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GLOSSARY

Meta ads, in plain English

If a report needs a human to explain it, the report failed.

Complexity is the incumbent business model: the harder the platform sounds, the more indispensable the person interpreting it becomes. So here is the whole vocabulary, one sentence each, in the order you'll actually meet it.

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What are Meta ads?

Meta ads are paid placements bought through one system that serves Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Audience Network. You choose an objective and a budget, supply creative, and Meta's models decide which people see which ad.

That last part is the whole modern story. You no longer buy audiences; you supply creative and rules, and the platform does the matching.

Objective — what you tell Meta to optimise for, e.g. purchases or leads. Choose the outcome you actually want, not clicks.
Campaign / ad set / ad — the three levels: budget and objective, targeting and delivery, then the creative itself.
Advantage+ — Meta's automated campaign type: fewer settings, broader delivery, the model doing the work you used to.
Andromeda — the retrieval system that decides which ads are eligible for a given person out of the millions available.
GEM — the ranking model that sequences eligible ads and predicts which will earn the impression.
Learning phase — the period after a change where delivery is unstable because the model lacks data. Editing during it restarts it.
Broad targeting — giving the model almost no audience constraints, which now usually outperforms hand-built audiences.
CPM — cost per thousand impressions: what the auction charges you for attention.
CPC / CTR — cost per click and click-through rate: diagnostic numbers, not business ones.
CPA / cost per purchase — what one outcome costs. This is the number to manage.
ROAS — revenue divided by ad spend, inside the platform's own reporting and its attribution assumptions.
MER — total revenue divided by total ad spend across everything. Closer to the truth than in-platform ROAS.
Attribution window — how long after seeing or clicking an ad a sale still counts. Change it and your ROAS changes with no change to reality.
Pixel — the browser tag that reports website events back to Meta.
CAPI — the Conversions API: the same events sent server-side, which survives browser tracking loss.
Event match quality — how confidently Meta can match your reported events to real people. Low scores quietly degrade delivery.
Creative fatigue — the point where an ad's audience has seen it enough that costs climb. The fix is new creative, not new targeting.
Frequency — average times a person saw your ad in a window. Useful for diagnosing fatigue.
Retargeting — advertising to people who already interacted with you. Smaller, cheaper, and often over-credited by attribution.
Incrementality — whether an ad caused a sale that wouldn't have happened anyway. The only question that really matters, and the hardest to answer.
Business Manager — the container that owns your ad account, pages and pixels. It should be yours, always.

Three terms that mislead more than they inform.

ROAS. It's a platform-reported ratio built on the platform's own attribution. Useful as a trend, dangerous as a target, and never a business metric on its own.

Impressions. Big numbers that feel like progress. They measure how much attention you rented, not what it earned.

Audience quality. Where hand-built targeting is still being sold as craft. In 2026 the model decides the audience; your leverage is creative volume and decision velocity.

Questions people actually ask.

What are Meta ads, in one sentence?

Paid placements bought through a single system that serves Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Audience Network, where you supply the creative and the objective and Meta's models decide who sees what.

What's the difference between ROAS and MER?

ROAS is revenue attributed by the platform divided by that platform's spend. MER is your total revenue divided by your total ad spend, across everything — harder to game and closer to the P&L.

What is Advantage+?

Meta's automated campaign type: fewer manual settings, broader delivery, and the model handling targeting and placement decisions that used to be done by hand.

Why does my ROAS change when I change the attribution window?

Because the window decides how long after an ad a sale still counts. Nothing about the business changed — only the accounting.

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Keep reading
The Meta Ad LibraryHow to read a competitor's live ads. What Facebook ads cost in AustraliaMedia, fees and the real numbers. GST on Facebook advertisingThe short Australian answer. The growth thesisDecision velocity and creative volume.
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