Mobile Growth Glossary

App discovery that occurs through editorial, category, chart, recommendation, event, collection, or other store surfaces without a direct keyword search.

Why it matters: It expands ASO beyond rankings and requires strong creative, product quality, relevance, and merchandising readiness.

The total cost required to acquire a new paying customer, using a clearly defined cost scope and customer qualification rule.

Why it matters: CAC should be compared with contribution-margin LTV and payback period, not revenue alone, before deciding whether growth is sustainable.

A standardized naming and hierarchy system for channels, markets, campaigns, ad groups, creatives, audiences, and objectives across advertising and analytics tools.

Why it matters: Consistent taxonomy prevents broken reporting joins and makes cross-platform performance, cost, creative, and cohort analysis reliable.

The percentage of customers, subscribers, or active users who stop using, cancel, or fail to renew during a specified period.

Why it matters: The denominator and churn event must be explicit because customer churn, revenue churn, subscription cancellation, and inactivity measure different problems.

Attribution awarded when a conversion occurs after an eligible ad click within the configured click window.

Why it matters: Clicks generally carry stronger intent than impressions, but credited conversions still require incrementality analysis before being treated as fully causal.

A low, medium, or high SKAdNetwork value used when privacy conditions do not permit a more granular fine conversion value.

Why it matters: A useful coarse mapping preserves broad business meaning under privacy thresholds instead of treating reduced granularity as missing data.

Analysis that follows users sharing a common start event or attribute, such as install week, acquisition source, country, or subscription start, across later periods.

Why it matters: Cohorts expose retention, revenue, and payback quality that aggregate calendar totals often hide.

A paid search campaign targeting competitor brands, products, or close alternatives to reach users actively comparing options.

Why it matters: These campaigns can unlock valuable intent but often carry higher cost and need careful relevance, legal review, custom messaging, and incrementality expectations.

Revenue remaining after subtracting variable costs directly associated with serving and monetizing customers, such as store fees, payment costs, fulfillment, or support load.

Why it matters: Using contribution margin rather than gross revenue produces more realistic LTV, CAC, and payback decisions.

The percentage of eligible users who complete a defined action, such as store visitors who install or trial users who subscribe.

Why it matters: Every CVR must name its numerator, denominator, surface, and time window to avoid comparing fundamentally different funnels.

A compact value used in Apple's privacy-preserving attribution to represent post-install behavior, revenue, or value tiers within the configured measurement window.

Why it matters: The mapping should prioritize events that occur early enough, have sufficient volume, and predict meaningful downstream business value.

Advertising cost divided by the number of defined acquisition outcomes, such as activated users, subscribers, purchasers, or another qualified event.

Why it matters: CPA is only meaningful when the conversion event, attribution source, window, and user-quality threshold are stated.

Advertising spend divided by attributed installs for the selected platform, campaign, period, and attribution methodology.

Why it matters: CPI measures acquisition efficiency at the install stage but says nothing about activation, retention, fraud, or revenue quality on its own.

The cost paid for one thousand ad impressions, calculated as spend divided by impressions and multiplied by one thousand.

Why it matters: CPM helps diagnose auction cost and audience competition, but creative response and downstream conversion determine whether those impressions are valuable.

An alternative App Store product page with its own screenshots, preview video, and promotional text for a specific audience, feature, campaign, or intent.

Why it matters: CPPs preserve message match between acquisition creative and the store destination, enabling more relevant conversion experiences than one generic page.

Spend divided by taps in Apple Ads, representing the average price paid for a user to open the advertised App Store destination.

Why it matters: A maximum sustainable CPT can be estimated from target CPA multiplied by tap-to-install conversion rate, then adjusted for downstream value.

A structured program that tests distinct hooks, value propositions, formats, proof mechanisms, audiences, or messages against predefined performance hypotheses.

Why it matters: Testing concepts before cosmetic variations produces more useful learning and should be judged on downstream quality rather than CTR alone.

A user segment created from first-party customer or product data for messaging, suppression, lookalike creation, re-engagement, or measurement.

Why it matters: Audience freshness, consent, identity resolution, exclusions, and lifecycle intent determine whether CRM activation helps users or creates noise.

The systematic improvement of a page, listing, paywall, or funnel to increase the proportion of qualified users completing a target action.

Why it matters: Strong CRO combines behavioral evidence, clear hypotheses, controlled testing, and guardrails for user quality instead of relying on isolated design preferences.

A Google Play listing variation tailored to a country, campaign, audience, keyword theme, or other supported targeting context.

Why it matters: CSLs let paid and organic traffic land on more relevant messaging while preserving separate performance analysis where measurement is configured.

A variance-reduction technique that uses predictive pre-experiment behavior to make treatment-effect estimates more precise without changing the underlying assignment.

Why it matters: It can shorten experiment time when pre-period behavior strongly predicts the outcome, but offers limited benefit for brand-new users without history.

The number of distinct users who meet the product's active-user definition during a single day.

Why it matters: The qualifying activity must represent meaningful use; counting any app open can inflate engagement and distort DAU-to-MAU comparisons.

A link that routes a user into a specific app screen or state when the app is installed, with a store or web fallback when it is not.

Why it matters: Deep-link quality affects campaign continuity, re-engagement, onboarding, and conversion, but it is not a workaround for ATT or attribution restrictions.

A link flow that preserves intended destination context through the app-store installation process and applies it when the app is first opened.

Why it matters: It reduces post-install friction, although privacy settings and platform limitations can restrict deterministic deferred routing for some users.