A cheat sheet of most commonly used acronyms in e-com and digital marketing

Originally posted on Medium August 10th, 2019.

Now and then you might come across abbreviations that left you feeling confused. So I made a list of acronyms that are commonly used in e-commerce and digital marketing space with a short description of the given term.


AB — Auto Bidding — option for bidding automatically inside the auction for your ad placements based on your bid

AI — Audience Insights— tool that lets you see how many people are interested in cats on the platform, or anything you could imagine

AM — Ads Manager — place where you can manage your fancy ads

AOV — Average Order Value — a metric which shows what average total of every order placed within a specific time is, the higher the better

ATC — Add to Cart— action / event on your store, an important micro-conversion step towards the purchase

ATV — Average Transaction Value — metric for average amount that a consumer spends with you within a single order

ATP — Average Time to Purchase — average amount of time costumer spends on your site till purchase

BIG 5US, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand — usually used to describe top 5 english speaking countries as targeting for your campaign

BM — Business Manager— your main tool from which you control your ads and check audience insights among other helpful features

CC — Custom Conversions — let you create rules for events or URLs, when you create these rules, you can measure more specific customer actions

CLV — Customer Lifetime Value — also known as LTV is a measurement of the total expected revenue from a customer over their entire relationship with a company

COD — Cash on Delivery — one of the payment option for clients, clients pays when goods arrive at his doorstep

COGS — Cost of goods sold — its the base cost of product you get from supplier

CPA — Cost Per Acquisition / Action— online advertising pricing model, meaning you pay for acquiring new customers e.g. by making a sale, click, newsletter sign up etc.

CPE — Cost per Engagement — this time you pay for engagement, meaning customers stop scrolling to engage with your ad on his feed (e.g. likes, comments)

CPL — Cost Per Lead— you pay for explicit sign-ups from potential costumers who displayed interested in your offer

CPM — Cost Per Impression (Cost Per Mil) — cost you pay for 1000 views or clicks (impressions)

CPC — Cost per Click / PPC — Pay Per Click — cost you pay when ad is clicked, meaning for every click you ad / link receives

CPP — Cost per Purchase— measurement of cost of advertising divided by the number of sales you get

CR — Conversion Rate — metric that shows percentage of visitors who take a desired action on your website, e.g. made an order or sign up for newsletter

CRO — Conversion Rate Optimization — process or system for enabling and increasing the percentage of people to take an action when they visit a website

CRR — Customer Retention Rate — refers to a certain point in the customer life-cycle and it can be measured monthly, quarterly, or annually depending on the business

CSB — Courier Shipping Bill — to be short and sweet it refers to document for ordered goods that are being exported

CTA — Call to Action — term referring to a link/button/image intended to prompt users to perform a specific action, usually takes the form of an instruction like „buy now” leading the consumer to the next step a sales funnel

CTC — Cost to Company — is the annual salary package of an employee, it indicates the total expenses that a company spends on an employee in a year, CTC includes gross salary with incentives and other expenses

CTR — Click Through Rate — refers to ratio of users who click on a specific link to the number of total users who view a page, email, or advertisement, measuring the effectiveness of your campaign

CTW — Click to Website — means you pay per click to your designated website

DABA — Dynamic Ads Broad Audience— with DABA you can target a broad audience and seek to reach people who have already expressed an interest in your type of product or service, even if they have never visited your website

DPA — Dynamic Product Ad — ad that automatically shows the right products to people who have expressed interest on your website or anywhere on the internet (remarketing)

DT — Desktop— ad placement device-wise

eCPSU — Effective Cost Per Swipe Up — the average cost per each swipe up

eCPV — Effective Cost Per Video View — the average cost per qualified video view

KPI — Key Performance Indicator— is a measurable value that demonstrates how effectively your ads are achieving their objective

LAA / LAL / LLA — Look Alike Audience — is an algorithmically-assembled group of social network members who resemble, in some way, another group of members, for example your past costumers

LTB — Life Time Budget — lets you set an specific amount to spend over the lifetime of an ad set

LTV — Lifetime Value— also known as CLV is a measurement of the total expected revenue from a customer over their entire relationship with a company

MAU — Monthly Active Users — is a performance metric for the success of an internet product, app or website per month

MB — Manual Bidding— option for bidding manually inside the auction for your ad placement based on your bid

MO — Mobile— ad placement device-wise

PPE — Page Post Engagement — is a metric that shows how much people engage with your page through likes and comments

PUR — Purchase— well it’s everything you should strive for with your store, bottom of the funnel

ROAS — Return on Ad Spend — is the amount of revenue a company receives for every dollar spent on an ad

ROI — Return on Investment— measures the gain or loss generated on an ad relative to the amount of money invested

RT — Retargeting — automatically shows the right products to people who have expressed interest in them on your website based on cookies

RVR — Repeat Visitor Ratio — measures the percentage of visitors who return to your site after an initial visit during some specific time period

SEO — Search Engine Optimization — is a methodology of strategies, techniques and tactics used to increase the amount of visitors to a website by obtaining a high-ranking placement in the search results page of a search engine

SEM — Search Engine Marketing — involves the promotion of websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages through paid advertising

SMO — Social Media Optimization— is the process of increasing the awareness of a product, brand or event by using a number of social media outlets and communities to generate viral publicity

SKU — Stock Keeping Unit — is used by retailers to identify and track its inventory, or stock

TOS — Terms of Service — rules by which one must agree to abide in order to use a service or else get banned

UPP — Unpublished post / Dark post— allow marketers to programmatically target specific demographics and conduct A/B tests without cluttering up their own brand’s newsfeed

USP — Unique Selling Proposition — could be thought of as “what you have that competitors don’t”

WC — Website Conversion — is a Facebook ad objective, helps boost conversions on your website

WCA — Website Custom Audiences — audience mades from visitors on your website e.g. people who visited specific pages or people who visited your site in last 30 days

VA — Virtual Assistant — is any type of remote assistant who provides administrative, creative or technical support service

VC — View Content — is a Facebook ad objective, sends traffic to specific piece of content

VTP — Average Visits to Purchase — average number of sessions from first website interaction to Purchase

VV — Video Views — is a Facebook ad objective that is aimed at getting the most views for a particular video during its first 10 seconds


Feel free to add some of the acronyms I might have skipped by commenting here or messaging me 😀

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