Glossary
Definitions for every acronym and product term used in these docs. For metrics specifically, the Metrics glossary includes formulas, sources, and cohort behaviour; this page covers the concepts around them.
Platform terms
Apple Ads (AA): Apple's search advertising platform. Rebranded from Apple Search Ads (ASA) in 2024; the old name and the "ASA" acronym are still in common use across the industry.
App Store Connect (ASC): Apple's publishing console for iOS apps. Catchbase connects to ASC to read app metadata and to publish Custom Product Pages from Creative Studio.
MMP: Mobile measurement partner. A third-party attribution provider that tracks installs and in-app events and tells Catchbase which installs came from Apple Ads. Supported providers: Adjust, AppsFlyer.
CPP (Custom Product Page): An Apple-defined variation of an app's App Store listing, with different screenshots or preview video. Catchbase can publish CPPs through Creative Studio.
ATT / SKAN: Apple's App Tracking Transparency framework and the SKAdNetwork attribution API. They constrain how much user-level data flows to advertisers. Catchbase reports what the MMP measures under these constraints.
Campaign structure
Campaign: The top-level unit in Apple Ads. Has a daily budget, a status, and one of the Apple Ads campaign types (search results, search tab, today tab).
Ad group: A subset of a campaign with its own default bid, keyword list, and audience settings.
Keyword: A search term the campaign bids on. Each keyword has a match type and a bid.
Match type: How Apple matches the keyword to actual searches. Exact Match is the narrowest; Broad Match expands to variants and semantically related queries.
Negative keyword: A term Apple Ads must NOT match against. Negatives are managed in Apple Ads today, not in Catchbase.
Campaign group: A Catchbase concept grouping multiple campaigns for portfolio-level reporting. Not an Apple Ads field.
Optimisation terms
Objective type: What the campaign is optimizing for. In Catchbase: volume (count-based, paired with a CPO target) or revenue (ROAS target).
Objective metric: The specific event the campaign's objective counts. Installs, revenue, a cohorted revenue variant (Revenue D0 through Revenue D30), or a custom MMP event name.
Target: The cost or return goal. For volume objectives: CPO. For revenue objectives: ROAS expressed as a percentage.
CPO (cost per objective): The Catchbase target type for volume objectives. Unifies the industry terms CPI (cost per install) and CPA (cost per acquisition) under a single name, because the bidding model treats them the same way: a target cost to achieve one of whatever the objective metric is counting.
CPA (cost per acquisition): Observed cost of a post-install event: ad spend divided by the count of the chosen event. Shown in analytics per event as <Event> (CPA).
CPI (cost per install): Observed cost of an install: ad spend divided by installs. Shown as a column on the analytics dashboard.
ROAS (return on ad spend): Revenue divided by ad spend, typically expressed as a percentage.
CPT (cost per tap): Ad spend divided by taps. In the analytics UI this appears as "Cost-per-Tap (CPT)".
CTR / TTR (click-through rate / tap-through rate): Taps divided by impressions. Apple Ads uses "tap" for what other platforms call "click".
CVR (conversion rate): Installs divided by taps.
SOV (Share of Voice): Mean share of eligible auctions where your ad was shown, averaged over a selected period. Sourced from Apple Ads' Impression Share API, which has a 30-day maximum lookback. Shown as "Average Share of Voice" in keyword analytics and as "SOV" on the Keyword Overlap table. See the Metrics glossary for the full Auction Insights group (SOV, Average Bid, Total Keywords, Prioritized, Deprioritized).
Data terms
Cohort: A group of users defined by their install date. Catchbase reports revenue per cohort: D0 (install day), D7, D14, D30.
Cohort maturity: The state where enough time has passed since install for a cohort's revenue window to be complete. A Revenue D7 cohort matures 7 days after its install date; the most recent 7 days of data are excluded until they mature.
Immature tail: The recent days whose cohorts have not yet matured. Excluded from analysis by design.
Attribution: The MMP's or Apple's decision about which ad, if any, gets credit for an install.
Incrementality: The causal lift attributable to advertising, measured with holdout tests. Distinct from attribution, which credits a touchpoint without proving causation.
Methodology terms
the bidding model: Catchbase's automated bidder. See the Bidding Model section.
Reinforcement learning (RL): The family of ML methods the bidding model uses. An agent takes actions, observes outcomes, and updates a policy that maps observations to actions. Full treatment in the RL bidding long-form article.
CausalImpact: A published Bayesian structural time-series method for measuring causal lift. Used by Catchbase's Incrementality feature.
Embedding: A numerical representation of text that captures meaning. Used by Keyword Mining to compare a candidate keyword's meaning against the app's description.
Roles
Admin, Editor, Viewer: The three roles you can assign to users in an organization. See the Permissions reference.