Media-buying & pacing terms
Plain-English definitions of the terms agencies use every day when planning and running campaigns.
Pacing (Campaign Pacing)
How actual spend on a campaign compares to what was planned for this point in its flight. A campaign is "on pace" when actual and planned spend track closely; overpacing and underpacing describe the two ways it can drift.
Free tool: Ad Budget & Pacing Calculator →Delivery Pacing
The ad platform's own algorithm for spreading a budget across a day or period — it can front-load, back-load, or spread delivery evenly depending on the budget type and auction conditions, independent of what an agency intended.
Free tool: Ad Budget & Pacing Calculator →CPA (Cost Per Acquisition)
The average amount spent to generate one conversion (a lead, sale, or signup).
Free tool: CPA Calculator →ROAS (Return on Ad Spend)
Revenue generated per dollar of ad spend, usually expressed as a ratio (e.g. 4x) — the revenue-side counterpart to CPA.
Free tool: ROAS Calculator →CPM (Cost Per Mille)
The cost of 1,000 ad impressions: ad spend ÷ impressions × 1,000. The standard way to price and compare reach across platforms.
Free tool: CPM Calculator →CPC (Cost Per Click)
The average cost of one click on an ad: ad spend ÷ clicks. Driven by CPM and CTR together (CPC = CPM ÷ (CTR × 10)).
Free tool: CPC Calculator →CTR (Click-Through Rate)
The share of impressions that led to a click: clicks ÷ impressions × 100. The clearest signal of how relevant an ad is to the people seeing it.
Free tool: CTR Calculator →Conversion Rate
The share of clicks (or visits) that became a conversion: conversions ÷ clicks × 100. Links CPC to CPA: CPA = CPC ÷ conversion rate.
Free tool: Conversion Rate Calculator →Frequency
The average number of times each person reached saw an ad: impressions ÷ reach. Rising frequency with falling CTR is the signature of creative fatigue.
Free tool: Creative Fatigue Checker →Creative Fatigue (Ad Fatigue)
When an audience has seen the same ad so often that they stop responding: frequency climbs while CTR falls and cost per result rises. Fixed by rotating in new creative or widening the audience.
Free tool: Creative Fatigue Checker →Agency Commission (Gross vs Net)
The agency’s fee as a share of the gross, client-billed amount. Net = gross × (1 − commission). A 15% commission equals a 17.65% markup on net. Ad platforms only ever see net.
Free tool: Agency Commission Calculator →Media Flowchart
A media plan laid out as a calendar: channels down the side, weeks across the top, with shaded cells showing when each channel runs and how much it spends.
Free tool: Media Plan Template (Excel) →Budget Variance
The dollar or percentage gap between planned spend and actual spend for a given channel or period — the raw number that pacing alerts are built on top of.
Free tool: Ad Budget & Pacing Calculator →Flight Dates
The start and end dates a channel or campaign is scheduled to be active. A media plan's flight dates don't always match the overall campaign period — different channels can flight independently.
Free tool: Campaign Setup Checker →Daily vs. Lifetime Budget
Two different budget types in Google Ads and Meta: a daily budget targets an average daily spend the platform can flex above; a lifetime budget targets a fixed total across a set date range. Mixing the two up is the most common cause of campaign overpacing.
Free tool: Campaign Setup Checker →Overpacing / Underpacing
Overpacing: a campaign spending faster than planned relative to its flight, risking running out of budget early. Underpacing: spending slower than planned, risking leftover budget at flight-end.
Free tool: Ad Budget & Pacing Calculator →Geotargeting
The location settings that determine where a campaign's ads are eligible to show. Misconfigured geotargeting — often left on an "interest-based" expansion setting instead of a strict location match — is a common, easy-to-miss setup error.
Anomaly Detection
Automatically flagging when a metric (CPA, ROAS, CPC) moves meaningfully away from its own recent baseline — typically using a rolling window (e.g. 7 days) rather than a single fixed target, so genuine trends stand out from normal day-to-day noise.
Free tool: Ad Account Health Check →Media Plan
A structured plan of which channels a campaign will run on, with budgets, flight dates, and goals per channel — the reference document actual spend and pacing get checked against.
Free tool: Media Plan Builder →Gantt Timeline
A horizontal-bar visualisation of a media plan showing every channel's flight dates side by side — useful for spotting overlaps, gaps, and drift across channels at a glance.
Free tool: Media Plan Builder →Setup Audit
A check of a live campaign's configuration (geotargeting, destination URLs, budget type, conversion tracking) against what it was supposed to be — distinct from a performance review, since a campaign can be perfectly configured and still underperform, or badly misconfigured and still look fine on the surface.
Free tool: Campaign Setup Checker →Action Point
A discrete task tied to a campaign or client — typically either a one-off SET UP task (a pre-launch step) or a recurring HEALTH CHECK task (a periodic review), with due dates derived from campaign dates.
UTM Parameters
Tags appended to a destination URL (source, medium, campaign, etc.) that let analytics tools attribute traffic and conversions back to the specific ad, campaign, or channel that generated the click.
Free tool: UTM Builder & Checker →Attribution Window
The length of time after an ad interaction during which a resulting conversion is still credited to that ad — e.g. a 7-day click / 1-day view window. Mismatched windows between an ad platform and an analytics tool are a common source of reporting discrepancies.
Dayparting (Ad Scheduling)
Restricting when a campaign is eligible to serve — specific hours or days of the week — usually set to match when an audience is actually likely to convert. Left over from a previous campaign, it can silently cap how much a campaign is able to spend.
Channel Library
A reusable reference of channel specs, SOPs, and past media plan structures an agency has already built — so a new client's plan starts from what's worked before instead of a blank page.