Profit from Web Analytics: From User Behaviour To Sales

Marketing attribution is the assignment of credit for a sale or a sign-up to the advertisements, searches, emails and visits that preceded it, according to a rule called an attribution model, so that each channel's reported results reflect its share of the outcomes it helped cause.

Return on ad spend is the revenue a campaign produced divided by what it cost, expressed as a ratio or a percentage: five pounds of sales for every pound of advertising is a ROAS of 5, or 500 per cent, and the number only becomes a decision once it is compared with the margin on those sales.

Digital marketing is the trade name for every commercial activity that reaches a buyer through a screen, gathered under one heading because the work is bought, delivered and counted through the same few platforms rather than because the activities resemble one another.

Data engineering is the discipline of moving records from the systems that produce them into a store where they can be queried, and of keeping that supply correct while the sources underneath keep changing.

SQL is the declarative language for asking questions of relational databases: you state which rows and columns you want and how tables relate, and the database engine works out how to retrieve them.

ETL is the pattern for moving data from the systems that produce it into the one place it is analysed: extract the records from each source, transform them into a common, cleaned shape, and load them into a warehouse; ELT keeps the same three steps and runs the transformation inside the warehouse after loading.