The working vocabulary of paid acquisition — the creative parts you build, the levers you pull on spend, and the numbers that tell you whether it worked.
Buyers use these words all day; here is what each one means. For the craft behind them, see what media buyers actually do, learn which return metric to optimise in ROI vs ROAS, and structure your tests with the creative testing framework.
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Media buying | Buying ad inventory to drive traffic to offers. |
| Creative | The ad itself — image, video or copy. |
| Angle | The specific message or hook a creative uses to sell, such as convenience for an e-commerce product. |
| Hook | The first few seconds or first line that stops the scroll. |
| Ad set | The layer that holds a targeting and budget setting for a group of ads. |
| Landing page | The page the click lands on, built to carry the angle through to the action. |
| UGC | User-Generated Content — creative shot to look native and unpolished, like a real user review. |
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Bid | What you are willing to pay per click or impression. |
| Budget | The spend allocated to a campaign or ad set. |
| Audience | The targeted group of users for a campaign. |
| Lookalike audience | A new audience the platform builds to resemble your existing converters. |
| Retargeting | Showing ads to users who already interacted with you. |
| Whitelist | The set of placements or sources you have approved to run on. |
| CBO vs ABO | Campaign vs Ad-set Budget Optimization — whether the budget sits at the campaign or ad-set level. |
| Dayparting | Scheduling ads to run only in the hours that convert best. |
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| CPM | Cost Per Mille — the price for one thousand impressions. |
| CPC | Cost Per Click — what you pay for each click. |
| CTR | Click-Through Rate — the share of impressions that become clicks. |
| CPA | Cost Per Acquisition — what it costs you to produce one conversion. |
| ROAS | Return On Ad Spend — revenue divided by ad spend. |
| ROI | Return On Investment — profit as a percentage of total cost. |
| Frequency | How many times, on average, each user has seen your ad. |
| Break-even ROAS | The ROAS at which revenue exactly covers spend; above it you profit. |
Where to go next: lay out accounts cleanly with campaign structure explained, find the message that sells in finding winning angles, run the daily loop in campaign optimization workflow, and grow a winner safely with scaling campaigns.
What media buyers actually do day to day: testing creatives, reading data, managing spend and scaling the campaigns that turn a profit.
Core · 11 min readHow to structure paid campaigns: the campaign / ad set / ad hierarchy, ABO vs CBO, one concept per ad set, naming conventions, and how structure fe...
Advanced · 14 min readThe algorithm handles targeting now; creative is what you control.
