Meta Ads Terminology Guide

Ad Set

  • A group of ads within a campaign that share settings for targeting, budget, schedule, and placement.

Advantage+ Shopping Campaign

  • Meta's automated campaign type that uses machine learning to serve the best ad combinations to high-intent shoppers.

Audience

  • The group of people you want to show your ads to, defined by interests, behaviours, demographics, or custom data.

Campaign Objective

  • The primary goal of your campaign (e.g. traffic, conversions, awareness) that Meta will optimise for.

Click-Through Rate (CTR)

  • The percentage of people who clicked your ad after seeing it. Calculated as clicks ÷ impressions × 100.

Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)

  • The average cost for acquiring a customer or conversion.

Cost Per Click (CPC)

  • The amount you pay, on average, when someone clicks on your ad.

Conversions API (CAPI)

  • A Meta tool that helps track events directly from your website server to improve tracking accuracy.

Custom Audience

  • An audience built from your data (e.g. email list, website visitors, customers).

Dynamic Ads

  • Ad formats that automatically show the most relevant products from your catalogue based on user behaviour.

Event Match Quality

  • A score in Meta Events Manager that shows how accurately your pixel or API is tracking user events.

Learning Phase

  • The period where Meta's system gathers data to optimise ad delivery effectively (typically 50 events needed).

Lookalike Audience

  • An audience that shares similar traits with a source audience (e.g. purchasers), created by Meta.

Pixel

  • A piece of code added to your website to track user actions and send data back to Meta for optimisation.

Retargeting

  • Showing ads to people who have previously engaged with your business online.

ROAS (Return on Ad Spend)

  • A measure of how much revenue you earn for every £1 spent on ads. ROAS = revenue ÷ ad spend.