RESOURCES / GLOSSARY
The first-party data glossary.
Plain-language definitions of the terms that decide whether your paid media is measurable. Written by the team that implements them.
Every term, defined in one breath.
Ad blockers
Ad blockers are browser extensions or network tools that strip ads and, as a side effect, block marketing pixels and analytics scripts.
Learn moreAd retargeting
Ad retargeting shows ads to people who previously interacted with a business: site visitors, cart abandoners, past customers.
Learn moreCCPA and CPRA
The California Consumer Privacy Act, amended by the California Privacy Rights Act, gives California residents rights over their personal information, including opt-out of sale and sharing.
Learn moreClick-through attribution
Click-through attribution credits conversions to ads that were clicked, within a defined window (for example 7-day click).
Learn moreConsent Mode v2
Consent Mode v2 is Google's framework for passing user consent state (ad_storage, ad_user_data, ad_personalization, analytics_storage) with every Google tag and API call.
Learn moreConversion rate optimization (CRO)
Conversion rate optimization is the practice of increasing the share of visitors who take a desired action, through testing changes to pages, flows, and offers.
Learn moreConversion tracking
Conversion tracking is the recording of valuable actions (purchases, leads, signups, calls) and their attribution to the marketing that drove them.
Learn moreConversions API (CAPI)
A Conversions API is a server-to-server interface for sending conversion events from your systems directly to an ad platform, instead of relying on a browser pixel.
Learn moreCost per click (CPC)
Cost per click is the price paid for each ad click.
Learn moreCustom audiences
A custom audience is an ad-platform audience built from a business's own data: hashed customer lists, site visitors, app users, or CRM segments.
Learn moreCustomer data platform (CDP)
A customer data platform collects, unifies, and stores customer data from many systems into persistent profiles other tools can use.
Learn moreCustomer lifetime value (CLV)
Customer lifetime value is the total profit a customer generates over their relationship with a business.
Learn moreCustomer Match
Customer Match is Google's first-party audience product.
Learn moreData consent
Data consent is the user's recorded permission for specific uses of their data.
Learn moreData governance
Data governance is the set of policies and controls that define who may access which data, for what purpose, with what quality standards.
Learn moreData localization
Data localization is a legal requirement that data about a country's residents be stored or processed within that country.
Learn moreData Manager API
The Data Manager API is Google's unified interface for bringing first-party conversions and audiences into Google Ads and related products, consolidating several older upload paths.
Learn moreData privacy
Data privacy is the discipline of collecting and using personal data in line with law and user expectation: lawful basis, minimization, transparency, and user rights.
Learn moreData Strength
Data Strength is Google's framework for how ready an advertiser's first-party data is to power AI-driven campaigns.
Learn moreDeduplication
Deduplication prevents the same conversion being counted twice when it arrives from two paths, typically browser pixel and server.
Learn moreEnhanced Conversions
Enhanced Conversions is Google's mechanism for improving conversion measurement by sending hashed first-party data (email, phone, address) alongside conversion events.
Learn moreEvent Match Quality (EMQ)
Event Match Quality is Meta's 1-to-10 score of how well the events you send can be matched to Meta accounts.
Learn moreFirst-party data
First-party data is information a business collects directly from its own customers and properties: website events, app activity, purchases, CRM records, loyalty data, and consented contact details.
Learn moreGDPR
The General Data Protection Regulation is the EU's data protection law.
Learn moreGoogle Tag Gateway
Google Tag Gateway (formerly First-Party Mode) serves the Google tag from your own domain through a CDN or Google Cloud, making measurement first-party by construction.
Learn moreHashing (SHA-256)
Hashing converts an identifier like an email address into a fixed-length string that cannot be reversed into the original.
Learn moreLast-click attribution
Last-click attribution gives all conversion credit to the final touchpoint before conversion.
Learn moreLead scoring
Lead scoring ranks leads by their likelihood to convert, using rules or models over profile and behavior data.
Learn moreMarketing attribution
Marketing attribution assigns credit for a conversion to the touchpoints that contributed to it.
Learn moreMarketing pixel
A marketing pixel is a snippet of code on a website or in an email that reports user actions to an ad or analytics platform.
Learn moreMatch rate
Match rate is the percentage of records you send to an ad platform that the platform successfully matches to a known user.
Learn moreOffline conversions
Offline conversions are outcomes that happen outside your website or app: in-store purchases, call-centre sales, dealership visits, policy issuance, loan disbursal.
Learn morePersonally identifiable information (PII)
PII is any data that identifies a person: email, phone, name, address, government IDs.
Learn moreQualified Future Conversions (QFC)
Qualified Future Conversions is Google's Gemini-powered metric, announced at Google Marketing Live 2026, that estimates the future value of today's ad interactions (repeat visits, brand searches, later purchases) so Smart Bidding can optimize toward long-term revenue rather than last-click outcomes.
Learn moreServer-side GTM (sGTM)
Server-side Google Tag Manager is Google's framework for running a tagging container on a server you control, usually on a first-party subdomain.
Learn moreServer-side tracking
Server-side tracking sends analytics and conversion events from a server you control rather than from the user's browser.
Learn moreThird-party cookies
Third-party cookies are identifiers set by a domain other than the site being visited, historically used to track users across the web for targeting and attribution.
Learn moreTop of the funnel (ToFu)
Top of the funnel is the awareness stage of the buyer journey: the audience that does not yet know the product.
Learn morePUT IT TO WORK