Glossary of Terms
Your comprehensive guide to the language of PPC performance, ad fraud protection, and ecommerce infrastructure.
Ad Fraud
The practice of fraudulently representing online advertisement impressions, clicks, conversion or data events in order to generate revenue for users or as a way to drain a competitor's ad budget.
Ad Spend
The total amount of money an advertiser spends on paid advertising campaigns across platforms such as Google Ads and Meta within a given period.
Attribution
The process of identifying which marketing channels, touchpoints, or campaigns contributed to a customer conversion or sale. Accurate attribution is essential for understanding what is actually driving revenue.
Attribution Model
A set of rules that determines how credit for sales and conversions is assigned to touchpoints in a customer's journey. Common models include last click, first click, and data-driven attribution.
Audience Network
Meta's extended advertising network that allows advertisers to show ads on third-party apps and websites beyond Facebook and Instagram, increasing reach but also exposure to invalid traffic.
Bot Traffic
Non-human traffic to a website, often generated by automated scripts or programs. While some bots are helpful (like search engine crawlers), malicious bots can perform click fraud or scrape content.
Budget Waste
The portion of an advertising budget consumed by invalid clicks, bot traffic, or non-converting sources that have no genuine buying intent. Reducing budget waste is a core goal of Cassian's ClickWall service.
Click Farm
A form of click fraud where a large group of low-paid workers are hired to click on paid advertising links for the purpose of draining a competitor's budget or increasing a publisher's revenue. Because these clicks are human, they are particularly difficult to detect with basic automated filters.
Click Fraud
A type of fraud that occurs in pay-per-click online advertising when a person, automated script, or computer program imitates a legitimate user of a web browser by clicking on an ad without having any genuine intention of purchasing.
ClickWall
Cassian's proprietary click fraud protection technology designed to identify suspicious traffic patterns and block invalid clicks in real-time, ensuring that advertising budgets are spent on genuine, high-intent visitors.
Competitor Sabotage
The deliberate act of a competitor repeatedly clicking on your paid ads to deplete your daily budget, drive up your cost-per-click, and push you out of the ad auction. Often difficult to detect without advanced behavioural analysis.
Conversion
A desired action taken by a visitor on your website, such as making a purchase, submitting a form, or signing up for a service. Conversions are the primary measure of advertising effectiveness.
Conversion Rate
The percentage of website visitors who complete a desired action. Calculated by dividing the number of conversions by total visitors. Invalid traffic artificially lowers conversion rates by inflating visitor counts without corresponding purchases.
CPA (Cost Per Acquisition)
The total cost an advertiser pays to acquire one converting customer. Also referred to as cost per acquisition. Inflated by invalid traffic that adds clicks without conversions.
CPC (Cost Per Click)
An online advertising pricing model where advertisers pay a fee each time someone clicks on their ad. Click fraud directly inflates CPC by generating non-genuine clicks in the ad auction.
CPM (Cost Per Mille)
An advertising pricing model where advertisers pay per 1,000 impressions. Common in Meta and Display campaigns, CPM campaigns can be impacted by bot farm impressions and invalid audience traffic.
Customer Journey
The complete sequence of interactions a customer has with a brand before making a purchase, spanning multiple channels and touchpoints such as social media, search, email, and direct visits.
Device Fingerprinting
A technique used to identify and track devices based on their unique hardware and software characteristics. Used by Cassian to detect repeat fraudulent activity even when IP addresses are rotated.
Display Campaigns
Advertising campaigns that show visual banner or image ads across the Google Display Network and other publisher websites. Susceptible to bot farm impressions and accidental clicks that waste budget.
FeedCore
Cassian's product feed management service that optimises product data across Google Shopping, Performance Max, Meta Catalogues, and marketplace platforms to improve ad performance and product visibility.
GCLID (Google Click ID)
A unique tracking parameter appended to URLs when someone clicks a Google Ad. Used to transfer click data between Google Ads and analytics tools. Cassian analyses GCLIDs as part of its real-time fraud detection process.
Google Merchant Centre
A platform that allows ecommerce businesses to upload and manage product data for use in Google Shopping and Performance Max campaigns. The quality of your product feed directly affects how your products perform in these channels.
Google Shopping
A Google advertising channel that displays product listings with images, prices, and store names in search results. Product feed quality is critical to Shopping campaign performance.
Growth Infrastructure
The combination of systems, tools, and strategies that underpin sustainable ecommerce growth. Cassian's suite of services — ClickWall, RivalView, TrueTag, and FeedCore — forms the growth infrastructure behind high-performing ecommerce brands.
Invalid Clicks
Clicks on ads that are determined to be illegitimate, whether from automated bots, accidental taps on mobile devices, or repeated clicks from the same source with no genuine buying intent.
Invalid Traffic
Any website traffic that does not represent genuine human interest. This includes bot traffic, click farms, automated scripts, and other non-human sources that consume ad budget without any potential for conversion.
IP Blocking
A security measure that prevents specific IP addresses from being able to click on ads or access a website. A core component of Cassian's ClickWall service for preventing repeat fraudulent activity.
Last Click Attribution
An attribution model that assigns 100% of the conversion credit to the final touchpoint before a purchase. Widely used but misleading, as it ignores all the channels that influenced the customer earlier in their journey.
Maropost Neto
An Australian ecommerce platform that Cassian integrates with natively, enabling seamless product feed management and advertising data synchronisation for Neto-powered stores.
Meta Ads
Paid advertising campaigns run across Meta's platforms, including Facebook and Instagram. Meta's broad audience network can attract sophisticated invalid traffic including bot accounts and behaviour-mimicking scripts.
Non-Converting Traffic
Website visitors who arrive via paid advertising but have no genuine intent to purchase. This includes accidental clicks, poor ad placements, and users who are entirely outside the target audience.
Parallel Tracking
A tracking method that sends customers directly from your ad to your final URL while measurement happens in the background, improving page load speed without compromising data collection.
Performance Max (PMAX)
A Google Ads campaign type that uses machine learning to serve ads across all Google channels from a single campaign. Product feed quality via Google Merchant Centre is central to PMAX performance.
PPC (Pay-Per-Click)
A model of internet marketing in which advertisers pay a fee each time one of their ads is clicked. The most common model for Google Ads and Meta Ads campaigns.
Pricing Intelligence
The practice of collecting and analysing competitor pricing data to make more informed and competitive pricing decisions. The foundation of Cassian's RivalView service.
Product Catalogue
A structured collection of product data including titles, descriptions, images, prices, and availability. Used to power advertising campaigns on Google, Meta, and marketplace platforms.
Product Feed
A structured data file that contains all the information about your products, submitted to advertising platforms and marketplaces to power Shopping ads, catalogue ads, and product listings.
RivalView
Cassian's competitor price monitoring service that tracks competitor pricing changes across product categories in real-time, enabling ecommerce brands to respond quickly and make smarter pricing decisions.
ROAS (Return on Ad Spend)
A marketing metric that measures the amount of revenue generated for every dollar spent on advertising. Invalid traffic reduces ROAS by consuming budget on clicks that never convert.
Search Arbitrage
The practice of buying traffic from one search engine and redirecting it to another platform's results to profit from the difference in CPC rates.
Search Campaigns
Google Ads campaigns that show text-based ads in search results when users search for specific keywords. High-intent by nature, but also a primary target for competitor sabotage and bot clicks.
Shopping Campaigns
Google Ads campaigns that display product listings in search results. Performance is directly tied to the quality of your product feed in Google Merchant Centre.
Traffic Quality
A measure of how likely website visitors are to take meaningful actions such as purchasing. High-quality traffic consists of genuine users with real buying intent. Cassian's ClickWall service is designed to improve traffic quality by filtering out invalid sources.
TrueTag
Cassian's conversion tracking and attribution service that gives ecommerce businesses clearer visibility into which marketing channels are genuinely driving revenue, beyond what platforms self-report.