A media buyer messages the owner of an IELTS prep centre: "CPL 896 ₸". In the table attached to the message the leads come from the centre's own list, the spend from Ads Manager, and the last row holds the contribution per student, 16,000 ₸ a month. Further into the course you will meet D7 and SRNs, and the Russian versions of the same lessons call the media buyer «таргетолог». Each of these words has one meaning throughout the course, and this lesson writes it down.
Leads and lead events
A lead is a person who left contact details and is waiting for a reply: submitted the form on the site, filled in an instant form on Instagram or wrote on WhatsApp. Leads are counted from your own list or the CRM, where repeat submissions and colleagues' tests have already been removed.
Russian has two words here: «заявка» (literally, a request) and the loanword «лид». The Russian lessons use the first and keep the second only where an interface or a metric name uses it: the Leads objective in Ads Manager, CPL (cost per lead), and the Qualified lead and Converted lead goals in Google Ads.
A lead event is another thing. Lead in the Meta pixel and generate_lead in GA4 are tag firings, and there can be more of them than people: a form submitted twice gives two events. In one week the online analytics school saw 69 generate_lead events in GA4 against 65 leads in the CRM for the same week. Decisions in the course are made on CRM numbers, because only there does a lead have a payment status.
Conversion from what to what
The lessons always write a conversion rate with both steps: "click to lead 6.4%", "lead to trial lesson 27%". The same number of purchases gives very different percentages against different denominators, and without the steps you can't compare them.
Two conversion denominators
Illustrative: the same 20 purchases
From visitors to purchases
20 purchases / 1,000 visitors
Conversion: 2%
From leads to purchases
20 purchases / 100 leads
Conversion: 20%
If a client's report says conversion "grew from 2% to 20%", the first thing to ask is whether the denominator changed. In an ad account the word has a second meaning: the action the campaign counts as its result, such as a lead or a purchase.
Ad account, media buyer and manager
An ad account is the platform's advertising account: Ads Manager at Meta, Google Ads, TikTok Ads Manager. "According to the ad account" means the platform counted the number itself, by its own rules and its own attribution window. Every ad account credits a sale to its own ads, which is why ad account reports are never added up: one payment easily lands in two reports at once.
Ads in the ad accounts are launched and run by the media buyer, and in this course that means more than social media. When an air conditioner repair shop in Almaty splits its budget between Google search and Instagram, that is the media buyer's job too.
Leads are answered by the manager, who writes on WhatsApp, calls and books people onto the trial lesson. So everything that happens after the lead, who replied, came and paid, the lessons take from the manager's notes or the CRM.
Contribution
Contribution is what the business keeps from a sale after the variable costs of that sale, before advertising and fixed costs. The IELTS centre charges 45,000 ₸ a month and keeps 16,000 ₸ after paying the teacher and for materials. From a 25,000 ₸ course the online school keeps 15,000 ₸ after the payment provider's fee and the tutor's pay. Other sources call the same thing contribution margin.
Advertising is paid for out of contribution, so the course makes advertising decisions on contribution, not revenue. The centre's first-month ROAS of 4.6 looks good, but it is compared with the break-even point of 45,000 / 16,000 = 2.81, not with one. How many months a customer takes to repay the acquisition cost is what unit economics calculates.
"The numbers are illustrative" and the recurring businesses
If an example's numbers are invented, the lesson says so once. Where a lesson describes a platform setting, a link to the documentation sits next to it: interfaces change, so check against it.
Russian lessons name buttons as they appear in the Russian interface and give the English name in brackets at first mention, as with key event in GA4. English lessons use the English interface names directly.
So that every lesson doesn't start with a new example, several businesses run through many lessons. The businesses are made up, the numbers are illustrative, and both stay the same from lesson to lesson:
| Business | Where it appears | What we know about it |
|---|---|---|
| IELTS prep centre in Almaty | Meta test, metrics glossary, cohort analysis | Three-month course at 45,000 ₸ a month; Meta test: 9,860 ₸ and 11 leads |
| Online analytics school | UTM tags, GA4, end-to-end analytics | Course at 25,000 ₸; 120,000 ₸ a week on Instagram and 80,000 ₸ on Google search |
| Grocery delivery app in Almaty and Astana | MMP, in-app events | Average order 9,000 ₸; 10,000 installs from ads in September |
| Online appliance store in Almaty | The store's ecosystem, S2S | Order T-310 for a vacuum cleaner at 48,000 ₸ |
| Online coffee store in Almaty | Conversions API, RFM analysis | Average order 15,000 ₸; 2,400 customers in a year |
| Online booking service for beauty salons | Product-led growth, Amplitude and Mixpanel | 12,000 ₸ a month per salon after a two-week free trial |
D7, D30 and SRN
These words appear mostly in the mobile lessons, where the example is the grocery delivery app.
D0 is the install day, D7 the seventh day after it, D30 the thirtieth. AppsFlyer counts days by the calendar, not as 24-hour periods from the moment of install (cohort periods in AppsFlyer). "First orders, D7" in the lessons is a running total from D0 to D7: in AppsFlyer that is the Cumulative calculation, while On day would show only the orders placed on day seven.
Ask the same question next to retention: did the person come back exactly on day seven, or on day seven or later? In Amplitude those are two different settings, Return On and Return On or After (reading retention in Amplitude). Courses paid monthly are counted in months rather than days: the IELTS centre's cohorts run M0, M1 and M2.
An MMP (mobile measurement partner) is a service such as AppsFlyer or Adjust that decides which ad gets credit for an install and for everything the person did after it (choosing an MMP). SRNs are self-reporting networks: Meta, Google Ads, TikTok, Apple Ads. They don't use an MMP tracking link. The MMP tells such a network about a new install, and the network claims it if the person saw or tapped its ad (SRNs in AppsFlyer).
The English names for these terms
Every lesson has an English version, and the English versions use one fixed wording for each term, with a few accepted variants for the example label:
| English lessons say | Meaning in the course |
|---|---|
| lead | A person who left contact details and is waiting for a reply |
| submit the form | Leave contact details through a form or a message |
| ad account | The platform's advertising account and its own numbers |
| media buyer | Whoever launches and runs the ads in the ad accounts |
| manager | Whoever answers leads and sells |
| contribution | What is left of a sale after its variable costs |
| self-reporting networks (SRNs) | Ad networks that claim app installs themselves |
| the numbers (or figures) are made up or illustrative | The example's numbers are invented |
Numbers in the English lessons use a comma between thousands and a point for decimals: 45,000 ₸ and 2.81, where the Russian lessons write them with a space and a decimal comma.
Where to look up a word
- The Goodlabs glossary, under Resources in the site menu: short definitions with formulas and industry benchmarks for CAC, LTV, ROAS, attribution, GTM, GA4 and other terms, with search and sections.
- The metrics glossary: 12 metrics from CPM to churn, calculated on the IELTS centre's numbers. Look for CPL, CPC and the cost of a student there.
- The marketing glossary: the words of your first month on a project, from segment and offer to attribution and retargeting.
- The Find a lesson box in the Academy catalogue. It searches titles, tags, descriptions, opening lines and section headings, not the full text, so it will find a term from a heading but not a word that appears only in the middle of a lesson.
The glossary gives a short definition; a lesson gives a worked calculation and a link to the platform's documentation. Where the wording differs, go by the lesson.
Exercise: a test summary in the course's words
Take your week 2 test from the Start track, or any report you have already sent a client, and rewrite the summary for the owner in five or six sentences:
Numbers without a source stand out first. The owner will read "40 leads" as 40 people, while in the ad account or GA4 they may be events, and as the online school's week showed, there can be more events than CRM leads. "Conversion 20%" without its steps will turn, a week later, into a question about why it fell to 2%, when it didn't fall at all: the denominator changed.
ROAS without contribution settles nothing either. The centre with a ROAS of 4.6 is in profit because its break-even point is 2.81. A business that keeps a fifth of the price from each sale would lose money at the same ROAS of 4.6, since its break-even starts at 5. And if a number in your summary can't be traced to the ad account, the list or the CRM, find out where it came from before you send it.