18 Marketing Terms Every Marketing Team Should Know

18 marketing terms that every DTC marketing team should know.

(Save this, you'll want it again.)

If you run a consumer brand, you're already playing this game whether you know the rules or not.

A lot of founders wing it.
They throw spend at ads or post content and hope something sticks.

That's how growth stays slow, or worse, how you burn budget without ever knowing why.

Here are 18 terms worth knowing if you want to scale on purpose instead of by accident.

1. CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost)
↳ What it costs, on average, to get one new paying customer.

2. ROAS (Return on Ad Spend)
↳ Revenue generated for every dollar spent on ads.

3. Conversion Rate
↳ The % of visitors who buy, sign up, or do the thing you wanted.

4. Churn Rate
↳ The % of customers who cancel or stop buying over a set period.

5. A/B Testing
↳ Running 2 versions of something side by side to see which one wins.

6. MER (Marketing Efficiency Ratio)
↳ Total revenue divided by total ad spend, across every channel combined.

7. AOV (Average Order Value)
↳ The average amount a customer spends per order.

8. LTV (Lifetime Value)
↳ Total revenue a customer brings in over their whole relationship with you.

9. LTV to CAC Ratio
↳ What a customer is worth compared to what it costs to get them.

10. Payback Period
↳ How long it takes a new customer to pay back their own acquisition cost.

11. Contribution Margin
↳ Profit left after variable costs. The number that tells you if growth is profitable at all.

12. Blended CAC
↳ Acquisition cost averaged across every channel.

13. Hook Rate
↳ The % of people who keep watching past the first few seconds.

14. Thumb-Stop Ratio
↳ How often your creative stops someone mid-scroll instead of getting ignored.

15. Creative Fatigue
↳ The point where a winning ad starts losing steam from overexposure.

16. Repeat Purchase Rate
↳ The % of customers who come back and buy more than once.

17. Cohort Retention
↳ How one group of customers, grouped by signup month, keeps buying over time.

18. First-Touch vs. Last-Touch Attribution
↳ Whether you credit the first ad someone saw or the last one before they bought. Changes everything about what looks like it's working.

If none of this is part of your regular thinking yet.

You're flying blind with someone else's money.

Which one of these tripped you up the first time you heard it?

♻️ Repost this to help your team catch up on the fundamentals.
And follow me, Jacob Rokeach, for more like this.