Attribution assigns credit to marketing touchpoints to show what drives conversions. However, perfect tracking is now impossible due to multi-device journeys, privacy regulations, and resulting signal loss which makes traditional models like Last Click unreliable. A holistic approach combining multiple measurement models (like MMM, data driven and incrementality testing) is now essential to make smart investment decisions.
Behavioral data is the record of a customer's actions across your business, from website clicks and purchase history to customer care interactions like support tickets. It reveals explicit user intent and preferences. The primary challenge isn't collection but activation, as this valuable data often remains siloed in different systems, preventing a unified and actionable customer view.
A CDP primary benefit is solving the problem of data silos by cohesively collecting information from numerous fragmented sources. A CDP has purpose-built, embedded tools to merge different customer identities from various touchpoints into a single, unified profile through identity resolution. It also includes capabilities to clean and standardise this information, checking data quality to ensure the resulting customer view is trustworthy and actionable.
Decay is the progressive decline in the value of the martech ecosystem. It includes the widening gap between capabilities and actual use, misaligned system updates, and degrading reliability over time. This trend ultimately can erodes marketing credibility, wastes budget, and triggers cuts.
The process of enhancing an organization's first-party data by incorporating supplementary information from third-party sources. This method expands basic customer information by adding valuable insights, such as interests or intent signals. The primary objective is to create a more comprehensive and accurate profile of the audience, which allows for more effective and targeted marketing strategies.
Often called the "holy grail," this is the information you collect directly from your own audience and customers. Whether from website behavior, purchases, or email sign-ups, this data is highly valuable because it is accurate, unique to your business, and compliant with privacy regulations.
Hashing is a security method that transforms data, such as an email address, into a unique, standardized string of characters (a "hash").
The process is one-way, making it essential for privacy-safe data collaboration. Brands use it to target customer lists on large platforms without exposing sensitive, personally identifiable information (PII).
Identity Resolution is the process of matching and stitching together customer identifiers from different devices and channels-such as cookies, mobile IDs, and email addresses-to create a single, stable profile of an individual. It is the engine that builds the "Identity Graph" and enables a holistic customer view.
Identity Resolution can have a probabilistic or deterministic approach.
JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight, text-based format for structuring and exchanging data. In the martech field, it acts as a universal language that allows different software and platforms to communicate seamlessly. It is essential for sending customer data from websites to CDPs, passing identity information securely between systems, and enabling data exchange that powers integrated marketing stacks.
A measurable value used to track progress against a core business objective.
Following Amazon's model, the most effective KPIs focus on controllable "input" metrics-the actions you directly manage, like ad spend or site speed. These inputs are leading indicators that directly influence "output" metrics-the lagging results you want to achieve, like revenue or customer lifetime value.
A lookalike audience is a group of new prospects who share characteristics with your best customers. You provide a "seed" list of high-value users to an ad platform, which analyzes their common attributes like demographics and behaviors.
The platform then finds a new, larger audience that "looks like" them, creating a powerful, data-driven approach to expand reach and improve ad targeting.
Martech maturity measures how effectively an organization uses technology to achieve business goals, extending beyond tools to the alignment of strategy, talent, and measurement.
A key sign of immaturity is the "Process-Resource Paradox": while 38% of companies report advanced, "Pioneer-level" processes, only 10% have the dedicated resources to execute them, stalling progress and preventing ROI.
"Net new X" quantifies the true growth of a metric, such as customers or sales, over a specific period by accounting for losses. It is calculated by taking the total number of new acquisitions (e.g., new customers) and subtracting any churn (e.g., lost customers). This provides a clear measure of sustainable growth, distinct from just gross additions.
Orchestration is the automated management of customer journeys across multiple touchpoints in real-time. It uses data to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time, bringing an omnichannel strategy to life.
Despite its power, marketers use, on average, only 43% of available capabilities, proving strategy must always guide the technology.
Personalization uses customer data to tailor marketing messages and digital experiences to individual preferences. While a priority for 56% of companies, execution often stalls due to the "Process-Resource Paradox": sophisticated processes without the dedicated teams to manage them. Success requires a unified audience strategy and investment in talent, not just technology.
A query string is the part of a URL that passes data, often used for tracking traffic sources. UTM parameters within the string are vital for linking marketing activities to results. Be aware that browsers like Safari are becoming stricter about passing user identifiers via this method, which can impact tracking in platforms like Google Ads, Meta, and others.
The process of copying data from a central data warehouse to operational systems such as CRMs, marketing automation platforms, and advertising tools. It is the critical "last mile" that makes the data in the warehouse actionable for marketers.
While traditional data pipelines move data into a warehouse for analysis, R-ETL pushes the unified and modeled customer profiles back out to the frontline tools.
Artificially generated information that mimics the statistical properties of a real-world dataset without containing any of the original, sensitive information.
It allows companies to train Al models and test new software in a privacy-safe way without using actual customer PII.
Testing systematically compares versions of a marketing activity to find what performs best against a goal, using methods from simple A/B tests to incrementality experiments that isolate true impact. A significant "experimentation gap" exists, as only 5% of businesses test the vast majority of their activities. Adopting this discipline de-risks investments and systematically improves data-driven performance.
A Universal ID (UID) is a persistent identifier used to recognize individual users across different digital platforms, especially within logged-in environments.
When used consistently, a UID allows marketers to stitch together information from various touchpoints (like web, mobile app, and in-store systems) to create a single, unified customer view. This helps in delivering more relevant personalization and accurate measurement.
Vanity metrics are data points that look impressive on the surface but offer no real insight into business performance or strategic direction. They should be eliminated because they create a false sense of success and fail to inform actionable decisions. Focusing on them leads to data overload without providing the clear direction needed to drive meaningful business results.
A data warehouse is a centralized repository designed to store, manage, and analyze large volumes of historical data from various sources. In martech, it serves as the system of record for all customer data.
The "warehouse vs. CDP" debate is a false binary; they work together, with platforms like Google BigQuery storing historical data that CDPs access for real-time activation.
XML (Extensible Markup Language) is a structured format for passing data, like product information, between different systems. In the martech and adtech field, it is an essential, if "old school," method for tasks like syndicating product catalogs to retail media networks or exchanging tracking data between platforms that lack modern API integrations.
Zero-party data is information customers intentionally and proactively share with a brand, such as through quiz answers, preference selections, and survey responses.
This explicit, trust-based data is highly valuable because it's accurate, privacy-compliant, and immediately useful for personalization.
Often considered "future-proof," it allows brands to understand customer intent directly from the source.