Audiences & Targeting
Custom Audiences
Ad-platform audiences built from your own customer lists or site/app activity for direct targeting.
Complete guideLookalike Audiences
Platform-modeled prospects who statistically resemble a seed audience of your best customers.
Complete guideRetargeting / Remarketing
Re-serving ads to people who previously visited or engaged but did not convert.
Complete guideContextual Targeting
Placing ads against page content and signals rather than personal identity, resurgent in the privacy era.
Complete guideExperimentation
A/B Testing
Randomized controlled comparison of two variants to measure the causal effect of a single change.
Complete guideMultivariate Testing
Testing multiple elements simultaneously to estimate individual and interaction effects.
Complete guideOverall Evaluation Criterion (OEC)
The pre-agreed metric an experiment must move, guarding against cherry-picked wins.
Complete guideTwyman's Law & Trustworthiness
'Any figure that looks interesting is usually wrong', the discipline of validating surprising results before acting.
Complete guideAttribution & Measurement
Attribution Modeling
Rules or models for assigning conversion credit across the touchpoints that preceded it.
Complete guideFirst-/Last-Touch Models
Single-touch shortcuts crediting only the opening or closing interaction, simple, and systematically biased.
Complete guideMulti-Touch Attribution (MTA)
Fractionally crediting all observed touchpoints (linear, U-, W-shaped, or data-driven weighting).
Complete guideIncrementality Testing
Holdout experiments estimating what would have happened without the ad, the causal gold standard.
Complete guideGeo-Lift Experiments
Turning media on/off across matched geographies to read true incremental impact in aggregate.
Complete guideBuying & Optimization
Programmatic Advertising
Automated, auction-based buying of digital inventory in real time across exchanges.
Complete guideReal-Time Bidding (RTB)
Per-impression auctions where demand-side platforms bid on individual ad opportunities in milliseconds.
Complete guideMedia Mix Optimization
Reallocating spend across channels using MMM, experiments, and marginal-return analysis.
Complete guideROAS / CPA / CPM Economics
The unit-cost vocabulary of paid media: cost per thousand, per acquisition, and return on ad spend.
Complete guideSignal Loss & Privacy-Era Buying
Adapting measurement and bidding to consent frameworks (GDPR) and platform tracking limits (Apple ATT).
Complete guide