Growth: 33 findings, with sources

The decay in an ad's performance as its audience sees it too many times: frequency climbs, CTR and hook rate slide, CPMs and CAC creep up. The platform is telling you the audience is done with this creative - the cure is new work, not more budget.

The systematic practice of raising the share of visitors who act - through testing changes to pages, flows, copy and offers. Compounds quietly: a relative 10% lift in conversion is worth the same as 10% more traffic, at none of the media cost.

The plan for how a product reaches its buyers and earns adoption: the audience, positioning, pricing, channels, sales motion and launch sequencing, as one coherent argument. What separates a launch from a press release.

Keeping the customers you have - measured as the share still active or still paying after a period. The mirror of churn and the quiet engine of compounding: small retention gains outperform equivalent acquisition gains because they repeat every period.

Paying partners a commission for the customers they send - publishers, creators and comparison sites carry the offer and earn on results. Attractive because the cost is contractually tied to outcomes; the catch is that affiliates gravitate to harvesting demand that already existed, so incrementality checks matter more here than anywhere.

Ranking leads by how much their profile and behaviour resemble buyers - title, company fit, pages visited, emails opened - so sales works the likeliest first. A prioritisation tool, not an oracle: scores encode yesterday's assumptions, so the model needs revisiting against what actually closed.

HubSpot's replacement for the funnel: instead of ending at purchase, happy customers feed growth through referrals, reviews and expansion, so the model is a wheel that spins faster as friction is removed. A useful corrective to funnel thinking wherever word of mouth and retention drive the economics.

The model of the path from stranger to customer - awareness, consideration, preference, purchase, and in modern versions retention and advocacy. A simplification everyone argues with and everyone still uses, because it gives teams a shared map of where buyers drop and which activity works on which stage.

The wider discipline of creating want for the category and brand before anyone fills a form - content, brand media, community, education - of which lead capture is only the harvesting end. B2B's rediscovery of future demand: most of the market is not buying this quarter.

The share of customers rating 9-10 on 'how likely are you to recommend us' minus the share rating 0-6, on a -100 to +100 scale. Beloved by boards for its one-number simplicity; treat it as a rough loyalty thermometer, not the growth predictor its marketing claims.

The handful of metrics chosen to represent whether the work is working - chosen being the operative word. A good KPI is causally close to the outcome, hard to game, and few in number; a dashboard of forty KPIs is a list of numbers, not a definition of success.

A page built for one campaign and one action, stripped of the site's usual navigation and choices. The principle is message match: the page continues the ad's promise, and every element either moves the visitor toward the single conversion or is removed.

Staying usefully present with leads who are not ready yet - sequenced emails, content, retargeting - until buying intent forms. The B2B application of future demand: most captured leads are early, and the vendor remembered at decision time is usually the one who kept teaching, not the one who kept chasing.

A goal-setting format pairing one qualitative objective with a few measurable key results that would prove it happened. Built at Intel, popularised at Google; the discipline is in the key results - if they can be achieved without the objective actually happening, they are the wrong key results.

Comparing two or more variants against live traffic split at random, so the difference in results can be attributed to the change rather than to circumstance. The honest core of performance culture - and honest only with enough volume, a single variable, and the discipline not to peek early.

Activity that captures identifiable prospective customers - names, emails, companies - for sales or nurture to work on. The B2B counterpart of e-commerce conversion; its classic failure mode is grading volume of leads instead of revenue they become.

The sequence of contacts a person has with a brand from first exposure to purchase and beyond, mapped across channels and moments. Useful as a map of experience and drop-off; misleading when drawn as a tidy line, because real buyers wander, stall and re-enter at will.

Profit attributable to marketing divided by its cost - the return on the spend, in margin terms. Stricter than ROAS, which counts revenue: a 3x ROAS on thin margins can be a negative ROI. Also structurally biased toward short-term, easily attributed activity, which is why optimising to it shrinks brand budgets.

The explicit instruction that tells the audience what to do next - buy, sign up, book, learn more - and the element that turns attention into a measurable response. The craft is specificity and low friction: 'Get the free checklist' outworks 'Submit' everywhere it is tried.

Marketing qualified lead: someone whose behaviour and fit suggest sales-readiness by marketing's criteria. Sales qualified lead: one sales has accepted as a real opportunity. The handoff definitions matter more than the acronyms - most marketing-and-sales friction lives in the gap between the two.

Average revenue per user: recurring revenue in a period divided by the number of paying customers. Some teams divide by all active users instead, so check the denominator before comparing numbers. The lever growth plans most often skip - tiers, add-ons and annual plans raise what each customer pays and move revenue without a single extra signup.