B2B digital marketing glossary: key terms

How should you use this glossary?

Each term below has one short definition, written for the people who sit in B2B marketing, sales and leadership meetings together. Terms are grouped by the question they help answer, and sorted A to Z inside each group. Where a term comes from a platform, the definition follows that platform's own documentation.

Pipeline and buyer terms

• Account-based marketing (ABM). Marketing aimed at a named list of target accounts, with messages and channels chosen for the buying group at each one.

• Buying group. The people inside a customer who influence or approve a purchase, such as the user, the technical evaluator, the budget holder and procurement.

• Customer acquisition cost (CAC). Total sales and marketing cost in a period divided by the number of new customers won in it.

• Ideal customer profile (ICP). A description of the companies most likely to buy, succeed and stay, by industry, size, region and situation.

• Intent data. Signals that a company is researching a topic, from your own site or from third-party sources. Useful for timing, weaker as proof of interest.

• Lead scoring. Points or a model that rank leads by fit and behavior, so sales sees the most promising first; our guide to predictive lead scoring explains the model-based kind.

• Lifetime value (LTV). The gross margin a customer is expected to bring over the whole relationship.

• Marketing qualified lead (MQL). A lead that meets the fit and interest rules marketing and sales agreed on.

• Pipeline. The total value of open sales opportunities, usually split by stage.

• Sales qualified lead (SQL). A lead that sales has reviewed and accepted as worth pursuing.

What do the paid media terms mean?

• Ad Rank. The value Google Ads uses to decide whether an ad shows and in what position. Google lists the bid, ad and landing page quality, minimum thresholds, the searcher's context and the expected impact of assets as inputs.^[1]

• Cost per click (CPC). What you pay when someone clicks an ad. Google notes that the amount you pay is often less than your maximum bid.^[1]

• Cost per lead (CPL). Ad spend divided by the number of leads it produced. Compare it with cost per opportunity, which says more about quality.

• Click-through rate (CTR). Clicks divided by impressions.

• Negative keyword. A term that stops an ad from showing for searches that contain it; Google describes negative keywords as a way to exclude search terms from your campaigns.^[3] Our guide to PPC campaign structure shows how they keep campaigns apart.

• Quality Score. A diagnostic in Google Ads, on a scale from 1 to 10 at keyword level, built from expected click-through rate, ad relevance and landing page experience. Google says it is not an input in the ad auction.^[2]

• Return on ad spend (ROAS). Revenue attributed to ads divided by ad spend. In B2B, pipeline or margin is often a better numerator than first-order revenue.

What do the search terms mean?

• AEO and GEO. Answer engine optimization and generative engine optimization: the work of having your pages quoted or cited in AI answers. Google says no special optimization is needed for its AI features beyond being indexed and eligible for a snippet.^[5] Our GEO guide covers the practice.

• AI Overviews. AI-generated summaries that Google shows on some results pages, with links to sources.^[5]

• Crawling and indexing. Google's first two stages: crawlers download pages, then Google analyzes and stores them before it can show them in results.^[4]

• Search engine optimization (SEO). Making pages easy to crawl, understand and choose for the searches your buyers make.

• Structured data. In Google's words, "a standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content".^[6] Most of it uses the schema.org vocabulary, and Google recommends the JSON-LD format.^[6]

• Zero-click search. A search that ends on the results page, answered by a snippet or AI summary, without a visit to any site.

Measurement terms

• Attribution. Assigning credit for a conversion or opportunity to the marketing touchpoints before it.

• Closed-loop reporting. Joining CRM outcomes, such as opportunities and revenue, back to the campaigns and spend that produced them.

• Consent mode. A Google feature that lets sites control how Google tags behave based on each visitor's consent choices.^[7]

• Dark social. Sharing in private channels, such as messaging apps, email and direct messages, that click tracking cannot see.

• Key event. An event in Google Analytics marked as important to your business; Google Ads conversions can be created from key events for bidding.^[8]

• Marketing mix modeling (MMM). A statistical model of aggregated spend and outcomes over time that estimates each channel's contribution.

• Multi-touch attribution (MTA). Sharing credit across the tracked touchpoints of individual journeys; our article on MTA vs MMM compares the two.

• Server-side tagging. Sending tracking data to your own server endpoint first, which then forwards it to analytics and ad platforms under your control.

• UTM parameters. Tags added to a link, such as utm_source, utm_medium and utm_campaign, that tell Google Analytics which campaign sent a visitor.^[9]

What do the email trust terms mean?

• DKIM. A cryptographic signature on outgoing mail that lets receivers check that it came from your domain and was not changed.

• DMARC. The protocol, now defined in RFC 9989, that lets a domain owner publish how receivers should treat mail that fails authentication, and receive reports about it.^[10]

• One-click unsubscribe. An unsubscribe that works in one step, shown by the mailbox provider. Google requires it for marketing mail from senders of 5,000 or more messages a day to Gmail accounts.^[11]

• SPF. A DNS record that lists the servers allowed to send mail for your domain.

Our guide to secure corporate DNS explains how SPF, DKIM and DMARC fit together. For how these terms connect in practice, see our digital marketing services.