Agency jargon explained: report terms translated into money

These four describe how well spend turned into revenue. They answer different questions, so a report that mixes them without saying which is which can look better than it is.

• ROAS is return on ad spend. A platform usually reports it from its own attributed revenue, which may include sales that would have happened anyway.
• MER (marketing efficiency ratio) is total revenue divided by total marketing spend, without splitting credit between channels. Our convention: MER = revenue ÷ all marketing cost. Blended ROAS = revenue ÷ media spend only. They differ by whatever you spend on agency fees, creative and tools, so ask which one a report means.
• Incremental ROAS (iROAS) is incremental revenue, meaning revenue caused by the ads, divided by ad spend. It needs an answer to what would have happened without the ads.
• Incrementality is that answer: the extra sales your activity caused. A test is one method of estimating it, not the only one.

One habit helps: put the definition in a footnote. "ROAS" with no note on where the revenue came from is a number, not a measurement.

Ask: which revenue is in this figure, and would it have happened without the spend?

These describe what a customer costs and what a customer is worth.

• CAC is customer acquisition cost. It means different things in different reports: all sales and marketing cost, or media spend only. Ask which.
• New-customer CAC (nCAC) is acquisition spend divided by first-time customers only, leaving out repeat buyers. It is stricter than a blended figure that counts repeat buyers in the same pot as new ones.
• LTV is customer lifetime value. It depends on the time window and on whether it is counted in revenue or in margin. A revenue-based LTV can make an expensive customer look cheap.

Ask: is this per customer, per order, in revenue or in margin, and over what period?

These are the names of how a platform works. They are not results, and a report that leads with them is describing the machine rather than the money.

• Meta learning phase is the period in which Meta's delivery system learns who to show an ad set to, and when. Reports sometimes use it to explain a poor week. Treat "it's still learning" as a prompt for a question, not an answer: since when, and what would end it?
• Meta Andromeda is, in Meta's engineering description, a proprietary machine-learning system design for retrieval in ad recommendation². Meta's post says retrieval cuts tens of millions of candidate ads down to a few thousand before the ranking stage². That is plumbing. The post's title ties it to Advantage+, Meta's name for its automated campaign tools². None of it tells you whether your campaign made money.
• Performance Max is a goal-based Google Ads campaign type that reaches all Google inventory from one campaign, with Google's AI managing bids, budget and placements. The reporting question is how much of the revenue came from existing customers or from searches for your brand name.

Ask: what decision does this platform detail change for my revenue or margin?

Here the jargon is often a hope with no metric.

• “Scale” is usually shorthand for "increase budget or scope". We found no independent definition with measurable thresholds. So "ready to scale" needs a number and a margin attached: scale to what spend, at what return, and what happens to margin on the extra orders?
• Full-funnel means planning awareness, consideration and conversion as one plan. It means something only when each stage you influence is named and has its own metric.
• Always-on is a continuous advertising presence instead of one-off campaigns. Fine, but being on is not the same as working.
• Channels "working together" is the claimed extra effect of channels combined. Marketing News Canada suggests naming the shared goal, the owner and the one shared metric whenever the word comes up¹. Without those three, it is a placeholder.
• Customer journey is a map of the steps a customer takes before buying. Useful as a drawing. Less useful as proof that every step contributed.

Example (illustrative): A deck says "we scaled spend and kept ROAS stable". Spend doubled from a small base. The new orders mostly came from people already on your email list. Revenue in the platform went up. Margin after discounts and delivery went nowhere.

Just one: "So what does that mean for revenue, margin or cash?"

If the answer is a number with a definition, good. If it is another term, ask again. If it is "it depends", ask on what. A good agency will not mind. Our view: a report you cannot translate into a decision is a report you should send back.