DTC Analytics Glossary

ARPC is an acronym for your “average revenue per customer" that measures the average amount of revenue your store receives per customer in a given period of time.

An abandoned cart is an online shopping cart that shoppers add items to, then exit the process before completing the purchase.

Active subscribers are customers who have opted in to receive promotional offers and marketing materials from your company.

Ad clicks are the clicks you receive to your site, or landing pages, from advertisements or pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns.

Ad impressions tell you the amount of time that your ad shows up on a search engine result page (SERP) or other site.

Ad conversions are transactions or customers gained on your website via ads.

Attribution is a measurement technique that marketers use to collect data for trackable media and conversion events during a customer’s journey to purchase.

Attribution models serve as a set of rules that determine how your marketing touch points receive credit for their impact on a conversion.

Average cart value (ACV) tracks the average dollar amount spent on your website by any given customer.

Average lifetime revenue (ALR) is a metric that measures the amount of revenue you can expect from any single customer for as long as that person remains a client.

Average Order Value (AOV) is an ecommerce metric that tells you how much, on average, your customers are spending per order on your website.

Bounce rate measures the percentage of visitors to your site that leave without taking an action, such as filling out a form, making purchase, or clicking through to a new page.

A bundle is a combination of products that are usually offered at a discount when purchased together.

An ecommerce channel is any platform that you use to sell your products.

Churn is the rate at which existing customers have ended their relationship with your business.

Churned subscribers are customers that have ended their relationship with a subscription service.

A Cohort is a name for a group of people with a similar attribute or variable.

Cohort AOV per month metric looks at average order value (AOV) by the cohort view, so you can easily understand if your returning customers are increasing the AOV on their subsequent purchases.

Cohort Analysis is a visual chart for plotting and comparing the progression of specific metrics for each cohort over time.

Cohort LTV - Gross Margin Per Month is a key metric for your ecommerce store that tells you your amount of profit for a particular cohort (or group of customers with a particular likeness).

LTV Per Cohort is a metric that tells you the lifetime profit of your monthly cohorts for your ecommerce site.

Conversion rate for your ecommerce site is a metric that represents how many visitors make a purchase compared to the total number of visitors.

CPA is a marketing metric that measures the total cost to acquire a new customer via a marketing or channel campaign.

Cross-selling is a useful technique that encourages customers to purchase a product related to what they are already looking at on your site or already have in their cart.

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) represents the $ amount that it costs you, on average, to acquire a new customer.

Customer Journey is a term used to describe the stages of a customer’s experience with your online store, from becoming aware of your brand, to any touch points with your marketing content, to their purchase on your site.

Customer lifetime value is expected total income you can expect from an average customer over their future relationship with your business.

Customer tags are a way for you to categorize and organize your customers into useful segments based on their behavior, control their access or manage discounts.

Cohort Customers per Order Count tells you the number of customers by number of orders.

Your Customers Returning Rate by Cohort metric tells you the percent of each cohort that comes back every month.

Having customers sign up for promotional offers, newsletters, or other forms of engaging content is a great way to capture valuable customer contacts along with customer intent.

Customers per Number of Orders is a cohort metric that groups the amount of customers from your monthly cohorts into smaller groups based on the amount of purchases they make after their first purchase.

Your dashboard is where you arrange, visualize and review the segmented metrics you care most about.

Days Since First Order answers the question - how long did it take for a customer to place a 2nd, 3rd, etc. order (on average)?

Discounts codes are a method to incentive customers to make a purchase by reducing the cost of an item or entire order.

Discounts by cohort measure the number of customers that used a discount.

Dunning is a way for you to reach out to customers when their payment method fails and to help facilitate an alternative method of payment.

Email capture is a technique you can use to grow your subscriber lists by offering visitors to your store or associated websites some sort of value in exchange for their email address.

Engagement Rate explains how your ads’ expected engagement rate compares to ads competing for the same audience.

First party data is any information you collect directly from your customers.

Gross margin describes your business' top line earnings.

Gross margin rate is a type of profit margin that expresses gross margin as a percentage.

Gross profit margin refers to the money your store has earned after subtracting the costs associated with creating, acquiring and selling your products.

Your gross sales is the total unadjusted sales of your business within a set time period.

Your growth rate is the percentage increase of a metric over time.

Headless commerce is a decoupling of the interface your customers interact with and backend that contains all of the behind-the-scenes programs that enable sales to occur.

Your LTV:CAC or lifetime value to customer acquisition cost is a ratio that compares the value of a customer over the lifetime of their relationship with your business to the cost of acquiring them.

Your landing page is any web page that a consumer can land on used to facilitate conversions by informing the visitor exactly what the outcome of a click or sharing of information will be.

Lifetime revenue is an estimate of a customer's total revenues throughout their lifetime with your business.

Lifetime value is an essential metric that helps you to optimize your marketing budget and set goals regarding your customer acquisition costs.

Market basket analysis is a data gathering technique that focuses on understanding customer purchasing behavior along with relationships between items that are purchased together.

MoM retention is a measurement that shows you the percentage of customers that are retained from month to month.

Your monthly recurring revenue is the amount of predictable revenue you can expect to receive on a monthly basis.

Net sales is a metric that tells businesses what their total sales are minus returns, allowances, and discounts.

New orders is a metric that shows you how many first-time purchasers you have on your site each day.

Number of Orders per Month is a cohort retention metric that tells you how many of your customers, per monthly cohort, are making orders in the subsequent months beyond their first purchase.

Omnichannel marketing is a method of optimizing your customer experience with every channel you market on, providing a consistent, seamless shopping experience throughout.

An order occurs when a customer completes a purchase on your ecommerce site.

Order tags are customized, identifying labels that you can set up on your site to help categorize and organize order types that come into your site.

Pacing Sales looks at how your current month’s revenue is pacing compared to last month’s.

A payment gateway is the software that reads and processes a customer’s card payment in a retail setting.

A pixel is a snippet of code that allows you to track valuable information about your website users.

Point of Sale (POS) is the final point of a transaction between the buyer and seller where money is exchanged for goods or services.

Post purchase surveys are automated questionnaires that either pop up after your customer completes their transaction or is sent to the customer via email once they make a purchase.

Product Tags are descriptive names that you attach to your products to help organize your ecommerce site.

Profit is the amount of money your company gains when your earnings exceed your expenses, costs, and taxes.

Purchase frequency is the amount of purchases a customer makes from your ecommerce site within a given period of time.

Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) is a metric that shows you how much value your customers are bringing into your store compared to your marketing ad spend.

Return on Investment is the total profit you see come into your store compared to the investments you’ve made for growth.

A recurring payment is an agreement between you and your customer for your company to process multiple transactions.

A referrer URL for your ecommerce site is the address of the website that a visitor or customer was on preceding their visit to your site.

A refund is a money issued back to you customer when they either return a product or have an issue with a product.

Refunds by cohort is an ecommerce metric that informs you of how many refunds occur within a given group of customers during a given period of time.

Repeat Orders Rate is a metric that tells you the rate at which your customers are making repeat orders within their given monthly cohorts.

Customer Repurchase Rate answers the question: how many of your customers are making subsequent purchases 2, 3, 4, 5, 10 more times?

Retention refers to your company’s ability to retain customers who have made at least one purchase.

Customer Retention Rate answers the question: how many of your customers are you retaining over time?

Your ecommerce site’s return rate reflects the rate at which customers return their purchased items to your store.

A Return Visitor is a prospective customer who visits your site more than once.

Your Returning Orders metric tells you how many repeat orders you have come into your store on a daily basis.

Revenue is the amount of money a company generates from selling products or services within the scope of their primary business operations.

SKU represents an individual product listing on your online store.

SMS Marketing stands for “short message service” marketing where companies reach out to customers directly via text messages.

Segments in the scope of your business represent smaller, approachable groups of customers that you’ve grouped based on similar attributes.

Sell through rate represents how much of a product you sell compared to how much you purchased from your manufacturer or supplier.

Signal Loss is a term used in marketing to describe when you lose the ability to attribute where your customers are coming from.

Subscribe and Save is a subscription business model where your customer signs up for automatic, recurring purchases of the same products at a discounted price.

Time Between Purchases metric is the average number of days a customer takes between making two purchases, when looking at the past 365 days.

Total Sales is a metric that measures the entire amount of revenue generated by your company over a given period of time.

UTM campaign is a url tag that marketers use to track which of their campaigns lead to conversions.

UTM content is a url tag that you can use to track which specific link a customer clicked within a piece of content to land on your product page.

UTM source code is a type of url tag that marketers use to track what source, from their various channels, their customer came in from.

Upselling is an ecommerce technique of driving your customer to purchase more items beyond what they initially planned to purchase.

A vendor, for your ecommerce store, is the company that you deal with to source your products.