad Placement5 min read Affiliate Creator6 min read Affiliate Network5 min read Affiliate Offer4 min read Auction Insights5 min read Audience Targeting5 min read Average View Duration5 min read

Brand Monitoring5 min read Branded Content5 min read Broad Match6 min read Bumper Ad5 min read

C19

Category Entry Point5 min read Click Map4 min read Commission6 min read Community Management4 min read Competitive Intelligence5 min read Competitor Keyword Gap4 min read Context Engineering5 min read Conversion Pixel5 min read Conversion Tracking4 min read Conversion Window4 min read CPA Network5 min read Creative Analysis4 min read Creative Fatigue4 min read Creator Brief5 min read Creator Economy4 min read Creator Rate Card4 min read Creator Whitelisting4 min read CRO6 min read CTV5 min read

Dead Click4 min read Drop-Off Rate5 min read DSP4 min read

EMV5 min read EPC6 min read Exclusivity5 min read

Faceless Marketing5 min read Frequency5 min read

Hook Rate4 min read

Influencer Whitelisting4 min read Invalid Click2 min read

JTBD5 min read

Landing Page5 min read Lead Arbitrage5 min read Lift Test5 min read Lost Impression Share (Budget)5 min read Lost Impression Share (Rank)5 min read

M12

Macro-Conversion4 min read Macro-Influencer4 min read Manual CPC5 min read Market Share4 min read Media Arbitrage5 min read Media Buying5 min read Media Mix5 min read Media Plan5 min read Micro-Conversion5 min read Micro-Influencer4 min read Mid-Roll Ad4 min read Multi-Touch Attribution4 min read

Nano-Influencer4 min read Non-Skippable In-Stream Ad4 min read

Offer Wall4 min read OTT4 min read

P11

Paid Social4 min read Payout5 min read Performance Marketing5 min read Phrase Match5 min read Pop Traffic4 min read Post-Roll Ad5 min read Postback URL5 min read Pre-Lander4 min read Pre-Roll Ad4 min read Price Monitoring4 min read Push Notification Traffic4 min read

Rage Click4 min read Reels Ads6 min read Retargeting6 min read RevShare4 min read RTB4 min read

S12

Scroll Map5 min read Search Campaign4 min read Search Everywhere Optimisation4 min read SERP Competitor4 min read Session Recording5 min read Share of Search5 min read Skippable In-Stream Ad6 min read Social Listening4 min read Split URL Testing5 min read Sponsored Post4 min read SSP5 min read SWOT Analysis4 min read

Target CPA7 min read Target ROAS4 min read Thumb-Stop Ratio4 min read TikTok Ads5 min read Tracking Link4 min read Traffic Arbitrage5 min read Traffic Monetisation5 min read Traffic Source5 min read

Usage Rights4 min read User Behaviour7 min read UTM Parameter4 min read

VCR5 min read Vibe Marketing5 min read Video Advertising7 min read Viewability4 min read VTR4 min read

Watch Time5 min read

YouTube Shorts5 min read

How to use this category

Find out who is actually beside you

Start with SERP competitor. The list a search engine produces is usually a surprise, and it changes what everything else is measured against.

Learn what an auction can and cannot report

Auction insights and invalid clicks first. Both are numbers a platform chooses to show you, with a defined shape and known blind spots.

Then decide with a framework, not a feeling

Jobs-to-be-done and SWOT are here because a positioning argument nobody can write down is an argument that restarts every quarter.

Common mistakes

Treating everything on your results page as a competitor, and building a strategy against a directory.
Reading auction insights as market share. It is a share of the auctions you entered, which is a set you chose.
Counting leads without counting what happened to them, which makes arbitrage look like growth.
Using a framework as a presentation rather than as a decision — a SWOT nobody acts on is a slide.

Questions about this category

How is a SERP competitor different from a business competitor?

A business competitor sells what you sell. A SERP competitor appears beside you for a query, which may be a marketplace, a directory, a news site or a comparison page that sells nothing. Both matter, and confusing them produces a strategy aimed at the wrong companies.

Why does paid search belong in a glossary about AI search?

Because the reader is the same person and the page is the same page. An assistant that answers a buying question removes a click that was being bid on, and the words for measuring that loss are the words paid search already uses.

What is jobs-to-be-done for, practically?

Deciding what to write or build when the keyword list has run out of ideas. It reframes a search from a phrase into a task somebody is trying to finish, which is usually a page nobody has written.

Is invalid click traffic something I can do anything about?

Partly. It is a platform's own judgement about which clicks were not genuine, so the number is theirs, not yours — but the patterns behind it are readable, and the terms here say which of them are worth acting on.

The other categories

Search engine optimisationThe words that describe how a page is found in a search engine — crawling, indexing, intent, structure, links. This is the ground the AI-search vocabulary is built on, not a separate subject.GEO and AI searchThe vocabulary of being found inside an answer rather than in a list of links: how a system retrieves, what it quotes, and what any of that can be measured with.Trust and E-E-A-TExperience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust — the signals that decide whether a page is treated as a source or as noise, by a search engine and by a system writing an answer.MeasurementThe words for counting what happened — impressions, share of voice, coverage, sampling, windows, confidence — and, for each of them, what it cannot tell you.

See whether assistants quote you

Reading a definition tells you what the word means. The Vectorscope tells you what your own site looks like to the systems that use it.

Open the Vectorscope

CC BY 4.0 — Free to reuse with a link back to this page. Quotations and illustrations stay under the licences of their own sources.