Marketing Metrics Glossary: Terms Every Marketing Leader Should Know

Share of search

Share of search is a brand’s share of all branded searches in its category. Divide one brand’s search volume by the total for every brand in the competitive set. Les Binet’s analysis for the IPA (EffWorks, 2020) found it correlates with market share and often moves ahead of it. Our share of search guide has a free calculator.

Share of voice

Share of voice is a brand’s share of the advertising or media presence in its category. It’s usually measured as a share of total ad spend or impressions among competitors. It describes what a brand puts out, where share of search describes the demand that comes back.

Excess share of voice

Excess share of voice is the gap between a brand’s share of voice and its market share. Binet and Field found that brands whose share of voice runs above their share of market tend to grow share over time. In an interview, it’s a useful way to frame a budget conversation around growth targets.

Market share

Market share is a brand’s portion of total sales in its category, by revenue or by volume. It usually comes from retail panel data, industry reports or company filings. It’s the outcome most brand metrics are trying to predict.

Brand awareness (aided and unaided)

Brand awareness is the share of a target audience that knows a brand. Unaided awareness counts people who name the brand without a prompt; aided awareness counts people who recognize it from a list. Both are measured by surveys, usually tracked over time against competitors.

Brand lift

Brand lift is the change in a brand metric, such as awareness or purchase intent, caused by a campaign. It’s measured by comparing a group exposed to the ads with a similar group that wasn’t. Ad platforms offer brand lift studies for larger campaigns.

Consideration

Consideration is the share of an audience that would think about buying a brand when they’re next in the market. It sits between awareness and purchase in most funnel models and is measured with surveys.

Mental availability

Mental availability is how easily a brand comes to mind in buying situations. Byron Sharp’s work at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute ("How Brands Grow”, 2010) argues brands grow mainly by building it, along with physical availability and penetration. It’s measured by how many buying cues people link to the brand.

Physical availability

Physical availability is how easy a brand is to find and buy. It covers distribution, shelf presence, search visibility and how simple the purchase is. It’s the counterpart to mental availability in Byron Sharp’s model.

Penetration

Penetration is the share of category buyers who bought a brand at least once in a given period. Byron Sharp’s work argues growth comes mainly from increasing penetration, reaching more buyers including light ones, rather than from more loyalty among existing buyers.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Net Promoter Score measures how likely customers are to recommend a brand, on a 0 to 10 scale. Subtract the percentage of detractors (0 to 6) from the percentage of promoters (9 or 10), giving a score from −100 to 100. It’s common in customer experience reporting and often asked about in interviews for retention-focused roles.

Sentiment

Sentiment is whether what people say about a brand is positive, negative or neutral. It’s measured by classifying comments, reviews, posts or news coverage, often as net sentiment (positive minus negative). Sample size matters: a score from a few dozen comments moves easily.

Engagement rate

Engagement rate is the share of people who interact with a piece of content. It’s usually interactions (likes, comments, shares, saves) divided by followers, reach or impressions. Always say which denominator you used, because each gives a different number.

Reach

Reach is the number of unique people who saw a piece of content or an ad at least once. It differs from impressions, which count every view including repeats.

Frequency

Frequency is the average number of times each person reached saw an ad. It equals impressions divided by reach. Too low and the message doesn’t stick; too high and people tune it out.

Impressions

Impressions are the total number of times content or an ad was displayed. One person can account for many impressions, so impressions alone don’t show how many people you reached.

CPM (cost per thousand impressions)

CPM is the cost of 1,000 ad impressions. Divide total spend by impressions and multiply by 1,000. It’s the standard way to compare the price of reach across channels.

CPC (cost per click)

CPC is the average cost of one click on an ad. Divide spend by clicks. It’s most common in paid search and paid social.

CTR (click-through rate)

Click-through rate is the share of impressions that led to a click. Divide clicks by impressions. It’s a quick read on how relevant an ad or search result is to the people who see it.

Conversion rate

Conversion rate is the share of visitors or users who complete a goal, such as a purchase or a sign-up. Divide conversions by visitors or sessions. Be clear about which goal and which denominator you mean.

CAC (customer acquisition cost)

CAC is the average cost of winning one new customer. Divide sales and marketing spend for a period by the new customers won in it. Some teams use marketing spend only, so ask which version a company uses.

LTV (customer lifetime value)

LTV is the total revenue or gross profit a business expects from one customer over the whole relationship. It’s estimated from average order value, purchase frequency and how long customers stay. Definitions vary, so check whether a company uses revenue or margin.

LTV:CAC ratio

The LTV:CAC ratio compares what a customer is worth with what it cost to win them. A ratio above 1 means customers are worth more than they cost to acquire. It’s a common question in growth and subscription interviews.

ROAS (return on ad spend)

ROAS is revenue attributed to advertising divided by the ad spend. A ROAS of 4 means $4 of attributed revenue for every $1 spent. It depends on how revenue is attributed, so it can flatter channels that capture demand others created.

ROI (return on investment)

ROI is the profit from an investment divided by its cost. In marketing it usually means the incremental profit a campaign produced relative to what it cost. Unlike ROAS, it accounts for costs and margin.

Marketing mix modeling (MMM)

Marketing mix modeling uses statistics on historical data to estimate how much each channel and factor (price, seasonality, promotions) contributed to sales. It works from aggregate data rather than tracking individuals, which makes it useful as privacy rules tighten. Larger budgets usually need it to plan spend across channels.

Incrementality

Incrementality is the extra result a campaign caused that wouldn’t have happened without it. It’s measured with experiments such as holdout groups or geographic tests. It’s the honest answer to “did this channel actually work?”

Attribution (multi-touch)

Attribution assigns credit for a conversion to the marketing touchpoints before it. Last-click gives all credit to the final touch; multi-touch models spread it across several. All attribution models are estimates, which is why teams pair them with incrementality tests or MMM.

Brand marketing vs performance marketing

Brand marketing builds long-term demand and memory for a brand; performance marketing drives measurable actions now. Binet and Field’s IPA research ("The Long and the Short of It”, 2013) found brand-building effects last longer while activation effects are short-lived, and that a roughly 60:40 brand-to-activation split was a general optimum, varying by category. Interviewers often ask how you’d balance the two.

Creator marketing (influencer marketing)

Creator marketing is paying or partnering with creators to make content that reaches their audience. It’s measured by reach, engagement, traffic and sales from creator content, and increasingly by whether the brand reuses creator content in its own ads.

Earned media

Earned media is attention a brand doesn’t pay for directly: press coverage, word of mouth, reviews and organic social shares. It’s harder to control and often more credible than paid media.

Owned media

Owned media is channels a brand controls: its website, app, email list and social accounts. The brand decides what appears there, but has to build the audience.

Paid media

Paid media is advertising a brand buys: search ads, social ads, TV, out-of-home and sponsored content. It buys reach quickly, and stops working when the spending stops.

Organic search

Organic search is traffic from unpaid search engine results. It grows with content quality, site health and authority, and doesn’t stop when spending stops, though it takes longer to build than paid search.

SEO (search engine optimization)

SEO is the work of making a site easier to find in unpaid search results. It covers technical health, content that answers what people search for, and links from other sites.

AEO and GEO (answer and generative engine optimization)

AEO and GEO are the work of getting a brand cited or recommended in AI answers, from ChatGPT and Perplexity to Google’s AI Overviews. The basics overlap with SEO: clear answers, structured pages and being mentioned on sources AI tools draw from. AI answers vary from one run to the next, so visibility is best measured as a rate across repeated questions, not a single answer.

FAQ

What are the most important marketing metrics for a brand role?

Most brand roles track awareness, consideration, share of search, sentiment, penetration and market share. Which matter most depends on the category and the company’s stage.

What’s the difference between ROAS and ROI?

ROAS divides attributed revenue by ad spend. ROI divides profit by the full cost of the investment, so it accounts for margin and other costs.

How do I talk about metrics in a marketing interview?

Use the metric the company cares about, say how it was measured and give the before-and-after with a timeframe. If you’re not sure how a company defines a metric, ask; it reads as rigor, not as a gap. And explain it the way you’d explain it to a colleague, in your own words, rather than reciting a definition.