Web Analytics Blueprint

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 wrangling is the work of repairing and reshaping real records, and of deciding what their gaps and inconsistencies mean, until a table can be trusted with the question being asked of it.

Data visualisation is the practice of encoding numbers as position, length and colour so that a comparison a reader would otherwise have to calculate becomes something they can simply see.

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.