Data & Tracking Terms

Agentic marketing is the use of AI agents that can plan and take marketing actions on their own, not just generate suggestions. An AI agent is software that decides a sequence of s...

Ahrefs is a paid SEO software platform used for keyword research, backlink analysis, competitor research and rank tracking. It crawls the web independently and builds its own index...

Anonymisation is the process of removing or altering personal information so a specific individual can no longer be identified, even by combining the data with other sources. Once...

An API (Application Programming Interface) is a connection point that allows two software systems to communicate and exchange data automatically. In marketing, APIs power integrati...

The Attribution Reporting API (ARA) is a Chrome browser feature that lets advertisers measure whether an ad click or view led to a conversion, without using third-party cookies. It...

Auto-tagging is a Google Ads setting that automatically adds a tracking parameter called GCLID (Google Click Identifier) to the end of your ad URLs. It lets Google Analytics match...

BigCommerce is a hosted ecommerce platform businesses use to build and run an online store without managing their own servers. It handles product catalogues, checkout, payments and...

BigQuery is Google's cloud data warehouse. Marketers mostly meet it as the free raw data export from Google Analytics 4 (GA4), which lets you query every individual event instead o...

Braze is a customer engagement platform that sends push notifications, in-app messages, email and SMS from one system, using real-time customer data to decide who gets what. It's b...

The CCPA, or California Consumer Privacy Act, is a privacy law giving California residents rights over their personal data, including the right to know what is collected, to have i...

Chrome UX Report (CrUX) is Google's public dataset of real-world page performance, collected anonymously from actual Chrome users who opt in. It's the source Google uses for Core W...

Click ID is a unique string of characters that ad platforms attach to the end of a link when someone clicks an ad. Google's version is GCLID, Meta's is FBCLID, Microsoft's is MSCLK...

A Content Management System (CMS) is software that lets you publish and edit website content without writing code. It handles pages, blog posts, images and site structure through a...

A Composable Customer Data Platform (CDP) is a customer data setup built directly on top of a business's existing data warehouse rather than a separate proprietary database. Instea...

Composable commerce is an approach to building an online store by connecting separate specialised tools, such as a headless CMS, a payment provider and a search engine, through API...

Consent in marketing is a person's permission to collect their data or contact them. To count, it generally has to be informed, specific and freely given, meaning the person unders...

Consent management is the process and technology for collecting, recording and honouring user permission to collect and use their personal data for marketing, analytics and adverti...

Consent Mode is Google's system for adjusting how its tags fire based on whether a visitor has agreed to be tracked. When someone declines cookies, Consent Mode tells Google Ads, G...

Consent Mode is Google's framework for adjusting how tags like Google Analytics and Google Ads behave based on a visitor's cookie consent. Basic mode blocks tags completely until c...

Consent Mode v2 is Google's framework for adjusting how tags like Google Analytics and Google Ads behave based on a visitor's cookie consent choice. It adds two consent signals, ad...

Consent rate is the percentage of website visitors who accept tracking or data collection when shown a consent prompt. It measures how many people actively opt in, and directly aff...

Container versioning is the practice of saving a snapshot of a tag management system's configuration each time it's published. Each version records exactly which tags, triggers and...

A Conversion API (CAPI) sends conversion events directly from your server to an ad platform (Meta, TikTok, Google) bypassing browser-based tracking limitations caused by ad blocker...

Conversion modelling is a statistical technique platforms use to estimate conversions they can't directly observe, usually because a user declined cookie consent or a browser block...

Conversions API (CAPI) is a way for businesses to send conversion events, like purchases or signups, directly from their own server to an ad platform such as Meta or Google. It wor...

A small text file a website stores in a visitor's browser to remember them across sessions or pages. Cookies power login persistence, cart memory, personalisation and the majority...

Cookie deprecation is the phasing out of third-party cookies, small files that let advertisers track a person across different websites. Browsers including Safari and Firefox alrea...

Cookieless describes marketing measurement and targeting that no longer relies on third-party cookies. As browsers block those cookies and privacy law tightens, the tracking that o...

Cookieless tracking is the set of methods marketers use to measure behaviour and attribute conversions without relying on third-party cookies. It leans on first-party data, server-...

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) is a Google Core Web Vital that measures how much a page's visible content unexpectedly shifts during loading — when elements move around and disrupt...

A Customer Data Platform (CDP) is software that collects customer data from all sources, unifies it into individual profiles and makes those profiles available to other marketing a...

A Customer Data Platform (CDP) is software that collects customer data from multiple sources, such as your website, app, email platform and point of sale, and stitches it into a si...

A privacy-preserving environment where two parties — typically a brand and a media platform — can analyse combined datasets without either party seeing the other's raw data. Only a...

A data dictionary is a reference document that defines every event, property and parameter a business tracks across its marketing and analytics stack. It states what each field mea...

Data enrichment is the process of adding extra detail to existing customer records, such as job title, company size or location, using external data sources. It turns a bare email...

The framework of policies, standards and responsibilities that govern how an organisation collects, stores, uses and protects data. For marketers, data governance defines what cust...

A data lake is a storage system that holds raw data in its original format, structured or not, until someone needs to use it. Unlike a data warehouse, it doesn't force data into ta...

A data lakehouse is a data storage architecture that combines the flexibility of a data lake with the structure and query performance of a data warehouse. It lets teams store raw,...

A JavaScript object on your website that acts as a structured communication layer between your website's code and Google Tag Manager. The data layer passes dynamic information — pr...

A data mart is a smaller, focused subset of a data warehouse built for one team or one purpose, such as marketing or finance. Instead of querying the entire organisation's data, a...

Data minimisation is the practice of collecting only the personal data you genuinely need for a specific purpose, and no more. Instead of gathering every field a form could hold, y...

Data modelling is the process of deciding how your marketing data is structured, named and related before it's stored. It defines what a session is, what counts as a conversion, an...

Data observability is the practice of monitoring your marketing and analytics data pipelines to know, in near real time, when something breaks. It covers whether events are firing,...

A data pipeline is the automated system that moves data from one place to another, cleaning and reshaping it along the way. In marketing, it usually moves data from ad platforms, y...

Data quality is how accurate, complete, consistent and up to date your marketing data actually is. It covers everything from correctly formatted email addresses to duplicate custom...

A Data Subject Request (DSR) is a formal request from a person asking an organisation to show them what personal data it holds, correct it, delete it or stop using it. It's the pra...

A centralised repository that stores large volumes of structured data from multiple sources — GA4, CRM, ad platforms, e-commerce — in a format optimised for analysis and reporting...

Deduplication is the process of finding and merging duplicate records in a database, most commonly customer or lead records in a customer relationship management (CRM) system or em...

Digital Asset Management (DAM) is a system for storing, organising and controlling access to brand files such as logos, images, videos and templates. Instead of assets scattered ac...

Do Not Track is a browser setting that sends a signal asking websites not to track the visitor. It sounds decisive but it never worked, because honouring it was voluntary and almos...

A Demand-Side Platform (DSP) is software advertisers use to buy digital ad space automatically across many sites and apps. A Supply-Side Platform (SSP) is the equivalent software p...

Durable measurement is Google's name for a set of tracking approaches designed to keep working as third-party cookies disappear and privacy rules tighten. It leans on first-party d...

Embeddings are numerical representations of words, sentences or documents that capture meaning and relationships. An AI model converts text into a list of numbers called a vector....

Enhanced Conversions is a Google Ads feature that sends hashed customer details, such as email address or phone number, alongside a conversion event to improve match accuracy. It s...

An Email Service Provider (ESP) is a platform used to send, manage and track bulk marketing emails. It handles list storage, automation, segmentation and reporting on things like o...

ETL and ELT are two orders for moving data into a data warehouse. ETL stands for Extract, Transform, Load: data is cleaned before it lands. ELT stands for Extract, Load, Transform:...

Event taxonomy is the naming and structure rulebook for how a business labels the things people do on its website or app, such as sign_up, add_to_cart or button_click. It defines e...

Fingerprinting is a tracking method that identifies a device by combining details like screen size, browser type, fonts, timezone and installed plugins into a unique profile. Unlik...

First-party data is information collected directly from your own customers through forms, purchases or your own website tracking. Third-party data is collected by an outside compan...

A first-party cookie is a small file set by the website you are actually on, under its own domain. It is how a site remembers you are logged in, keeps items in your cart between pa...

FLEDGE (First Locally-Executed Decision over Groups Experiment) was Google's early Chrome proposal for running remarketing auctions on-device instead of through third-party cookies...

GA4 stands for Google Analytics 4. It is Google's current web and app analytics platform, released as the replacement for Universal Analytics in 2023. GA4 tracks user behaviour as...

The European Union's comprehensive data protection regulation that governs how organisations collect, store and use personal data of EU residents — regardless of where the organisa...

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is Google's free platform for tracking how people use a website or app. Unlike its predecessor, it measures everything as an event rather than a pageview,...

Google Merchant Center is a free platform where businesses upload their product catalogue so Google can show it in Shopping ads, free product listings and other surfaces. It stores...

Google Search Console (GSC) is a free tool from Google that shows how your website performs in search results. It reports which pages are indexed, which search queries bring traffi...

Google Tag Manager (GTM) is a free tag management system that lets you add, edit and remove tracking code on your website without touching the underlying code. It acts as a single...

SHA-256 stands for Secure Hash Algorithm 256-bit. It's a mathematical process that turns any piece of data, like an email address, into a fixed-length string of characters called a...

Headless analytics is a tracking setup where data collection happens on the server or through an application programming interface (API) rather than through a JavaScript tag runnin...

A headless CMS is a content management system (CMS) that stores content separately from how it's displayed. Rather than rendering pages itself, it delivers content through an API t...

Hotjar is a behaviour analytics platform that shows how visitors actually use a website. It records anonymised session replays, generates heatmaps of clicks and scrolling, and runs...

HubSpot is a customer relationship management (CRM) platform that bundles marketing automation, sales pipelines, customer service tools and a website builder into one system. Built...

Human-in-the-loop (HITL) means a person reviews, approves or corrects what an AI system produces before it goes live. Instead of the model acting on its own, a human sits at a chec...

An identity graph is a database that links the different digital identifiers belonging to one person, such as an email address, device ID, cookie and login, into a single profile....

The structural design of a website — how pages are organised, labelled and connected — that determines how easily visitors can find what they are looking for.

The connection between two or more software platforms that allows data to flow automatically between them, eliminating manual data entry and enabling coordinated marketing activity...

Klaviyo is an email and SMS marketing platform built specifically for ecommerce businesses. It connects directly to store data like purchase history and browsing behaviour, letting...

One of Google's Core Web Vitals — measures how long it takes for the largest visible element on a page (typically an image or headline) to load and render for the user.

Lead assignment is the process of deciding which salesperson or team a new lead goes to once it enters your customer relationship management (CRM) system. It can be manual, rule-ba...

Lead routing is the set of rules that decide which salesperson or team gets a new lead once it enters your customer relationship management (CRM) system. It's usually based on terr...

LinkedIn Campaign Manager is the ad platform businesses use to build, run and measure campaigns on LinkedIn. It handles targeting by job title, industry and company size, along wit...

Magento is an open source ecommerce platform used to build and run online stores. Adobe owns it and sells an enterprise version called Adobe Commerce. Magento gives store owners de...

Mailchimp is an email marketing platform used to build, send and track email campaigns and basic marketing automation. It also offers simple customer relationship management (CRM)...

Marketing operations, often shortened to MOps, is the function that manages the systems, data and processes marketing runs on. It covers the customer relationship management (CRM)...

Marketing Resource Management (MRM) is software that helps organisations plan budgets, manage creative assets, coordinate approvals and track marketing work across teams. It sits a...

Marketo is a marketing automation platform, now sold as Adobe Marketo Engage, used to run email nurture programs, score leads and hand qualified prospects to sales. It's built prim...

The collection of software tools used to plan, execute, measure and optimise marketing. Includes CRM, email platforms, analytics, CMS, advertising tech and automation tools.

A martech stack is the full set of software tools a business uses to run, track and measure its marketing. This typically includes a customer relationship management (CRM) system,...

Master Data Management (MDM) is the discipline of creating one trusted, agreed-upon version of core business data, such as customer, product or supplier records, that every system...

Match rate is the percentage of your customer records that a platform like Meta or Google successfully matches to a real user identity when you upload a customer list. Higher match...

Meta Ads Manager is the platform used to build, run and report on ads across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Meta's Audience Network. It handles targeting, budgets, creative and...

Meta Pixel is a small piece of tracking code you place on your website that reports visitor actions, page views, purchases, signups, back to Meta. Meta uses this data to measure ad...

Microservices and monolith are two ways to structure software. A monolith is one large application where everything runs together. Microservices split the same functionality into s...

Microsoft Ads is the pay-per-click advertising platform that runs search ads on Bing, Yahoo and AOL, plus the Microsoft Audience Network. It works like Google Ads, with keyword bid...

An approach where the mobile experience is designed and built before the desktop version. Also refers to Google's mobile-first indexing, where the mobile version of a site is used...

Modelled conversions are conversions that a platform estimates rather than directly measures, using statistical modelling to fill gaps left by cookie loss, ad blockers or consent o...

Opt-in means someone has to actively agree before you can market to them. Opt-out means they're included by default and have to actively ask to be removed. The difference decides w...

PageSpeed Insights (PSI) is a free tool from Google that tests how fast a web page loads and how it performs against Core Web Vitals. It shows two separate readings: a lab test run...

PII stands for personally identifiable information. It's any data that can identify a specific person, either directly like an email address or full name, or indirectly when combin...

A pixel is a snippet of JavaScript code placed on your website that sends behavioural data to an advertising platform, such as Meta or Google. It tracks which pages users visit, wh...

Privacy and data compliance in marketing covers the legal obligations and ethical standards for collecting, storing and using consumer data. In Australia, the key framework is the...

A privacy policy is a public statement of how your business collects, uses, stores and shares personal information. It tells people what data you gather, why, who you disclose it t...

Privacy Sandbox is Google's set of proposed Chrome browser technologies meant to replace third-party cookies while still allowing some form of ad targeting and measurement. It grou...

Deterministic matching links two data points using an exact, verified identifier like an email address or logged-in user ID. Probabilistic matching links data points using statisti...

Product Information Management (PIM) is a system that stores and organises product data such as descriptions, images, pricing and specifications in one central place. Businesses us...

Protected Audiences is a Chrome browser feature that lets advertisers show remarketing ads without third-party cookies. Interest groups and auctions run locally inside the browser...

Pseudonymisation is a data protection technique that replaces identifying details like name or email with an artificial code. The original identity can still be recovered using a s...

Purpose limitation is the rule that personal data collected for one stated reason can't be reused for an unrelated reason without fresh consent. If you collect an email for order c...

A rate limit is a cap on how many requests a system will accept from you in a given time window, such as 100 requests per minute. Platforms like Google Ads, Meta and CRMs use rate...

Real-time and batch describe two ways data moves through a system. Real-time processing updates data the moment an event happens. Batch processing collects events and processes the...

Responsive design is a web design approach where a site's layout, images and text automatically adapt to display correctly across different screen sizes, from desktop monitors to t...

Revenue Operations (RevOps) is the function that aligns marketing, sales and customer success around one shared set of data, processes and tools. Instead of each team running its o...

Reverse ETL is the process of taking data already collected in a data warehouse and pushing it back out into the tools a business uses daily, like a CRM, email platform or ad platf...

Reverse IP lookup is the process of matching a visitor's IP address back to the company or organisation it belongs to, rather than to an individual. B2B marketers use it to identif...

Right to erasure is a person's ability to ask an organisation to delete the personal data it holds about them. It comes from the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation...

Round-robin is a lead distribution method that assigns incoming leads to team members in a fixed rotating order, one after another. Each rep gets a turn before the cycle repeats, s...

Salesforce is a customer relationship management (CRM) platform used to track leads, manage sales pipelines and store customer data. It's one of the largest CRM providers globally,...

Schema is a standardised code format that tells search engines exactly what's on a page, like marking a paragraph as a recipe, a review, an FAQ or a product listing. It doesn't cha...

A scoring model is a rule set that assigns points to leads or accounts based on attributes like job title, company size or website behaviour, so sales and marketing can prioritise...

Second-party data is first-party data collected by another organisation and shared directly with you through a formal agreement. Unlike third-party data bought through a broker, se...

Segment is a Customer Data Platform (CDP) that collects customer and event data once from your website or app, then routes it to other tools like Google Analytics, ad platforms and...

Semrush is a paid research platform used for search engine optimisation (SEO), competitor analysis and paid media research. It estimates keyword rankings, search volume, backlinks...

Server-side tagging is a way of collecting website data that sends information to a server you control first, rather than letting every ad and analytics tool fire directly from the...

Shopify is a hosted ecommerce platform that lets businesses build and run an online store without managing their own servers or writing checkout code. It handles product listings,...

Signal loss is the growing gap between what marketers can actually measure and what really happened, caused by privacy rules, consent requirements and browser restrictions. As trac...

SimilarWeb is a web analytics platform that estimates traffic, engagement and audience data for any website, including competitors you don't have direct access to. It works by mode...

Single Sign-On (SSO) is a login method that lets someone access multiple separate tools and platforms using one set of credentials. Instead of a different password for your CRM, an...

Snowflake is a cloud-based data warehouse platform. It stores large volumes of structured data from multiple sources such as a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, ad pla...

Square is a payments and point-of-sale (POS) platform that lets businesses take card payments in person and online. It also handles inventory, invoicing and basic customer data, ma...

Stripe is a payment processing platform that lets businesses accept online payments, run subscription billing and manage invoicing without building their own payment infrastructure...

Sync and integration describe different layers of the same problem. An integration is the connection built between two systems, often using an Application Programming Interface (AP...

A synthetic audience is a set of AI-generated personas or simulated respondents that stand in for real research participants. Instead of surveying actual customers, you prompt a la...

Synthetic data is artificially generated information that statistically resembles real data without containing any actual user records. It is produced by algorithms or AI models tr...

Tag bloat is the build-up of unnecessary or duplicate tracking tags on a website, usually managed through a Tag Manager. Each tag adds a script that has to load and run. Accumulate...

Tag governance is the set of rules and processes an organisation uses to control which tracking tags get added to its website, who can add them, and how they're named, tested and r...

A tag management system (TMS) is a tool that lets marketers add, edit and remove tracking code on a website without asking a developer to change the underlying code each time. Goog...

A Tag Manager is a system that lets you add and manage marketing tracking code (tags) on your website without editing the site directly. Google Tag Manager (GTM) is the most widely...

A third-party cookie is a small file set by a domain other than the website you are actually visiting, usually an advertising or analytics company. Because the same third party is...

The Topics API is a Chrome browser feature built by Google that assigns users to broad interest categories, like 'fitness' or 'travel', based on their browsing history. It's design...

A tracking plan is a document that lists every event, property and naming convention a business will track across its website, app and marketing tools. It acts as the blueprint tha...

A trigger is the condition that tells a tag or automated action to fire. In tag management, a trigger watches for a specific event, like a page view, button click or form submissio...

UTM governance is the set of rules a team follows for building and naming UTM parameters, the tags added to a URL to track where traffic comes from. It covers naming conventions, c...

A UTM parameter is a short piece of text added to the end of a URL that tells your analytics tool where a visitor came from. Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) parameters let you label t...

UTM parameters are small tags you add to the end of a link so your analytics can tell exactly where a click came from. UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Module, a name left over from...

A webhook is a way for one piece of software to automatically notify another the moment something happens, like a new sale or a form submission. Instead of one system repeatedly as...

WooCommerce is a free ecommerce plugin for WordPress. It turns a standard WordPress website into an online store, handling product listings, the cart, checkout and payment processi...

Zapier-style automation is software that connects two or more apps so data moves between them automatically, without a developer writing custom code. Named after Zapier, one of the...

Zero-party data is information a customer deliberately and proactively shares with a business, such as preferences, purchase intentions or personal context, usually through a quiz,...