Marketing, SEO and AI Search Glossary: 80 Terms Explained in Plain English

Marketing is full of jargon, and agencies hide behind it. This glossary explains 80 terms Ghanaian business owners often hear, from Facebook ads and Google to AI search and MoMo payments, in one or two plain sentences each. Platform features change often, so the definitions below reflect how Meta, Google and OpenAI describe them as of October 2026.

Paid ads

Ads Manager

Ads Manager is Meta's tool for creating, running and measuring adverts on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp. It gives far more control than the Boost button on a post.

Campaign objective

A campaign objective is the result you tell an ad platform to get, such as Sales, Leads, Traffic or Awareness. The platform then shows your ads to the people most likely to take that action, so choosing the wrong objective wastes money.

Boosted post

A boosted post is an existing Facebook or Instagram post you pay to show to more people, with limited targeting and goal options. It is quick but usually weaker for sales than a campaign built in Ads Manager.

Advantage+

Advantage+ is Meta's name for its AI-driven automation in Ads Manager, covering audiences, placements, budgets and creative. A Sales, App or Leads campaign counts as an Advantage+ campaign when its audience, placements and budget settings are all left to Meta's automation. See Advantage+ campaigns explained.

Andromeda

Andromeda is the machine-learning system Meta uses to pick which ads are worth showing each person, out of tens of millions of candidates, before its ranking stage chooses the final ads. Because it reads your creative to decide who sees it, more genuinely different adverts give it more ways to find buyers.

Ad fatigue

Ad fatigue is when an advert's results fall because the same people have seen it too many times. The usual signs are rising frequency, falling click-through rate and a higher cost per result.

Frequency

Frequency is the average number of times each person has seen your advert over a period. It is your total impressions divided by the number of people reached.

CPM (cost per mille)

CPM is the cost of showing your advert 1,000 times. It tells you how expensive it is to reach your audience, not whether the advert is working.

CPC (cost per click)

CPC is the average amount you pay each time someone clicks your advert. A low CPC means little if those clicks never turn into sales.

CTR (click-through rate)

CTR is the percentage of people who saw your advert and clicked it. It is the quickest signal of whether your creative and message catch attention.

Click-to-WhatsApp ad

A click-to-WhatsApp ad is a Facebook or Instagram advert whose button opens a WhatsApp chat with your business instead of a website. It suits Ghanaian buyers who prefer to ask questions before paying. See click-to-WhatsApp ads.

Instant form

An instant form is a lead form that opens inside Facebook or Instagram, pre-filled with the person's details, so they can enquire without leaving the app. It produces cheap leads, which need qualifying questions to keep quality up.

Retargeting

Retargeting is showing adverts to people who have already interacted with your business, such as website visitors, video viewers or people who messaged you. These warm audiences tend to buy at a higher rate than strangers.

Lookalike audience

A lookalike audience is a group of new people an ad platform finds because they resemble an audience you supply, such as your past buyers. On Meta, lookalikes increasingly act as a suggestion that the system can go beyond.

Google Search ads

Google Search ads are text adverts that appear above and below Google's results when someone searches for words you bid on. They capture people who are already looking for what you sell.

Negative keyword

A negative keyword is a word or phrase you tell Google Ads not to show your adverts for, such as "free", "jobs" or "cheap". It stops you paying for searches that will never buy.

Performance Max

Performance Max is a Google Ads campaign type that uses automation to show your adverts across Search, YouTube, Display, Gmail, Maps and Discover from one campaign. It needs good conversion tracking and strong creative to work well.

Quality Score

Quality Score is Google Ads' 1 to 10 rating of how relevant your keyword, advert and landing page are to the search. It is a diagnostic: higher relevance usually means cheaper clicks and better positions.

Tracking and measurement

Meta Pixel

The Meta Pixel is a piece of code on your website that tells Meta what visitors do, such as viewing a product, adding to cart or buying. Meta uses that information to measure results and find more people likely to act.

Conversions API (CAPI)

The Conversions API, or CAPI, sends events such as purchases and leads to Meta directly from your server, website platform or CRM instead of only from the visitor's browser. It can recover events that browsers and ad blockers lose, and Meta treats them like Pixel events. See setting up the Meta Pixel and Conversions API.

Event

An event is a single action a person takes that you track, such as PageView, AddToCart, Lead or Purchase. Ad platforms optimise for the events you tell them matter.

Event Match Quality (EMQ)

Event Match Quality is a score out of 10 in Meta's Events Manager showing how well the customer details sent with your events can be matched to Meta accounts. Higher scores usually mean better optimisation and more accurate reporting.

Deduplication

Deduplication is how Meta avoids counting the same action twice when both the Pixel and the Conversions API report it. It works by sending a matching event ID from both sources.

Conversion

A conversion is any valuable action you want people to take, such as a purchase, a lead form, a WhatsApp chat or a booked call. What you count as a conversion decides what your adverts optimise for.

ROAS (return on ad spend)

ROAS is the revenue your adverts produce divided by what you spent on them. A ROAS of 4 means GH₵ 4 in sales for every GH₵ 1 of ad spend, before product costs, delivery and fees. See ROAS explained.

CPA (cost per acquisition)

CPA is the average ad cost of getting one customer or one result, such as a sale or a lead. Ads Manager often calls it "cost per result".

Attribution window

An attribution window is the period after someone clicks or views an advert during which a sale is credited to that advert, for example seven days after a click. Different windows give different numbers for the same campaign, so always compare like with like.

UTM parameters

UTM parameters are tags added to the end of a link, such as utm_source=facebook, that tell your analytics tool where a visitor came from. They let you see which adverts, posts and messages bring sales.

Google Analytics 4 (GA4)

Google Analytics 4 is Google's free tool for measuring what visitors do on your website and app, built around events rather than page views. It shows where visitors come from and which channels lead to sales.

Enhanced conversions

Enhanced conversions is a Google Ads feature that sends hashed first-party data, such as the email or phone number from a purchase or lead form, to improve conversion measurement. The version for leads lets you report which leads became sales from your CRM.

SEO

SEO (search engine optimisation)

SEO is the work of making your website appear higher in Google and Bing's free results for searches your buyers make. It covers technical health, relevant content and authority from other sites.

Indexing

Indexing is when a search engine stores a page so it can appear in results. A page that is not indexed cannot rank, however good it is.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is Google's free tool that shows which searches your site appears for, how many clicks it gets, and any indexing or technical problems. Every business website should have it set up.

Search intent

Search intent is what the person searching actually wants: to learn, to compare, to find a specific site or to buy. A page that matches the intent behind a search ranks and converts better.

Backlink

A backlink is a link from another website to yours. Links from relevant, trusted sites are one of the strongest signals that your site deserves to rank.

Google Business Profile

Google Business Profile is your free business listing on Google Search and Maps, showing your address, hours, phone number, photos and reviews. For local businesses, it is often the most important page you own.

Local pack

The local pack is the box of businesses with a map that Google shows for local searches such as "pharmacy near me" or "mechanic in Takoradi". Your Google Business Profile, reviews and distance decide whether you appear.

Schema markup

Schema markup, also called structured data, is code that describes your page's content to search engines in a standard format, such as your business name, address, products, prices or FAQs. It helps search engines understand your page and can make it eligible for richer results.

Featured snippet

A featured snippet is a short answer Google pulls from a web page and shows at the top of the results. Pages that answer a question clearly in the first sentence or two are more likely to be chosen.

robots.txt

A robots.txt file sits at the root of your website and tells crawlers which pages they may or may not visit. A mistake here can hide your whole site from Google or from AI assistants.

Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals are Google's three measures of page experience: how fast the main content loads (LCP), how quickly the page responds to taps (INP) and how much the layout jumps around (CLS). They matter even more in Ghana, where many visitors browse on mobile data.

E-E-A-T

E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, the qualities Google's search quality rater guidelines ask reviewers to look for in content. It is a framework for judging quality, not a single ranking score.

AI search (GEO and AEO)

AI search

AI search is when people get a written answer from an AI system, such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot or Google's AI features, instead of only a list of links. The AI reads sources, summarises them and often names a few businesses.

GEO (generative engine optimisation)

GEO is the work of getting your business mentioned, recommended and cited accurately in answers written by AI assistants. It includes your website, your facts across the web and what independent sources say about you. See SEO vs GEO vs AEO.

AEO (answer engine optimisation)

AEO is the work of making your content the direct answer a search engine or assistant gives, such as a featured snippet, a voice reply or a quoted passage in an AI answer. It is mostly about writing: question headings, answer-first sentences, lists and tables.

AI Overviews

AI Overviews are AI-written summaries that Google shows at the top of some search results, with links to the sources used. Google describes them as a way to get the gist of a complicated question quickly.

AI Mode

AI Mode is a tab in Google Search where you can ask complex questions and follow-ups in a conversation and get an AI-written answer with links. Google says it is most helpful for questions that need exploration, reasoning or comparisons. It expanded to more than 180 countries and territories in English in August 2025.

Query fan-out

Query fan-out is the technique Google says AI Mode and AI Overviews may use: the system breaks your question into many related searches across subtopics, runs them at once and combines the results into one answer. It means a page can be cited for a sub-question it answers well, even if it doesn't rank for the original search.

Large language model (LLM)

A large language model is the type of AI behind ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude, trained on huge amounts of text to understand and write language. When connected to search, it can read current web pages before answering.

AI citation

An AI citation is a link or named source that an AI assistant shows alongside its answer. Being cited sends some visitors and, more importantly, shapes how the AI describes your business.

Zero-click search

A zero-click search is one where the searcher gets what they need on the results page, from a snippet, map or AI answer, and never clicks through to a website. It is why being named in the answer now matters as much as ranking.

llms.txt

llms.txt is a proposed Markdown file at the root of a website that gives AI systems a short summary of the site and links to its most important pages. It was proposed by Jeremy Howard of Answer.AI in September 2024; Google says you don't need it to appear in its AI features. See what is llms.txt?

GPTBot

GPTBot is OpenAI's web crawler for collecting content that may be used to train its AI models. Blocking it in robots.txt is separate from blocking ChatGPT's search crawler.

OAI-SearchBot

OAI-SearchBot is OpenAI's crawler for ChatGPT's search features. If your robots.txt blocks it, OpenAI says your site won't appear in ChatGPT search answers, though it may still appear as a navigational link.

Google-Extended

Google-Extended is a robots.txt token that lets publishers control whether Google may use their content to train Gemini models and to ground Gemini answers with fresh information. Google says it does not affect a site's inclusion or ranking in Google Search.

Entity

An entity is a distinct, identifiable thing, such as a business, person, place or product, that search engines and AI systems recognise and connect facts to. Consistent facts about your business across the web make your entity clearer and easier for AI to describe correctly.

Websites and conversion

Landing page

A landing page is a web page built for one purpose, usually to turn visitors from an advert into buyers or leads. It shows one offer and one clear next step, without the distractions of a full website.

Conversion rate

Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who take the action you want, such as buying or enquiring. Doubling it halves your cost per sale without spending more on ads.

Call to action (CTA)

A call to action is the instruction that tells people what to do next, such as "Order on WhatsApp" or "Book a free call". Every page and advert needs one clear CTA.

Sales funnel

A sales funnel is the series of steps that takes a stranger from first seeing you to buying, such as advert, landing page, WhatsApp chat, checkout and follow-up. Fixing the weakest step is often the quickest way to lift sales.

Lead magnet

A lead magnet is something useful you give away free, such as a guide, checklist, webinar or free lesson, in exchange for a phone number or email. It turns cold traffic into contacts you can follow up.

A/B test

An A/B test compares two versions of an advert, headline or page, shown to similar people at the same time, to see which performs better. Change one thing at a time so you know what made the difference.

Sales and CRM

Lead

A lead is a person or business that has shown interest and given you a way to contact them, such as a form, call or WhatsApp message. A lead is not a sale until someone follows it up.

Qualified lead

A qualified lead is one who fits your offer and is likely to buy, based on budget, need, timing and authority to decide. Qualifying early stops your team wasting time on people who will never buy.

Speed to lead

Speed to lead is how quickly you respond to a new enquiry. The faster the reply, the better your chance of the sale, especially when the buyer messaged three competitors at once.

CRM (customer relationship management)

A CRM is a system that records every lead and customer, their conversations, their stage in the sale and the next follow-up. It replaces notebooks and scattered WhatsApp chats so no enquiry is forgotten.

Pipeline

A pipeline is the set of open deals in your CRM, organised by stage, such as new enquiry, quote sent, negotiation and won. It shows how much business is coming and where deals get stuck.

WhatsApp Business Platform

The WhatsApp Business Platform, often called the WhatsApp API, is Meta's version of WhatsApp for medium and large businesses, connected to software rather than a single phone. It allows several staff, automation, chatbots and approved template messages at scale.

Customer lifetime value (CLV)

Customer lifetime value is the total profit you expect from one customer over the whole relationship. Knowing it tells you how much you can afford to spend to win a customer.

Abandoned cart recovery

Abandoned cart recovery is following up shoppers who started checkout but didn't pay, usually by WhatsApp, SMS or email. A friendly reminder often recovers sales that were lost to a distraction or a failed payment.

Content and creative

Hook

A hook is the first one to three seconds of a video, or the first line of an advert, designed to stop people scrolling. If the hook fails, most people never see what comes after it.

User-generated content (UGC)

User-generated content is photos, videos and reviews made by real customers rather than the brand. In advertising, UGC-style videos look like a customer talking to camera, which often feels more trustworthy than a polished commercial.

AI video ad

An AI video ad is an advert made partly or wholly with AI tools, for scripts, voiceovers, presenters, scenes or editing. It can let businesses produce and test many more ad concepts for what one traditional shoot might cost.

Copywriting

Copywriting is writing words that persuade people to act, in adverts, websites, sales pages, emails and WhatsApp messages. Good copy speaks to the buyer's problem in their own language.

Social proof

Social proof is evidence that other people already buy from and trust you, such as reviews, testimonials, customer photos and client logos. It is one of the strongest answers to "can I trust this seller?"

Payments in Ghana

Mobile money (MoMo)

Mobile money, or MoMo, is a wallet on your mobile number that lets you send, receive and pay money from your phone. In Ghana the main services are MTN MoMo, Telecel Cash and AT Money (formerly AirtelTigo Money).

MoMo checkout

MoMo checkout is a payment step on a website or sales page where the buyer enters their mobile money number and approves the payment on their phone. The seller gets a confirmed payment automatically, instead of checking screenshots.

Pay on delivery

Pay on delivery, also called cash on delivery, means the buyer pays in cash or MoMo when the order arrives. It removes the buyer's fear of paying and receiving nothing, but increases the risk of failed deliveries.

Payment gateway

A payment gateway is the service that connects your website or app to MoMo wallets and bank cards and moves the money to your account. It handles the payment securely so you don't have to.

Fake MoMo screenshot

A fake MoMo screenshot is an edited image of a payment confirmation that a scammer sends instead of paying. Always confirm the money has arrived in your own wallet or merchant account before releasing goods.

Where to go next

Knowing the words is the first step. Knowing which of these things is costing you sales is the next. If you'd like a straight answer on what's working and what isn't in your ads, website and follow-up, book a free strategy call and we'll walk through it with you in plain English.