Experiment Nation's CRO Glossary

If you haven’t noticed, CRO is a jargon-heavy industry. Here are some terms to help you get your bearings in case you are new to CRO:

A/A Testing: An experimentation method that involves comparing two identical versions of a webpage or app to ensure the testing infrastructure is functioning properly.
A/B testing: A controlled experiment where two or more versions (A and B) of a webpage or app are compared to determine which performs better based on predefined metrics.
A/B/n testing: Similar to A/B testing, but with multiple variations (A, B, C, etc.) being tested simultaneously to compare their effectiveness.

Above the fold: The portion of a webpage or app visible without scrolling, typically considered prime real estate for capturing user attention.
Account-based marketing: A strategic approach where marketing efforts are tailored and focused on specific target accounts or companies.
Ad viewability: A measure of whether an advertisement was actually seen by the user, typically referring to the percentage of the ad that was in the user’s view.
Agile CMS: A content management system that supports the agile development methodology, allowing for flexibility, collaboration, and iterative improvements in content creation and delivery.
App personalization: The practice of tailoring the user experience within a mobile app based on individual user preferences, behavior, and demographics.
Average order value: The average monetary value of transactions or orders made by customers within a given period.
Behavioral science: The study of human behavior, often applied in experimentation to understand and predict user actions and decision-making processes.
Behavioral targeting: The practice of delivering personalized content or ads based on user behavior, interests, demographics, or past interactions to increase relevance and engagement.
Below the fold: The portion of a webpage that is not immediately visible and requires scrolling to view.
Bounce rate: The percentage of website or app visitors who leave without interacting further, often indicating a lack of engagement or dissatisfaction with the content or user experience.
Brand Engagement: The level of interaction, involvement, or emotional connection between a customer and a brand, often measured through metrics such as social media interactions and time spent on a website.
Bucket Testing: Another term for A/B testing, where users are randomly assigned to different buckets or groups to compare the performance of different variants.

Call to action (CTA): A clear and compelling prompt that encourages users to take a specific action, such as making a purchase, subscribing, or clicking a button.
Canary testing: A technique where a new feature or change is gradually rolled out to a small subset of users to validate its performance and gather feedback before a wider release.
Click-through rate (CTR): The percentage of users who click on a specific link, ad, or CTA out of the total number of impressions or views, measuring the effectiveness of the campaign or content.
Content calendar: A schedule or plan that outlines the creation, publication, and promotion of content over a specific period, helping maintain consistency and organization.
Content delivery: The process of distributing and serving digital content to users, often involving content delivery networks (CDNs) to optimize speed and reliability.
Content hub: A centralized platform or repository that hosts and organizes a brand’s content, allowing easy access and discovery by users.
Content lifecycle management: The process of managing content from creation to retirement, including planning, creation, publishing, archiving, and governance.
Content management infrastructure: The underlying technology and systems that support the creation, storage, organization, and delivery of digital content.
Content management system: Software or platforms that enable the creation, editing, organization, and publishing of digital content without requiring coding skills.
Content recommendation engine: A system that analyzes user behavior and preferences to suggest relevant content, increasing engagement and personalization.
Continuous Delivery: A software development practice where changes and updates are regularly and automatically deployed to production environments to ensure a continuous and streamlined release process.
Continuous integration: A software development practice where developers frequently integrate their code changes into a shared repository, enabling early detection of integration issues.
Conversion: The desired action or outcome that a business wants users to take, such as making a purchase, filling out a form, or subscribing to a newsletter.
Conversion rate: The percentage of users who complete a desired conversion action out of the total number of visitors, indicating the effectiveness of a campaign or user experience.
Conversion rate optimization: The process of improving a website or app to increase the percentage of users who convert, often through iterative testing and optimization techniques.
Customer data platform: A unified platform that collects, integrates, and manages customer data from various sources, enabling personalized marketing and customer insights.
Customer journey management: The strategic and holistic approach of understanding and optimizing the end-to-end experience and touchpoints that a customer goes through.
Customer journey mapping: The visual representation of a customer’s interactions, touchpoints, and emotions throughout their journey with a brand, helping identify pain points and opportunities for improvement.
Decision fatigue: The mental exhaustion and reduced ability to make decisions effectively that can occur when individuals are faced with too many choices or decisions.
Decoupled CMS: A content management system architecture where the back-end content management capabilities are separated from the front-end presentation layer, allowing flexibility and scalability.
Digital asset management: The organization, storage, and distribution of digital assets such as images, videos, and documents, enabling efficient content management and reuse.
Digital content: Content that is in digital format, such as text, images, videos, or audio, and is designed for consumption on digital platforms.
Digital content delivery platform: A platform or service that facilitates the secure and efficient distribution of digital content to end-users across various devices and channels.
Digital content management: The process of creating, organizing, and delivering digital content to the target audience, often involving content management systems and workflows.
Digital web strategy: The comprehensive plan and approach that outlines how an organization leverages digital channels, technologies, and content to achieve its business goals.
Ecommerce platform: A software or online platform that enables businesses to sell products or services online, managing inventory, payments, and customer interactions.
Enterprise commerce: The practice of conducting online commerce operations at an enterprise level, typically involving large-scale operations and complex integrations.
Eye-tracking: The process of measuring and analyzing the movement and focus of a person’s eyes on a webpage or visual stimulus to understand attention patterns and user behavior.
Experience analytics: The collection and analysis of data related to user interactions and behaviors, aiming to gain insights and optimize the overall user experience.
Experience optimization: The ongoing process of improving and refining the user experience through data-driven insights, testing, and iterative changes to enhance engagement and conversion rates.
Experiential marketing: A marketing strategy that focuses on creating memorable and immersive brand experiences to engage and connect with consumers on a deeper level.
Feature branch: A separate branch in a version control system that allows developers to work on a specific feature or functionality without affecting the main codebase until the feature is ready for integration.
Feature flags: Conditional statements or configurations that enable or disable specific features or functionality within an application, allowing for controlled and gradual feature rollouts.
Feature rollout: The process of introducing a new feature or functionality to users in a controlled and phased manner, typically starting with a subset of users before expanding to a larger audience.
Feature test: An experiment or evaluation conducted to assess the performance, usability, or impact of a specific feature or functionality within a product or service.
Feature toggle: A mechanism that allows developers to turn on or off specific features or functionality within an application in real-time, providing flexibility and control during development and deployment.
Form conversion: The successful completion of a form or data submission by a user, often indicating a specific conversion goal, such as lead generation or newsletter sign-up.
Growth hacking: A data-driven and agile approach to marketing that focuses on rapid experimentation and innovative techniques to drive rapid and scalable business growth.
Headless CMS: A content management system architecture where the back-end content management capabilities are decoupled from the front-end presentation layer, enabling flexibility and multi-channel content delivery.
Headline testing: The process of experimenting with different headlines or titles for a webpage, email, or advertisement to determine which generates the highest engagement or click-through rates.
Heatmap: A visual representation of user interactions on a webpage, displaying areas of high and low activity to identify patterns, user behavior, and areas of interest or concern.
Hero image: A prominent and visually appealing image or banner placed at the top of a webpage or landing page to capture attention and create a compelling first impression.
Hyper-personalization: The practice of delivering highly tailored and individualized experiences to users based on their preferences, behaviors, demographics, and other relevant data points.
Inbound marketing: A marketing methodology that focuses on attracting and engaging customers through relevant and valuable content, aiming to build trust, establish authority, and generate leads.
Information scent: The visual and textual cues on a webpage or app that help users understand the relevance and nature of the content, guiding them to find what they are looking for.
Landing page optimization: The practice of improving and refining landing pages to maximize conversions by optimizing elements such as design, messaging, call-to-action, and overall user experience.
Lead generation: The process of identifying and capturing potential customers or leads for a business, typically through various marketing techniques and strategies.
Lean hypothesis testing: An approach to experimentation based on the lean startup methodology, where hypotheses are formulated, tested, and validated through rapid experimentation and data analysis.
Lifetime value: The total value or revenue generated by a customer throughout their entire relationship with a business, often used to assess customer profitability and inform marketing strategies.
Marketing automation: The use of software tools and platforms to automate repetitive marketing tasks and workflows, such as email campaigns, social media posting, lead nurturing, and customer segmentation.
Marketing strategy: A comprehensive plan that outlines the marketing objectives, target audience, messaging, tactics, and channels to achieve business goals and drive growth.
Marketing technology stack: The collection of software tools and technologies used by a marketing team to plan, execute, analyze, and optimize marketing activities and campaigns.
Micro-conversion: A smaller and intermediate step or action that leads to a larger conversion or goal, such as adding a product to the cart or subscribing to a trial.
Mobile app A/B testing: The process of conducting controlled experiments on mobile applications to compare different variations and measure their impact on user behavior and key metrics.
Multi-armed bandit: An adaptive algorithm used in experimentation to dynamically allocate traffic or resources to different variations based on their performance and potential rewards.
Multivariate testing: An experimentation technique where multiple variables or elements are simultaneously tested in various combinations to determine their impact on user behavior and outcomes.
Omnichannel marketing: A marketing approach that focuses on delivering a consistent and seamless customer experience across multiple channels and touchpoints, both online and offline.
Online marketing: Marketing activities and tactics conducted on digital platforms and channels, such as websites, search engines, social media, email, and display advertising.
Personalization: The process of tailoring and customizing content, recommendations, or experiences based on user preferences, behaviors, demographics, and other relevant data.
Remote config: A feature or functionality that allows developers to remotely change or update application configurations without requiring a new release or update.
Revenue per visitor: The average amount of revenue generated per visitor to a website or app, often used as a key metric to assess monetization and marketing performance.
Sales funnel: The step-by-step process that potential customers go through, from initial awareness to final conversion, typically represented as a funnel-shaped model.
Search engine marketing: The practice of promoting websites or apps through paid advertising on search engine result pages to increase visibility, traffic, and conversions.
Search engine optimization: The process of optimizing websites or apps to improve their visibility, rankings, and organic traffic on search engine result pages.
Server-side testing: An experimentation approach where the variations or treatments are implemented and controlled on the server-side infrastructure rather than in the client’s browser or app.
Shopping cart abandonment: The situation where a user adds products to their online shopping cart but leaves the website or app without completing the purchase.
Social proof: The influence and validation that users perceive when they see social signals, such as reviews, testimonials, ratings, or social media engagement, indicating the popularity or credibility of a product or service.
Split testing: Another term for A/B testing, where users are randomly assigned to different groups or variations to compare the performance of different elements or features.
Squeeze page: A landing page designed with a single focused objective, often capturing visitor information, such as email addresses, through a lead capture form or call-to-action.
Statistical significance: A measure that determines if the results of an experiment are unlikely to have occurred by chance, indicating a meaningful relationship between variables.
Strategic data management: The systematic and strategic approach to collecting, organizing, analyzing, and leveraging data to support business goals, decision-making, and optimization.
Testing in production: The practice of conducting experiments, tests, or validations directly in a live production environment, often with controlled exposure and monitoring to minimize risks.
Trunk-based development: A software development approach where all developers work on a single codebase (trunk) and frequently integrate their changes, promoting collaboration and reducing code divergence.
Type 1 error: In statistics, a type 1 error refers to rejecting a true null hypothesis, mistakenly concluding that there is a significant difference or effect when it doesn’t exist.
Type 2 error: In statistics, a type 2 error refers to failing to reject a false null hypothesis, mistakenly concluding that there is no significant difference or effect when it actually exists.
Unique selling proposition (USP): The distinctive and compelling feature or benefit that sets a product, service, or brand apart from competitors and appeals to target customers.
Usability testing: The process of evaluating a website, app, or product’s ease of use and effectiveness by observing users’ interactions and collecting feedback to identify usability issues and opportunities for improvement.
User flow: The sequence of steps, actions, or interactions that a user takes while navigating through a website, app, or product to achieve a specific goal or task.
User journey map: A visual representation that illustrates the entire end-to-end experience of a user with a product, service, or brand, identifying touchpoints, emotions, and opportunities for enhancement.
Website readability: The ease with which website content can be read and understood by users, often influenced by factors such as font type, size, spacing, and overall design.