Funnel marketing glossary

An extra authentication step in which the card's bank verifies the buyer, for example in their banking app. It usually shifts fraud liability to the bank.

A split test between two identical versions of a page. Both should convert about the same, so it checks that the traffic split and the tracking work before you trust a real test.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: A/B test tutorial (FAQ: A/A tests)

Application-to-person messaging over a normal 10-digit US phone number. US carriers ask businesses that text from these numbers to register their brand and each messaging campaign, including how people opt in and opt out.

A checkout someone started, with an email or phone number entered, and left without paying. An abandoned cart email or call reminds them to finish.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: Automations

The score Google Ads uses to decide whether a search ad shows and in which position. It combines the bid with auction-time ad quality (expected CTR, ad relevance, landing page experience) and other factors.

A paid page written like an editorial article that leads into an offer. Affiliates use it to warm up cold traffic before the sales page.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: Advertorial and presell builder

A marketer who promotes someone else's product and earns a commission on each sale or lead they send.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: ElasticFunnels for affiliates

A marketplace that connects vendors with affiliates and handles tracking and payouts, such as BuyGoods, ClickBank or Digistore24. Networks that pay per lead or action are often called CPA networks.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: Network integrations

Revenue divided by the number of orders. Order bumps and upsells raise it.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: Order bumps

Deciding which ad, campaign or channel gets credit for a sale. Models differ in how they share credit between the touchpoints before the purchase.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: Marketing attribution models, explained

The bank identification number: the first 6 to 8 digits of a card, which identify the issuing bank, card type and country. Used for fraud rules and payment routing.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: Fraud rules by BIN, country and velocity

A guard against false winners when one test makes several comparisons: the significance level is divided by the number of comparisons. It matters when you run 3 or more variants.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: A/B test sample size calculator

The ROAS at which ad spend is exactly covered by gross margin: 1 divided by your margin. A 40% margin needs a ROAS of 2.5.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: ROAS calculator

Everything you spend to win one new customer, divided by the new customers won. On a paid-traffic funnel it is close to the CPA of the first order, plus any creative, agency or affiliate cost that brought those buyers in.

A team that calls or takes calls from leads and customers to close sales, recover declined or abandoned orders and handle support.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: Call center on the customer record

Meta's server-side way to send conversions: your server reports the purchase directly to Meta instead of relying on the browser pixel alone. Google and TikTok have equivalents.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: Meta Ads integration

Retrying a declined card payment on another merchant account or processor, so a soft decline does not lose the sale.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: MID routing

A payment the cardholder disputes through their bank, which reverses it and usually charges the merchant a fee. Too many put the merchant account at risk.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: Chargeback prevention

A warning from a network such as Ethoca or Verifi that a customer has opened a dispute, sent before it becomes a chargeback so the merchant can refund first.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: Dispute alerts

The share of customers or subscribers who stop buying or cancel during a period. It is the mirror of the retention rate.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: Subscriptions and rebills

A unique ID an ad platform adds to the landing URL (fbclid for Meta, gclid for Google, ttclid for TikTok) so a later conversion can be matched to the click.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: What is gclid? (with fbclid and ttclid guides)

Cost of goods sold: what the product itself costs you, before ads and fees. Needed for real profit and break-even ROAS.

A group of customers who share a starting point, such as the month of their first order or the ad source that brought them, tracked together over time.

The range the true difference between two variants probably lies in. If a 95% interval for the lift includes zero, the test has not shown a real difference.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: Reading a split test result

What an order leaves after the costs that come with it: product, shipping, payment fees and any affiliate commission. Ad spend is subtracted after it, which is why it is the number to set a CPA target against.

In a split test, the current version of the page. Every variant is compared against it.

The action a test or campaign counts as a success: a purchase, a lead, a click. Decide it before the test starts.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: What a split test counts as a conversion

The share of visitors who complete the goal: conversions divided by visitors or sessions. 30 purchases from 1,000 sessions is 3%.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: A/B test sample size calculator

Affiliate fraud where an affiliate's tracking cookie is set on a shopper's device without a click on that affiliate's link, so the affiliate is credited for a later purchase it did not drive. Also called cookie dropping.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: What is cookie stuffing?

How long an affiliate's tracking cookie keeps counting after the click. A purchase inside the window is credited to that affiliate; after it expires, the sale is not.

Ad spend divided by the number of conversions. In affiliate marketing, CPA also names an offer that pays a fixed amount per action.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: CPA calculator

Ad spend divided by clicks. Compare it with your EPC: pay less per click than you earn per click and the traffic is profitable before other costs.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: EPC calculator

Cost per thousand ad impressions. It is how most social platforms price reach.

The drop in an ad's results after the same audience has seen it too often: click-through rate falls and cost per sale rises until the creative is refreshed.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: Refreshing video ads with AI editing

Customer relationship management: the system that holds every lead and customer with their orders, messages and history.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: CRM and automations

Clicks divided by impressions, for an ad, or clicks divided by visitors, for a button or link. 5 clicks from 100 impressions is a 5% CTR.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: CTR meaning in marketing

The share of customers you had at the start of a period who are still customers at the end of it: (customers at the end minus new customers won during the period) divided by customers at the start, times 100.

Splitting customers into groups that behave alike, such as one-time buyers, repeat buyers or big spenders, so each group gets its own offer, message or report.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: How to segment customers (tutorial)

How much of your email reaches the inbox, as opposed to the spam folder or a block at the receiving server. It depends on authentication, complaint rate, bounces and how engaged your list is.

The name that appears on the customer's card statement. A descriptor customers don't recognise causes chargebacks.

Marketing that asks for an action right away, such as a purchase, a sign-up or a call, and is judged by how many people take it. Most paid-traffic ads and sales pages are direct response.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: What a direct response copywriter does

An email authentication record that tells receiving servers what to do with mail that fails SPF or DKIM for your domain. Gmail and Yahoo require SPF, DKIM and DMARC from bulk senders.

A cheaper offer shown after a customer declines an upsell, such as a smaller pack or a payment plan.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: Upsells and downsells

The emails and retries that try to recover a failed subscription payment before the customer is cancelled.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: Subscriptions and rebills

Revenue or commissions divided by the clicks or visits that produced them. Net EPC uses net revenue instead of gross.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: EPC calculator

Data you collect yourself on your own pages and checkout, rather than data an ad platform or third party collects about your visitors.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: Funnel analytics

The sequence of pages a buyer goes through, from the ad click to the purchase and the offers after it: for example presell, sales page, checkout, upsells, thank-you page.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: What is a sales funnel?

A business in a category banks consider riskier, such as supplements, CBD or subscriptions, because of higher chargeback and refund rates. It pays higher fees and usually needs several MIDs.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: High-risk MIDs for CBD and nutra

A random share of an audience that is deliberately not sent a message, so you can compare what they do with what the people who got it did. The difference is the lift the message caused.

ClickBank's affiliate link. It carries the affiliate's nickname so the sale is credited to them.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: ClickBank for affiliates

One showing of an ad, a search result or another piece of content on a screen. CTR and CPM are both counted per impression.

Subscribers lost because a renewal payment failed (an expired card, insufficient funds, a bank decline), not because they chose to cancel. Dunning is the usual fix.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: Subscriptions and rebills

A message a payment platform such as ClickBank or PayPal sends to your server when an order, refund, rebill or chargeback happens.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: ClickBank vendor integration

The page a visitor lands on from an ad or link, built for one goal: a sale, a lead or a click to the next step.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: AI landing page builder

An attribution rule that gives all the credit for a sale to the last click, or the last affiliate cookie, before the purchase.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: Marketing attribution models, explained

A person who has shared contact details, such as an email or phone number, but has not bought yet.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: Leads in the CRM

The period after an ad set is created or significantly edited, while the ad platform explores who to show it to. Delivery and costs are less stable until it exits.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: Split testing without resetting ads

The total revenue a customer brings over their whole relationship with you, including upsells and rebills.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: Funnel analytics

An open standard that lets an AI app use outside tools. An MCP server is a small program that lists its tools; the app starts it and calls those tools when a task needs them.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: Add an MCP server to Claude Code

The smallest lift a test is designed to detect reliably. Halving it roughly quadruples the sample size.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: A/B test sample size calculator

A bank account that lets a business accept card payments. The bank that provides it (the acquirer) holds the funds before they reach you.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: What is a MID?

The ID of a merchant account. Many businesses hold several MIDs to spread volume, keep a backup and route payments.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: What is a MID?

Choosing which merchant account processes each payment, by rule (country, card type, amount, volume caps) or by rotation.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: MID routing

A card payment an agent keys in for the customer, for example on a phone order. It is card-not-present, without the customer entering the card themselves.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: Phone orders in the call center

A test that changes several elements at once and measures each combination. It needs far more traffic than an A/B test.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: Split testing

A paid ad made to match the look of the feed or page it appears in, such as a sponsored headline in a block of recommended articles. It still carries an ad label.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: What is a native ad?

The share of delivered emails that registered an open. Apple Mail Privacy Protection loads email content in the background, which records opens for many emails nobody read, so open rate is a weak signal on its own.

A page whose only goal is to collect an email or phone number, often in exchange for a free guide or discount. Also called a squeeze page.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: Page templates

A small extra offer with a checkbox on the checkout page, added to the order before payment.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: What is an order bump?

An offer shown once, usually right after the purchase. Often used for the first upsell.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: One-click upsells

How likely a difference at least this big would be if the variants really performed the same. Below the significance level (usually 0.05), the result is called significant.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: Reading a split test result

In ElasticFunnels, the graph behind a page that decides what happens on each visit: split tests, redirects, conditions, popups. Every visit starts at the Funnel Entry Point.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: Open a page's events

A Meta ad that runs from a creator's or partner's handle with their permission, shown with a Paid partnership label. Formerly called branded content ads.

How long a new customer takes to earn back what it cost to acquire them, counted in the margin they generate, not their revenue. A first order that covers its CPA has a payback period of zero days.

The software that sends card details from your checkout to the processor and returns the approval or decline, for example NMI.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: NMI integration

The company that moves the money for a card transaction between the card networks, the customer's bank and your merchant account.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: MIDs, processors and gateways

A snippet from an ad platform that runs in the visitor's browser and reports page views and conversions back to the platform.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: Meta Ads integration

A server-to-server call that reports a conversion to a tracker, network or ad platform, usually with the click ID, so the sale is credited without relying on the browser.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: Affiliate tracking and postbacks

An ad pricing model where the advertiser pays each time someone clicks the ad. Google Ads search campaigns are the best-known example; the price of one click is the CPC.

A page between the ad and the offer that warms the visitor up: a story, a quiz or an article. Also called a bridge page.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: Presell and advertorial builder

A diagnostic score Google Ads shows per keyword, built from expected CTR, ad relevance and landing page experience. Google says it is not an input in the ad auction; use it to find which of the three to fix.

A funnel that starts with a few questions and uses the answers to recommend an offer or segment the lead.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: Quiz funnel builder

A recurring charge on a subscription or continuity offer, taken on a schedule after the first order.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: Subscriptions and rebills

Refunded orders divided by all orders. Rising refunds eat into the revenue a test or campaign looked like it made.

The share of buyers from one period or cohort who place another order within a set window, for example 90 days. The retention measure that fits one-time products better than a subscription retention rate.

Revenue from an email divided by the number of people it was sent to. It counts both how many bought and how much they spent, so it compares sends of different sizes fairly.

Revenue divided by visitors. It combines conversion rate and order value, so it is a fairer test metric than either alone.

Revenue divided by ad spend. $5,000 from $2,000 of ads is a ROAS of 2.5.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: ROAS calculator

Tracking where conversions are reported from one server to another, with postbacks or APIs, instead of through browser pixels and cookies.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: Affiliate tracking

The number of visitors each variant needs before you judge a test. It depends on the conversion rate, the lift you want to detect, the significance level and the power, and is fixed before launch.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: A/B test sample size calculator

An offer shown when a subscriber tries to cancel, such as a discount, a pause or a cheaper plan, to keep them as a customer.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: Subscriptions and rebills

An email tool feature that picks when to send a campaign, for the whole list or per person, from past engagement data. Most tools need a minimum list size or sending history before it works.

One visit: the pages a visitor sees from arriving until they leave or go idle. Split test conversion rates are usually per session.

A temporary card decline, such as insufficient funds or a bank timeout, that may succeed on a retry or on another MID. A hard decline, such as a stolen card, will not.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: MID routing

Showing two or more versions of a page to comparable visitors at the same time and keeping the one that performs better on the goal you set.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: Split testing under one URL

The chance a test detects a real lift of the size you planned for. 80% is the usual target.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: A/B test sample size calculator

A result is statistically significant when the p-value is below the significance level you set, usually 0.05 (95% confidence). It says the difference is unlikely to be chance, not that it is large.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: Reading a split test result

Showing a returning visitor the same variant they saw first, so nobody flips between versions during a test.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: A/B test tutorial (FAQ: returning visitors)

A free-text tracking parameter on an affiliate link (sub1, sub2…) that affiliates fill with the campaign, ad or placement to see which one sold.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: Affiliate tracking

The share of buyers who accept an upsell or order bump: accepted offers divided by the buyers who saw them.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: Upsells

The US law behind the FCC's rules on marketing calls and texts: prior express written consent for automated marketing texts, calling hours of 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. in the recipient's time zone, and opt-outs honored within 10 business days.

The share of visitors each variant gets, such as 50/50 or 70/30. An uneven split is safer for the control but takes longer to reach the sample size.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: Setting the traffic split

A long-form sales page written as a letter to the reader: headline, story, proof, offer and close, with no video. The written counterpart of a VSL.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: What copywriters write for a funnel

Video or images made by customers or creators in a customer's style, such as a phone-shot review, often used as ad creative because it looks native to the feed.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: AI video editing tools for ads

An extra or upgraded offer shown after the customer has bought, often with one click and no need to re-enter the card.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: What is an upsell?

Tags added to a link (utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, utm_content, utm_term) that say where a visit came from.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: Revenue by UTM source

The Visa Acquirer Monitoring Program, which watches merchants' fraud and dispute ratios and fines or restricts those above the thresholds.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: Chargeback prevention

One of the versions in a split test. The control is the current version; the others are challengers.

The product owner who sells through an affiliate network and pays affiliates a commission on their sales.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: ElasticFunnels for vendors

A sales page built around a video that makes the pitch, usually with the order button shown after the offer is revealed.

How ElasticFunnels handles it: VSL funnel builder

Messages or offers sent to customers who have stopped buying, to bring them back for another order.