Glossary
Meta ads terms, in plain English
Twelve words that stop small business owners in the middle of setting up an ad. Each one is defined the way it would be explained out loud, and each is followed by the article that answers the question a definition always leaves behind: what do I do about it.
- Ad account
- The account inside Meta or Google that holds your campaigns and the payment method they are billed to. It belongs to the business rather than to the person who set it up, which is why an agency should be asking for access to yours instead of running your ads from an account you cannot see.
- Read next: How to read Facebook Ads Manager: seven numbers that matter, three that mislead
- Pixel
- A small piece of code you place on your website so Meta can see what visitors did after they arrived. Without it the platform knows who clicked and nothing after that, so it keeps optimising toward clicks rather than toward the people who eventually buy.
- Read next: Facebook Conversions API in plain English: why the pixel alone is not enough
- CPM, cost per mille
- What it costs to show your ad a thousand times. CPM is the price of attention, not a result: it says how expensive the audience was to reach and nothing at all about whether anyone who saw the ad did what you wanted.
- Read next: Why your CPM is rising on Meta, and what actually sets the price of an impression
- CTR, click through rate
- The share of people who clicked after seeing your ad. It measures the ad itself more than anything around it: the same offer, in front of the same audience, gets a different CTR from a different image or a different first line.
- Read next: How to test Facebook ad creatives so the winner means something
- CPL, cost per lead
- What one enquiry costs you: money spent divided by leads received. On its own it is only half a number, because a cheap lead that never buys is more expensive than a costly one that does. The other half is what a lead is worth to you once it closes.
- Read next: Why your cost per lead keeps rising on Meta, and what to do about it
- Ad set
- The layer between a campaign and the individual ads. It holds the audience, the budget, the schedule and the placements, which makes it the level where most of the decisions that move your cost per lead are actually taken.
- Read next: How much budget you need for Meta ads to get your first leads
- Reach
- How many different people saw your ad at least once. Reach counts people and impressions count views, and confusing the two is how a campaign shown over and over to a small group can look far larger than it is.
- Read next: How to read Facebook Ads Manager: seven numbers that matter, three that mislead
- Frequency
- How many times the average person saw your ad. It is impressions divided by reach, and it climbs on its own as an audience gets used up, which is why the same creative tends to get more expensive the longer it runs.
- Read next: Creative burnout: how to see it in the numbers, not by eye
- Conversion
- The action you decide to count as a result: a form submitted, a call started, a purchase completed. What you choose to count changes what the platform optimises toward, so a campaign told to collect form fills will collect them whether or not they turn into customers.
- Read next: Cost per lead vs cost per acquisition: which one to optimize for
- Retargeting
- Showing ads to people who already had some contact with you: visited the site, watched a video, opened a form. The pool is small and it refills only from other advertising, which is why retargeting improves what you already have but cannot be the whole plan.
- Read next: Facebook retargeting after iOS 14: which audiences still work
- Attribution
- The rule that decides which ad gets the credit when somebody buys. Meta, Google and your own records each apply a different rule to the same sale, which is why their totals rarely agree and why reading one against another as if they measured the same thing is a trap.
- Read next: Facebook Conversions API in plain English: why the pixel alone is not enough
- Learning phase
- The stretch right after a launch or a significant edit, while the platform is still working out who to show the ad to. Results during it are unstable by design, and editing again restarts it, which is how a campaign can be reset over and over without anyone meaning to.
- Read next: The Meta Ads learning phase: what resets it and how to get out
Why the list is short
These twelve are not the twelve most common terms in advertising. They are the ones the product underlines wherever they appear on screen, because they are the words that make somebody stop reading and start guessing. A term earns its place here by interrupting a person, not by belonging to the vocabulary.
The list grows when a word starts costing people time, not when a page needs filling. It is also why there is no separate page for each term. Twelve short pages built around the same handful of searches would compete with the articles that already answer them properly, and every one of them would be worth less than the single page you are reading.
Where these numbers actually show up
A definition tells you what a number means. It does not tell you whether yours is any good. Two places on this site go further: the calculators run the arithmetic behind these terms on figures you type in, and the articles work through what to change when a number moves the wrong way.
Stop looking these up
Inside the platform these words are explained where they appear, next to your own numbers, at the moment they appear. This page is what that looks like from the outside.