Glossary
Meta ads, in plain words
Every term from Ads Manager and Events Manager in one sentence, with the formula and an example where it helps.
A
- Account Quality The page in Meta’s Business Support Home that shows restrictions, rejected ads and policy issues for your ad accounts, pages and business.
- Account spending limit A cap on the total amount an ad account can spend until you raise, reset or remove it. When it is reached, every ad stops.
- Ad auction The auction Meta runs each time it can show an ad, where the winner is the ad with the highest total value, not simply the highest bid.
- Ad review Meta’s check, mostly automated, that every new or edited ad follows its Advertising Standards before it can deliver.
- Ad set The middle level of a Meta campaign, where you choose the audience, placements, schedule, optimisation event and (unless the campaign holds it) the budget.
- Advantage+ audience Meta’s automatic targeting, where your audience settings are suggestions and the system may show ads to people outside them if it expects better results.
- Advantage+ campaign budget A budget set on the campaign that Meta distributes across its ad sets, moving money to the ones it expects to perform best.
- Advantage+ placements The setting that lets Meta show your ads in every placement (Feeds, Stories, Reels, Messenger, Audience Network and more) and spend where results are cheapest.
- Advantage+ sales campaign Meta’s largely automated sales campaign type, where targeting, placements and budget split are handled by the system with few manual settings.
- Attribution setting The time after someone clicks or views your ad during which Meta credits a conversion to that ad. The default is 7-day click and 1-day view.
- Automated rule A condition and an action Meta checks for you, such as "pause the ad set if it spent $100 with no purchase in the last 3 days".
- Average order value (AOV) The average amount a customer spends per order.
B
- Bid cap A bid strategy that sets the maximum Meta may bid in any single auction.
- Break-even ROAS The ROAS at which ad spend exactly pays for itself, with no profit and no loss.
- Breakdown effect Meta’s name for why a segment with a higher average cost can still get more budget: the system optimises the cost of the next result, not the average.
C
- Campaign objective What you tell Meta the campaign is for: Awareness, Traffic, Engagement, Leads, App promotion or Sales.
- Click-through rate (CTR) The share of impressions that led to a click.
- Conversion rate The share of visitors or clicks that end in a conversion, such as a purchase or lead.
- Conversions API (CAPI) Meta’s way of sending conversion events from your server or shop platform directly to Meta, instead of only from the visitor’s browser.
- Cost per acquisition (CPA) What you pay in ad spend for each conversion, most often each purchase.
- Cost per click (CPC) What you pay on average for each click on your ad.
- Cost per lead (CPL) What you pay in ad spend for each lead, such as a submitted form.
- Cost per result Spend divided by results, where "result" is whatever the ad set optimises for: purchases, leads, landing page views and so on.
- Cost per result goal A bid strategy where you tell Meta the average cost per result you want to stay around, and it gets as many results as it can near that cost.
- CPM (cost per mille) What you pay for 1,000 impressions of your ad.
- Creative fatigue When an ad has been shown to the same people so often that they stop responding, so its results get worse and its costs rise.
- Custom audience An audience built from people who already know you: website visitors, customer lists, app users or people who engaged with your page or videos.
- Customer lifetime value (LTV) The total profit (or revenue) you expect from a customer over the whole relationship.
D
- Daily budget The average amount you want a campaign or ad set to spend per day.
- Dataset Meta’s container for your conversion events, combining what the pixel and the Conversions API send.
- Delivery status The Delivery column in Ads Manager that says what each campaign, ad set and ad is doing: Active, Learning, Learning limited, In review, Rejected, Off and others.
E
- Event deduplication How Meta keeps one event when the pixel and the Conversions API both report the same conversion: it matches them by event name and event ID.
- Event match quality (EMQ) A score from 0 to 10 that tells you how well the customer information in your server events lets Meta match them to people on its apps.
L
- Landing page view Counted when someone clicks your ad and the destination page loads far enough for the pixel to fire.
- Learning phase The period after an ad set is created or significantly edited, while Meta works out how best to deliver it. It usually ends after about 50 results in a week.
- Lifetime budget A total amount for the whole run of a campaign or ad set, spread over its schedule.
- Link click A click on your ad that leads to a destination, such as your website, an app store or a Messenger chat.
- Lookalike audience An audience of people similar to a source audience you provide, such as your customers or website visitors.
M
- Marketing efficiency ratio (MER) Total revenue divided by total ad spend across every channel.
- Meta Pixel The code on your website that sends visitor actions, such as page views, add to carts and purchases, from the browser to Meta.
- Modelled conversions Conversions Meta estimates statistically for people it cannot observe directly, for example when tracking is limited by privacy settings.
P
R
- Reach The estimated number of people who saw your ads at least once.
- Retargeting Showing ads to people who already interacted with you, such as site visitors or cart abandoners, usually through custom audiences.
- Return on ad spend (ROAS) Revenue attributed to your ads divided by what you spent on them.
S
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