Uncover Basics Concepts

This article serves as a glossary of the key terms and essential concepts for using the Uncover platform and our services.

The goal is to align understanding and ensure everyone shares a common knowledge base.

This post is divided into the three main sections that make up the core Basics Concepts:

🎯 Goal [Funnel]: In marketing, goal funnels (or conversion funnels) are a sequence of action steps that users or leads are expected to follow in order to “convert.” These steps can occur within media (such as awareness, consideration, and conversion) or outside of it, involving other areas such as customer relationship.

📣 Awareness [Top of Funnel]:
Awareness, or Brand Awareness, refers to how consumers recognize and remember your brand — essentially, the top of the funnel. In general terms, it’s about how familiar your audience is with your logo, messaging, and products. Because it’s a broad and abstract concept, it's difficult to measure directly using quantitative metrics (unlike the other funnel stages).
In digital marketing, the most commonly used metrics are impressions and reach. For this reason, some companies believe that awareness doesn’t generate results (and has a high cost), even though it is essential to drive the other two stages of the funnel. This is exactly where Uncover comes in.

💭 Consideration [Middle of Funnel]:
The goal here is to generate some kind of interaction or engagement from the user after they’ve been introduced to your brand during the awareness stage.
The most commonly used metric to measure consideration is the click and/or CTR (Click-Through Rate) — see more on that below. This stage acts as a bridge: the user is already familiar with your brand (from awareness), and now the goal is to start leading them toward conversion. That’s why the click is important — it moves the user toward a conversion point.

💳 Conversion [Bottom of Funnel]:
This is the core of the goal. After reaching and engaging the user in the previous stages, this is where they finally convert.
Depending on the client, a conversion can mean generating a lead or a purchase on a website or app.

👀 Impressions:
The number of times posts were displayed to users. This includes all views, even if the same user saw the content multiple times.

📊 Measurable Impressions (mainly for Google and programmatic media):
The number of times an ad appeared in places on websites or apps where impressions could be measured. This metric helps understand how often your ad was displayed in measurable locations.

👁️ Viewable Impressions (mainly for Google and programmatic media):
Shows the number of times ad impressions were considered viewable. An ad is considered viewable if at least 50% of its area is visible for at least one second (for display ads), or at least two seconds (for video ads).

🖱️ Clicks:
Clicks on the ad — whether it's an image, video, or link — that take the user to a destination or experience. In media, the click must direct the user somewhere.

🖱️ Link Clicks (Facebook metric):
Clicks that lead to specific destinations or experiences, either on Facebook properties or external sites. The broader “All Clicks” metric includes these, plus other types of clicks (e.g., clicking the Page name or expanding the image).

🖱️ CTR (Click-Through Rate):
The percentage ratio between the number of clicks and the number of impressions an ad received. This metric reflects how effective a campaign is — i.e., the percentage of users who clicked on your ad after seeing it.

📈 Viewability Rate:
The percentage of times your ad was actually viewable on websites or apps.
Formula:
​(Viewable Ad Impressions ÷ Ad Impressions) × 100

🤩 Leads:
A lead is a potential customer who represents a business opportunity, having already shown interest in your company or product — such as by filling out a form, signing up, or registering their email for a promotion. It refers to collecting user contact information, bringing them closer to the business.

🚥 Traffic:
The movement of users through your online pages. Traffic can be:

Traffic can be analyzed from three perspectives:

💸 CPM (Cost per Mille / Cost per Thousand Impressions):
The average cost for 1,000 impressions on a given platform over a certain period. This can be calculated at a broader level (e.g., "Meta’s CPM was R$7.80 in the month") or more granularly (e.g., "Instagram Post Feed CPM was R$9.54 during the week of October 29, 2022").

💸 CPV (Cost per View):
Similar to CPM, but considers only viewable impressions. This cost model is typically used for video formats that aim to deliver viewability, not just impressions.

🧭 Media Contribution:
Media contribution is our first and primary modeling output. It represents how much — in absolute or percentage terms — each media variable contributes to the dependent variable being analyzed (e.g., sales, revenue, leads).
Contribution reflects the value generated by each variable — such as a lead or conversion — and is calculated based on the investment made during the analyzed period.

🚠 Channel Saturation:
This is a model calculation that estimates, based on the investment during the analyzed period, whether a media channel is at its optimal investment point for generating additional leads/conversions — or if it has already reached a performance limit for that channel.

🔄 ROI / ROAS (Return on Investment / Return on Ad Spend):
This is our media efficiency metric, also known as Uncover ROI. It shows how much revenue was generated for every $1 spent on a specific media channel.
Example: If the TV ROI is $1.50, it means that for every $1 invested in TV, the brand generated $1.50 in revenue.
When the return is 1:1, we refer to it as break-even.

🔎 Attribution Model:
This model tracks the customer’s online journey up to conversion and determines how the sale will be attributed.
The most commonly used model is Last Click, where 100% of the conversion credit is given to the last ad the user clicked — which fails to capture the effects of upper and mid-funnel touchpoints.

🎛️ Control Variables:
These are the external inputs added to the model to account for external factors that may impact performance. They range from macroeconomic changes (e.g., interest rate hikes, inflation, unemployment) to uncontrolled direct factors (e.g., negative brand events, holidays, organic category search, competitor activity).

⚙️ Baseline:
This refers to the portion of sales or revenue that would occur independently of marketing actions or control variables.
It is part of what we call the Intercept — the share of results not attributed to any model input.
The baseline typically reflects brand strength and can also be related to sales patterns from other factors, such as product distribution to physical stores.