Glossary

ACoS

Advertising Cost of Sales. Ad spend divided by ad-attributed sales. Amazon’s primary efficiency metric. ACoS of 25% means you spent $0.25 on ads for every $1 of attributed sales. Lower is better (inverse of ROAS).

Attribution

Assigning credit for a conversion (order) to a specific channel or campaign based on the customer’s journey. Different attribution models distribute the credit differently — see Attribution models explained.

AOV

Average Order Value. Total revenue divided by order count.

CAC

Customer Acquisition Cost. Ad spend divided by new customers acquired. Used in the Offer calculator to evaluate whether a discount is justified.

Channel

High-level bucket for where a session came from: Email, Paid Social, Organic Search, Direct, etc. Derived from UTM parameters via the channel taxonomy.

Client ID

An anonymous, stable identifier for a browser. Set by Ordinary’s first-party pixel. Used to stitch sessions together across pageviews.

Cohort

A group of customers who share a common start date (usually the month of first order). Cohort retention analysis tracks how each cohort’s retention curve evolves.

CTR

Click-Through Rate. Clicks divided by impressions. Delivery-level metric, same definition Meta / Google / Amazon use.

First-click attribution

An attribution model that gives 100% of the credit for an order to the very first session where the customer arrived. Good for measuring acquisition channels.

First-party pixel

A tracking script that runs on your own domain instead of a third-party ad platform’s. Survives ad blockers and iOS privacy rules better than traditional Facebook Pixel / Google Tag. See What is a first-party pixel?.

Funnel

The sessions → product views → add-to-cart → checkout → order progression. Shows drop-off rates at each step. See Funnel.

GMV

Gross Merchandise Value. Total Shopify sales in the last 12 months. Used to determine pricing tier. See Understanding your GMV tier.

Last-click attribution

An attribution model that gives 100% of the credit for an order to the final session before the customer converted. Default in Ordinary, Shopify, and Google Analytics 4. Good for measuring bottom-of-funnel performance.

Linear attribution

An attribution model that distributes credit equally across every session in the customer’s journey. Good middle ground when you don’t want to overweight either end. Available on Starter+.

Lookback window

How far back in time a report can pull data. Plan-dependent:

• Free: 30 days.
• Starter: 12 months.
• Advanced: 24 months.
• Enterprise: unlimited.

Merchant

A Shopify store using Ordinary. Synonym with “customer” when talking about Ordinary’s own business, but in the app UI we say “store” or “organization” to avoid confusion with a merchant’s end customers.

Organization

The Ordinary account that contains one Shopify store, its integrations, and its team members. Usually 1:1 with a merchant.

Over-tier

When your Shopify 12-month GMV exceeds the cap for your current plan tier. Triggers a warning banner at first; keeps escalating if GMV stays well past the cap. See Over-tier banner.

Pixel

Shorthand for Ordinary’s first-party tracking script installed via Shopify’s Customer Events extension. See Customer Events pixel extension.

ROAS

Return on Ad Spend. Attributed revenue divided by ad spend. Inverse of ACoS. ROAS of 4 means you got $4 in attributed revenue per $1 of ad spend.

Session

A period of continuous activity from a single browser on your storefront. Starts on first pageview, ends after 30 minutes of inactivity or at midnight UTC.

Subscription-aware attribution

Separating first-time orders from recurring subscription reorders in attribution calculations. Keeps retention billing out of your acquisition ROAS.

Time-decay attribution

An attribution model that weights recent sessions more heavily than earlier ones in the customer’s journey. Available on Starter+.

UTM parameters

Query string tags (utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, etc.) that travel with a link and tell analytics tools where the visitor came from. Ordinary uses UTMs to classify sessions into channels.

Webhook

A real-time HTTP POST from Shopify to Ordinary when something changes (order placed, customer created, etc.). Most Shopify data flows through webhooks rather than polling.