Glossary
Growth marketing, defined
The terms that come up in a growth engagement, in plain language. Link straight to any definition.
- Application funnel
- A page and form that qualify a prospect on fit, budget and readiness before a call is booked.
- Common for coaches, consultants and high-ticket services. It trades raw enquiry volume for a calendar of calls worth taking.
- Attribution
- Assigning credit for a conversion to the touchpoints that led to it.
- No model is perfect. HQ360 favours instrumented funnels and blended measures over debating last-click versus first-click.
- Average order value (AOV)
- Average revenue per order over a period.
- Bundles, cross-sells and quantity offers raise AOV without more traffic. It is one of the levers analysed before recommending acquisition spend.
- Blended acquisition cost
- Total sales and marketing cost divided by new customers, across all channels.
- It resists the attribution games of channel-level metrics and shows whether retention work is actually lowering what each customer costs.
- Browse abandonment
- When a visitor views products but leaves without adding anything to the cart.
- A light follow-up referencing the viewed products can bring the visitor back. It sits earlier in intent than cart abandonment, so messaging is softer.
- Cart abandonment
- When a shopper adds an item to the cart but leaves before completing checkout.
- A recovery flow sends a relevant, benefit-led reminder back to the same step. Because the shopper already showed intent, it is usually among the highest-return automations for a store.
- Conversion rate optimisation (CRO)
- Improving the share of visitors who take the key action, through structured testing rather than guesswork.
- CRO works on page sequence, offer framing, proof placement, mobile friction and checkout flow. Changes are tested one at a time and judged on a meaningful sample.
- Core Web Vitals
- Google's measures of loading, interactivity and visual stability, weighted toward the mobile experience.
- Poor scores can suppress rankings and, more importantly, cost conversions on mobile-heavy traffic.
- Database reactivation
- Structured campaigns to past leads and customers already sitting in a CRM.
- Because the contacts are already owned, reactivation often books appointments or orders at a fraction of new-lead cost.
- Google Business Profile
- The free business listing that powers local search results and the map pack.
- For local and home-service businesses, an optimised profile plus reviews is frequently the highest-return first step.
- Growth system
- A connected set of stages — position, attract, engage, capture, convert, retain, scale — with one owner accountable for booked revenue.
- Rather than isolated services, a growth system treats acquisition, conversion and retention as one loop where each stage feeds the next better inputs. The defining feature is a single metric — booked revenue — sitting above every channel and vendor.
- Lifecycle marketing
- Email and SMS mapped to where a customer is in their relationship with the brand.
- Welcome, post-purchase, win-back, replenishment and new-product flows each address a specific moment. Segmentation prevents pitching people what they just bought.
- Merchant Center feed
- The structured product data Google uses to show items in Shopping results.
- Feed completeness and accuracy affect which products surface for which queries, making it part of e-commerce SEO rather than a separate task.
- Return on ad spend (ROAS)
- Revenue attributed to advertising divided by the amount spent.
- Useful as a directional measure. It is sensitive to attribution windows and should be read alongside blended acquisition cost and repeat-purchase rate — and never guaranteed.
- Speed to lead
- How quickly a business makes first contact with a new enquiry.
- Contact rates fall sharply as minutes pass after a form submission. Automating the first touch and raising an immediate call task typically improves conversion more than increasing lead volume.
- Speed-to-lead automation
- The automated first response and routing that reaches a new lead within seconds.
- It does not replace a salesperson; it buys them a live conversation instead of a voicemail. After-hours routing rules are part of a complete setup.
- Speed-to-lead window
- The short period after an enquiry when contact rates are highest.
- Practically, the first few minutes. Automation exists to make sure a business acts inside that window every time, including outside business hours.
- Structured data
- Machine-readable markup that helps search engines understand a page's content.
- Product, review and FAQ structured data can make listings eligible for richer search results, used only where the page genuinely qualifies.
Start here
Want the system, not just the vocabulary?
Start a project and we will build the connected version for your business.