Terms & Definitions
A quick, no-nonsense glossary
The words and acronyms dealers hear constantly. No jargon for jargon’s sake.
- Agentic
- AI systems that can take multi-step actions on their own rather than just answering questions. Still early and often over-hyped.
- AIA
- Automotive Inventory Ads (Meta/Facebook). Paid inventory ads that pull from a catalog and are eligible for placement across Meta surfaces, including Marketplace.
- AI / Artificial Intelligence
- Broad term now used for everything from simple automation to large language models. In dealer marketing it usually means “the platform claims it optimizes itself.”
- Bounce Rate
- The percentage of sessions where someone left without doing anything meaningful. Still useful in some contexts, but often over-weighted or misunderstood.
- C2C / Click-to-Call
- When a user clicks a phone number on a site or ad and it initiates a call.
- Campaign / Medium / Source
- The basic building blocks of traffic reporting in GA4. Source = where the traffic came from. Medium = how it got there. Campaign = the specific effort.
- Chatbot
- Automated messaging on a website or Messenger. Quality ranges from useful first-touch to pure annoyance.
- CPC
- Cost Per Click. What you pay each time someone clicks an ad.
- CTR
- Click-Through Rate. Clicks divided by impressions. Useful, but only one piece of the picture.
- Engagement Rate
- In GA4, a session that lasts longer than 10 seconds, has a conversion event, or has 2+ page/screen views. Many people still treat it like the old bounce rate inverted. It's not.
- Event Count
- Total number of events recorded. Easy to inflate and frequently used to make activity look bigger than it is. Look at meaningful events, not just volume.
- FB Marketplace
- Facebook Marketplace. Where a large amount of local vehicle shopping now happens. Since January 2023 vehicle listings can no longer be created from a business Page, so dealer presence there runs through paid ads rather than organic listings.
- First Click / Last Click Attribution
- First Click gives credit to the first touchpoint. Last Click gives credit to the final one before conversion. Both are incomplete. Most platforms have moved on from pure last-click, but many reports still lean on it because it's simple.
- GA4
- Google Analytics 4. The current version of Google Analytics. Replaced Universal Analytics (UA).
- JSON-LD
- A way of adding structured data to a page so search engines and AI systems can better understand the content — vehicles, prices, availability, and so on.
- Machine Learning
- Systems that improve from data over time without being explicitly reprogrammed for every scenario. The engine behind a lot of “AI” claims in advertising platforms.
- Meta
- The parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Still commonly called Facebook by many dealers.
- OTT
- Over-The-Top. Streaming TV advertising that bypasses traditional cable.
- PMax / Performance Max
- Google's automated campaign type that runs across Search, Display, YouTube, Gmail, and Discover from a single campaign.
- PPC
- Pay-Per-Click. The broad category of paid search and paid social advertising.
- Programmatic
- Automated buying of digital ad inventory using software and data, rather than manual placement.
- ROI
- Return on Investment. Profit relative to the total cost of the investment. The number that actually matters to ownership.
- ROAS
- Return on Ad Spend. Revenue generated divided by ad spend. Useful, but it ignores other costs and is easier to inflate than true ROI.
- SEM
- Search Engine Marketing. Usually refers to paid search (PPC).
- SEO
- Search Engine Optimization. The work of improving visibility in organic (unpaid) search results. Still foundational — and still very different from the SEO of 2019. Ranking is only part of the game now; how a site shows up in AI answers and generative results matters too.
- SERP
- Search Engine Results Page. What you see after you hit enter on a search.
- Session
- A group of user interactions with your site within a given time frame.
- Turn / Days Supply
- Related but different. Turn usually refers to how quickly inventory is selling — how many times the lot “turns” in a period. Days Supply is how many days of inventory you currently have based on recent sales rate. High days supply = aging problem.
- UA
- Universal Analytics. The previous version of Google Analytics. Officially sunset; no longer collecting new data.
- Users vs Sessions
- Users = unique people. Sessions = visits. One user can generate multiple sessions.
- VIN
- Vehicle Identification Number. The only reliable way to tell whether two listings are two cars or the same car published twice — which matters a great deal when counting a multi-rooftop group's inventory.
- VLA
- Vehicle Listing Ads (Google). Inventory ads that show specific vehicles in search and other Google surfaces.
- ZMOT
- Zero Moment of Truth. Google's older term for the research phase that happens before a customer ever talks to a salesperson. Still relevant even if the acronym has faded.