Ads Growth Blog
Practical guides to advertising and growth.
Clear explanations of the concepts, systems, and metrics behind digital advertising, with practical next steps and relevant tools.
Featured article
Keyword Research
Keyword research identifies the searches worth targeting and the intent behind them.
SEO & Organic Growth
Build durable search traffic through keyword research, useful content, technical foundations, and performance measurement.
Keyword Research
Keyword research identifies the searches worth targeting and the intent behind them.
Search Intent
Search intent is the outcome a person expects when they enter a query.
SERP
A SERP is the search engine results page shown for a query.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO helps search engines crawl, understand, render, and index a website.
Backlinks
Backlinks are links from other websites that can send referral traffic and signal authority.
AI Overviews
AI Overviews are Google's AI-generated summaries at the top of search results that synthesize answers from multiple sources, appearing above the traditional blue links and changing how publishers receive traffic from informational queries.
Topical Authority
Topical authority is the depth and breadth of expertise a website demonstrates on a subject by comprehensively covering its related topics.
Paid Acquisition
Plan, launch, measure, and improve campaigns across Google, Meta, TikTok, and other paid channels.
ROAS
ROAS compares attributed revenue with advertising spend.
Marketing Attribution
Attribution assigns conversion credit to marketing interactions.
Conversion Tracking
Conversion tracking records the actions used to measure and optimize campaigns.
Cost Per Click
CPC is the average advertising cost paid for a click.
Cost Per Acquisition
CPA is the average advertising cost required to generate a defined conversion.
Incrementality Testing
Incrementality testing measures the additional conversions an ad actually causes, by comparing an exposed group against a holdout that saw no ads.
Startup Growth Tools
Startup growth tools are the lean stack of measurement, acquisition, and analytics products an early team uses to find traction and scale what works.
Media Mix Modeling
A top-down statistical method that estimates how each marketing channel contributes to sales using aggregate, privacy-safe data.
Marketing Efficiency Ratio
Marketing Efficiency Ratio (MER) is total revenue divided by total marketing spend, giving a single blended view of how hard every advertising dollar works across all channels.
Marketing Data Pipeline
The automated flow that moves advertising, web, and revenue data from source platforms into one warehouse so teams can report and model on a single source of truth.
View-Through Conversion
A view-through conversion credits an ad that was seen but not clicked when the user later converts within a set window.
Cohort Analysis
Cohort analysis groups users by when they joined and tracks how each group behaves over time instead of blending everyone into one average.
Reverse ETL
The practice of syncing modeled data out of the warehouse and into the operational tools where marketing, sales, and support teams actually act on it.
Multi-Touch Attribution
Multi-touch attribution distributes conversion credit across the several marketing touchpoints a buyer interacts with before converting, rather than giving it all to one.
Server-Side Tracking
Sending conversion and event data to ad platforms from your own server instead of relying only on the user's browser.
First-Party Data
The customer and behavioral data you collect directly from your own audience, with consent, instead of buying it from third parties.
Performance Max
Google's goal-based campaign type that uses automation to serve ads across every Google inventory from a single asset-driven setup.
Programmatic Advertising
Understand the open-internet advertising supply chain, from DSP buying to publisher yield and verification.
DSP
A DSP is software advertisers use to buy digital ad inventory programmatically.
SSP
An SSP helps publishers sell and optimize advertising inventory.
Real-Time Bidding
RTB is an automated auction for an individual ad impression.
Ad Exchange
An ad exchange facilitates transactions between advertising demand and supply.
Header Bidding
Header bidding lets multiple demand sources compete before the ad server makes its final decision.
Supply-Path Optimization
Supply-path optimization is the practice of choosing the cleanest, most direct routes to buy the same ad impression, cutting out redundant intermediaries that add cost and risk.
Private Marketplace (PMP)
A private marketplace is an invitation-only programmatic auction where select buyers bid on a publisher's premium inventory through a negotiated deal ID.
Data Clean Room
A data clean room is a secure, privacy-controlled environment where two parties match and analyze their data together without either side seeing the other's raw, user-level records.
Connected TV Advertising
Connected TV (CTV) advertising is buying video ads that play on internet-connected televisions — through streaming apps and smart-TV platforms — usually purchased programmatically and measured digitally rather than by traditional TV ratings.
First-Price Auction
A first-price auction is a programmatic ad auction where the winning buyer pays exactly the price they bid, rather than one cent above the runner-up.
Frequency Capping
Frequency capping limits how many times a single user sees the same ad over a set period to curb waste and audience fatigue.
Bid Shading
Bid shading is an algorithm that lowers a buyer's bid to the smallest amount needed to win a first-price auction, preventing overpayment.
Ads.txt and App-ads.txt
Public text files that let publishers declare which companies are authorized to sell their ad inventory, cutting off counterfeit and unauthorized reselling.
Invalid Traffic (IVT)
Invalid traffic is any ad impression or click generated by bots, fraud, or non-human activity rather than a real, interested person.
Contextual Advertising
Contextual advertising targets ads based on the content of the page a person is viewing rather than their personal browsing history.
Ad Curation
Ad curation is the practice of pre-packaging quality inventory and audiences into ready-to-buy deals, usually assembled on the sell side, so buyers can transact value rather than sift through the raw open exchange.
Website Monetization
Turn useful website traffic into sustainable revenue with ads, affiliate offers, newsletters, and digital products.
Page RPM
Page RPM estimates publisher revenue per one thousand page views.
Affiliate Commission
An affiliate commission is compensation earned for a referred action or sale.
Ad Viewability
Ad viewability estimates whether an impression had an opportunity to be seen.
Pay-Per-Crawl
Pay-per-crawl is an emerging model where AI companies compensate publishers when their crawlers index site content, treating crawling as a billable event rather than a free data collection right.
Consent Management Platform
A consent management platform (CMP) collects, stores, and signals user consent choices for tracking and advertising, enabling GDPR and CCPA compliance while managing the revenue impact of consent decisions.
Anchor Ads
Anchor ads are sticky banner ads fixed to the bottom or top of the viewport that remain visible while the user scrolls, generating consistent impressions and typically higher viewability scores than standard in-content ads.
Merchant Of Record
A merchant of record is the entity that legally sells your product to the customer and takes on payment, tax, and compliance liability.
App User Acquisition
Research, instrument, launch, and optimize mobile growth campaigns around retention and lifetime value.
Mobile Measurement Partner
An MMP measures mobile app acquisition and post-install outcomes across channels.
App Store Optimization
ASO improves an app's visibility and conversion within app stores.
Cost Per Install
CPI is the average advertising cost for an attributed app install.
Customer Lifetime Value
LTV estimates the economic value generated by a customer over time.
SKAdNetwork
SKAdNetwork is Apple's privacy-preserving framework for measuring app advertising outcomes.
AdAttributionKit
AdAttributionKit is Apple's 2024 replacement for SKAdNetwork, offering privacy-preserving mobile attribution with improved measurement capabilities for iOS app install campaigns and re-engagement.
Playable Ads
Playable ads let users interact with a short, hands-on demo of an app before they install it.
Self-Attributing Network
A self-attributing network is an ad platform that reports its own conversions to your measurement partner instead of sharing raw click data.
App Monetization
Design and optimize an ad monetization stack while protecting retention and product experience.
Ad Mediation
Ad mediation manages competition among multiple app advertising demand sources.
eCPM
eCPM expresses advertising revenue per one thousand impressions.
Ad Fill Rate
Fill rate measures how often eligible ad requests result in delivered ads.
ARPDAU
ARPDAU measures average revenue per daily active user.
Rewarded Video
Rewarded video gives users an in-app benefit for choosing to watch an advertisement.
Offerwall
An offerwall is an in-app placement where users earn virtual currency or rewards by completing actions like installs, purchases, or surveys.
Affiliate Marketing
Build and scale affiliate revenue streams — from choosing the right programs and networks to tracking attribution, preventing fraud, and maximizing EPC.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a performance-based arrangement where publishers earn a commission for each sale or lead they refer to a brand.
Affiliate Attribution
Affiliate attribution determines which publisher receives credit for a conversion when multiple affiliates touched the customer's journey.
Affiliate Fraud
Affiliate fraud is activity by bad-faith publishers that generates artificial commission payouts without delivering genuine buyer intent.
Affiliate Network
An affiliate network is a marketplace that connects brands with publishers, providing shared tracking, payment, and compliance infrastructure for performance-based partnerships.
Affiliate Disclosure
An affiliate disclosure is a statement that a publisher earns commissions from links in their content, required by FTC and equivalent regulations in most markets.
EPC (Earnings Per Click)
Earnings per click (EPC) is the average commission a publisher earns per affiliate link click, used to compare programs and forecast revenue before committing to a promotion.
Brand Bidding
Brand bidding is when affiliates bid on an advertiser's brand name in paid search, intercepting organic brand traffic to collect commissions on conversions that would likely have occurred without them.
Smartlink
A smartlink is a single tracking URL that automatically routes each click to the best-matching offer based on rules like geo, device, and real-time performance.
Retail Media Advertising
Master sponsored product advertising on retail platforms — from Amazon Sponsored Products to in-store digital screens — and measure true closed-loop ROI with first-party data.
Retail Media Network
A retail media network is a retailer's owned advertising platform where brands pay to reach shoppers at the point of purchase.
Sponsored Product Ads
Sponsored product ads are pay-per-click listings that appear alongside organic results on a retailer's search and category pages.
Closed-Loop Measurement
Closed-loop measurement connects ad exposure directly to verified purchase data within the same retailer environment.
Commerce Media
Commerce media is advertising that uses shopping intent and purchase data to target buyers throughout their path to purchase, spanning retailer networks, financial data, and marketplace inventory.
In-Store Retail Media
In-store retail media is advertising displayed inside physical store locations — on screens, shelf-edge displays, and audio systems — sold by retailers to brands as an extension of their media network.
New-to-Brand (NTB)
New-to-brand (NTB) is a retail media metric that measures what share of purchases attributed to an ad were made by customers who had not bought from that brand in the past 12 months.
Digital Shelf
The digital shelf is the sum of every place online where shoppers discover, evaluate, and buy your product, and how well your listings perform there.
Creative Intelligence & Ad Testing
Research competitor ad creatives, prevent creative fatigue, and build a rigorous testing system to find winning ad formats across social and programmatic channels.
Competitive Ad Intelligence
Competitive ad intelligence is the practice of monitoring competitors' ad creatives, spend, and placement strategy to inform your own campaigns.
Creative Fatigue
Creative fatigue is the performance decay that happens when an audience has seen the same ad too many times and engagement drops.
Ad Creative Testing
Ad creative testing is the process of running controlled experiments to determine which creative elements produce better campaign results.
UGC Ads
UGC ads are paid advertisements that use content styled like authentic user-generated material — informal video, real testimonials, or lo-fi imagery — to achieve higher engagement and lower viewer skepticism than polished brand creative.
AI-Generated Creative
AI-generated creative uses generative AI models to produce ad images, copy, or video at scale, with compliance implications for disclosure and copyright that are evolving rapidly.
Hook Rate
Hook rate is the percentage of people who watch the first 3 seconds of a video ad, used as a leading indicator of whether the opening moment is compelling enough to stop the scroll.
Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO)
DCO automatically assembles and serves the best-performing combination of creative elements to each impression in real time.
Attention Metrics
Attention metrics estimate how much active human attention an ad actually earned — using signals like in-view time, eye-tracking panels, and on-screen interaction — going beyond whether the impression merely had a chance to be seen.