Glossary
Plain-language definitions of the terms our guides and manuals reference, from customer data platforms and marketing automation to the specifics of Bloomreach Engagement, Klaviyo, and Trifft.
Each entry gives the definition first, then the practitioner context that makes it useful. Search by keyword or browse the terms alphabetically below.
A
A/B Test
An A/B test is a controlled experiment that serves two versions of an experience to a randomly split audience and compares a chosen outcome to see which performs better.
Abandoned Cart
An abandoned cart is a session where a customer adds items to a cart but does not complete the purchase within a defined window.
Abandoned cart flow
An abandoned cart flow is a triggered sequence of messages, across email, SMS, and web, sent after a customer leaves items in their cart unpurchased. Where an abandoned cart is the event, the flow is the automated response that tries to bring them back.
Action Node
An action node is a step inside a scenario that executes something for the customer who reaches it: sending an email, SMS, mobile push, or webhook, or writing to an ad audience.
Activation
Activation is pushing CDP audiences and signals into the downstream tools that act on them: email platforms, ad networks, on-site personalization, and support systems.
Agentic CDP
An agentic CDP is an emerging concept where AI agents act on customer data and campaign goals inside or on top of the CDP, deciding and executing rather than only reporting.
AI Agent
An AI agent is an AI system that can reason, decide, and take actions through tools, rather than only generating text.
AI Governance
AI governance is the set of rules for safe, compliant, explainable, and controlled use of AI, especially when AI uses customer data to make decisions.
AI in Marketing
AI in marketing is the use of machine learning and generative models to predict customer behavior, personalize content, and automate decisions across channels.
analytics_storage
analytics_storage is the Google Consent Mode v2 signal that controls whether analytics cookies and measurement can run for a given user.
Anonymization
Anonymization removes identifiers so that an individual cannot reasonably be re-identified from the data.
Anti-Flicker
Anti-flicker is a pre-render guard that briefly hides page content until experiment variants are applied, so visitors do not see the original version flash before the test version loads.
App Link
An App Link is an Android HTTPS URL, verified to belong to a specific app, so that tapping it opens that app directly to a specific screen instead of falling back to the browser.
Async Mode
Async mode is the Bloomreach experiment mode that applies variants after the DOM is ready, hiding the affected content with an async-hide class until the variant is in place.
Attribution
Attribution is the method of assigning credit for a conversion to one or more of the marketing touchpoints that preceded it.
Average Order Value (AOV)
Average order value (AOV) is the average revenue per order over a defined period: total revenue divided by the number of orders.
B
Behavioral Data
Behavioral data is data about what people actually do across channels, as opposed to static attributes about who they are.
Bloomreach Content
Bloomreach Content is Bloomreach's headless content management system (CMS). On bloomreach.com it now sells as the Enterprise CMS under the Loomi AI platform, though practitioners and the documentation still call it Content.
Bloomreach Discovery
Bloomreach Discovery is Bloomreach's AI-powered search and merchandising product. On bloomreach.com it now sells as Ecommerce Search (also marketed as Autonomous Search) under the Loomi AI platform, but practitioners and the documentation still call it Discovery.
Bloomreach Engagement
Bloomreach's customer data platform and marketing automation product: tracking, customer profiles with identity resolution, segmentation, analytics, and campaign execution across email, SMS, push, weblayers, and ads, in one application. It is one of three Bloomreach products (Engagement, Discovery, Content) and the one people usually mean when they say "we have Bloomreach." Formerly known as Exponea, and before that Infinario.
Bloomreach SDK
The Bloomreach SDK is the JavaScript (and mobile) library that collects events and identifies customers on your site or app, then sends that data to Bloomreach Engagement.
C
Catalog (Bloomreach Engagement)
A catalog in Bloomreach Engagement is a structured dataset of items you import into the platform, such as products, articles, or stores, and reference inside campaigns. Each item has an ID and a set of fields. You look an item up in Jinja and read its fields, for example `catalogs['Products'].item_by_id(product_id)` followed by `item['display_name']`.
Churn Prediction
Churn prediction is forecasting which customers are likely to stop buying, stop engaging, or cancel.
Client-Side Tracking
Client-side tracking collects event and identity data directly in the browser or app and sends it straight to each vendor, instead of routing it through a server you control.
Commerce Media
Commerce media is advertising powered by purchase intent and transaction data, spanning retailers, marketplaces, and commerce platforms.
Composable CDP
A composable CDP is a CDP assembled from modular, best-of-breed tools rather than one packaged, all-in-one platform.
Consent Data
Consent data is the record of what a customer has allowed or denied, expressed by purpose, that every downstream tool must honor before acting.
Consent Management Platform (CMP)
A consent management platform (CMP) is the tool that collects and enforces privacy consent, typically starting with the cookie banner.
Cookie Deprecation
Cookie deprecation is the set of browser and privacy changes that reduce the usefulness of third-party cookies for cross-site tracking.
Cross-Site Scripting (XSS)
Cross-site scripting (XSS) is a security vulnerability where an attacker injects malicious script into a page that other users' browsers then execute.
Custom Tracking Domain
A Custom Tracking Domain (CTD) is a Bloomreach Engagement subdomain you own that serves Bloomreach's tracking API, so the tracking cookie is set server-side through an HTTP response header instead of by JavaScript. On Safari, HTTP-set cookies aren't subject to the same seven-day cap that applies to JavaScript-set ones.
Customer 360
A customer 360 is a complete view of a customer assembled from every data source: identity, behavior, transactions, consent, and engagement.
Customer Data & Experience Platform (CDXP)
A customer data and experience platform (CDXP) is a CDP plus the activation layer: a unified customer-data foundation combined with journeys, personalization, and campaign execution built on top.
Customer Data Architecture
Customer data architecture is the design of how customer data is modeled, stored, and connected across systems, so it can be trusted and used for marketing and analytics.
Customer Data Infrastructure (CDI)
Customer data infrastructure (CDI) is the technical foundation for collecting, transforming, and routing customer data across systems.
Customer Data Platform (CDP)
A customer data platform (CDP) is packaged software that unifies customer data from every source into one persistent, real-time profile that other tools can use. It solves the problem of scattered data and identity across channels: web, app, email, ads, point of sale, call center, loyalty. Where a CRM organizes work around known contacts, a CDP unifies behavior and identity across everyone, known and anonymous, and makes the result available for segmentation, personalization, and measurement.
Customer Intelligence Loop
A customer intelligence loop is the cycle where a system reads customer data, decides on an action, acts, measures the result, learns, and repeats.
Customer Journey
A customer journey is the sequence of stages and touchpoints a customer goes through: anonymous visitor, lead, buyer, repeat customer, advocate.
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV / LTV)
Customer lifetime value (CLV or LTV) is the estimated long-term value of a customer to the business.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
A customer relationship management (CRM) system organizes the work and relationships around known contacts: sales pipeline, service cases, and interaction history.
Customer Retention
Customer retention is the practice of keeping existing customers active and purchasing over time, usually measured as the share of customers who remain across a given period.
Customer Segmentation
Customer segmentation is the practice of dividing customers into groups by shared traits or behavior, so campaigns and journeys can target each group differently.
D
Data Clean Room
A data clean room is a privacy-safe environment where two or more parties analyze combined data without either exposing raw, user-level records.
Data Governance
Data governance is the set of rules for data quality, access, privacy, ownership, and usage across an organization.
Data lake
Storage for data in its raw, original form: event streams, logs, exports, and files, kept cheaply and structured later, if at all. Data engineers and data scientists work here; the lake is where data lands first, not where campaigns run from. Raw data has to be cleaned and structured before marketing can act on it.
Data Lakehouse
A data lakehouse is an architecture that combines the low-cost scale of a data lake with the structure and querying of a data warehouse.
Data Lineage
Data lineage is visibility into where data came from, how it was transformed, and where it moved across systems.
Data Management Platform (DMP)
A data management platform (DMP) is adtech software for collecting and activating anonymous or pseudonymous audiences, mostly for advertising. It dealt largely in third-party data.
Data mart
A purpose-built subset of the data warehouse prepared for one team's questions. The marketing mart holds customer, order, and campaign tables shaped for marketing's use, without the risk tables and logistics feeds the rest of the warehouse carries. Faster queries, simpler models, less blast radius when something upstream changes.
Data Minimization
Data minimization is the practice of collecting only the data necessary for a defined purpose.
Data Quality
Data quality is the accuracy, completeness, consistency, and freshness of data.
Data warehouse
Storage for data that has been cleaned, deduplicated, and modeled into tables with agreed meanings, ready for SQL querying and reporting. This is where "one version of the truth" lives and where BI dashboards point. When the marketing platform's numbers and finance's numbers disagree, the warehouse is the referee.
Decision engine
A system that ranks what each customer should be offered next: which product, which message, which channel, which moment. Decisions are computed centrally, from a shared data platform, so every channel makes the same promise; the alternative is the call center offering a discount the email journey knows nothing about. The engine can be a vendor product or an in-house model stack.
Deliverability
Deliverability is whether your email actually reaches the inbox rather than the spam folder or a block, unlike delivery, which only means the receiving server accepted it.
Deterministic Matching
Deterministic matching links records using confirmed identifiers, such as a login email or account ID. The match is treated as certain.
Digital Experience Platform (DXP)
A digital experience platform (DXP) manages and delivers websites, content, portals, and other digital experiences across channels.
DMARC
A DNS-published email policy that tells receiving servers what to do with messages that fail authentication: monitor them (p=none), send them to spam (p=quarantine), or refuse them (p=reject). Published at `_dmarc.yourdomain.com`. A missing DMARC record means your domain is spoofable and your marketing email is more likely to land in spam. A p=none record only watches; it does not stop anything.
Dynamic Content
Dynamic content is content that changes based on customer data or context, so different people see different versions of the same placement.
E
Event Data
Event data is data generated by actions, such as clicks, page views, purchases, logins, and searches.
Exponea
The former name of Bloomreach Engagement. Exponea was a Slovak-founded customer data platform and marketing automation product (originally launched as Infinario) that took the Exponea name in 2016 and was acquired by Bloomreach in January 2021. The product lives on as Bloomreach Engagement, and the old name still shows up in live implementations: the `api.exponea.com` tracking endpoint, `__exponea` cookie names, and `exponea.start()` snippets all predate the rebrand and keep working.
Expression (Bloomreach)
An expression in Bloomreach Engagement is a formula-based derived attribute: it combines customer attributes, aggregates, functions, and operators into a single computed value.
G
GA4 client ID
The GA4 client ID is the browser-scoped identifier GA4 assigns to a device and stores in the `_ga` cookie. In Bloomreach Engagement it's captured and written to a soft ID, so the same visitor can be matched across GA4 and Bloomreach for analysis and warehouse joins.
Golden Record
A golden record is the single most trusted version of a record after duplicates are merged and conflicting fields are resolved.
Google Analytics 4 (GA4)
Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is Google's analytics platform, built around an event-based data model rather than Universal Analytics' session-and-pageview model.
Google Consent Mode
Google Consent Mode is a Google framework that adjusts how Google tags, such as GA4 and Ads, behave based on a user's consent choices. Version 2 uses four signals: analytics_storage, ad_storage, ad_user_data, and ad_personalization.
Google Tag Manager (GTM)
Google Tag Manager (GTM) is a tag management system that lets you deploy and update tracking tags, such as GA4, Bloomreach, and ad pixels, through a web interface instead of editing site code for each change.
H
Hard ID vs Soft ID
A hard ID is a stable, explicit identifier that reliably points to one person or account, such as an email address, phone number, customer ID, or login. A soft ID is a weaker signal that suggests identity but can be shared, reset, or expire, such as a cookie, device ID, or IP address.
HTML entity
An HTML entity is a short text code that begins with an ampersand and ends with a semicolon, which a browser or email client decodes into a single character when it renders HTML. Examples: ` ` becomes a [non-breaking space](https://asteroad.com/glossary/non-breaking-space), `&` becomes `&`, `€` becomes the euro sign. Entities exist for characters that are invisible, reserved by HTML, or hard to type.
I
Identity Graph
An identity graph is the map that connects the many identifiers (emails, devices, cookies, account IDs, and households) that belong to the same person or family.
Identity resolution
Identity resolution is the process of matching the many identifiers a single customer leaves across devices, sessions, and tools into one unified profile. It's how a CDP decides that an anonymous web visitor, an email subscriber, and an app user are the same person.
Incrementality Measurement
Incrementality measurement estimates what happened because of marketing, often using control groups, rather than crediting everything that happened after an ad.
Infinario
The original name of the platform now known as Bloomreach Engagement. Infinario launched for the gaming industry, tracking player behavior and running in-game retention campaigns, before rebranding to Exponea in 2016 to serve broader e-commerce and B2C markets. Bloomreach acquired Exponea in January 2021 and renamed it Bloomreach Engagement.
Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP)
Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) is Apple's set of privacy restrictions in Safari and WebKit that limit how long cookies and other identifiers set by scripts can persist.
J
Jinja
Jinja is a templating language that inserts data into text using {{ ... }} for output and {% ... %} for logic like loops and conditions. In Bloomreach Engagement it is the way a message or weblayer pulls in customer attributes and catalog data, and it runs on the server before the result reaches the browser.
Journey Orchestration
Journey orchestration is coordinating a customer's interactions across channels and lifecycle stages into one connected experience.
K
Kafka
Apache Kafka is an open-source event streaming platform that moves high volumes of event data between systems in real time, widely used as the backbone of data pipelines.
Key Performance Indicator (KPI)
A key performance indicator (KPI) is a metric chosen to measure progress toward a specific goal, such as conversion rate, retention, or average order value.
Key-Value Pair
A key-value pair is a single piece of data expressed as a named key and its value, such as country set to DE, or plan set to premium.
Klaviyo
Klaviyo is a marketing automation and customer data platform focused mainly on email and SMS, widely used by ecommerce brands, especially on Shopify.
Known Customer
A known customer is a person a CDP can identify by a stable identifier such as an email address, account ID, or customer ID, as opposed to an anonymous visitor tracked only by a soft signal.
L
Lead Scoring
Lead scoring is ranking prospects by fit, intent, and engagement so sales and marketing can focus effort on the best ones.
Lifecycle Marketing
Lifecycle marketing is marketing based on a customer's lifecycle stage and relationship maturity rather than one-size-fits-all campaigns.
Lookalike Audience
A lookalike audience is an audience modeled to resemble your existing valuable customers.
Loyalty Marketing
Loyalty marketing is the practice of rewarding repeat customers, through points, tiers, or perks, to increase retention and lifetime value.
M
Marketing Automation
Marketing automation is software that triggers and personalizes messages across channels, such as email, SMS, and on-site, based on customer behavior and data rather than manual sending.
Master Data Management (MDM)
Master data management (MDM) is the enterprise discipline and toolset for governing trusted master records for core entities such as customers, products, and suppliers.
N
Next Best Action (NBA)
Next best action (NBA) is the single action a system recommends as most likely to move a customer forward: which offer, message, or channel, at which moment.
Non-breaking space
A non-breaking space is a space character (Unicode code point U+00A0) that holds the tokens on either side of it on the same line, so the renderer never breaks between them. It looks like an ordinary space but behaves like glue.
O
Omnichannel Marketing
Omnichannel marketing is coordinated communication across channels such as email, SMS, app, web, and ads, built on a consistent view of the customer.
Open Rate
Open rate is the share of delivered emails that recipients opened, calculated as unique opens divided by delivered messages.
P
Personalization
Personalization is adapting a customer's experience based on what is known about them, whether through rules a marketer wrote, segments the team defined, or a model's decisions.
Personally Identifiable Information (PII)
Personally identifiable information (PII) is data that identifies a specific person, such as an email address, phone number, or home address.
Post-Cookie Era
The post-cookie era is the marketing environment shaped by reduced reliability of third-party cookies for tracking and targeting.
Predictive Scoring
Predictive scoring is a model's estimate of the likelihood of an outcome such as churn, conversion, purchase, or engagement.
Preference Center
A preference center is the interface where a customer manages topics, channels, frequency, and permissions.
Probabilistic Matching
Probabilistic matching links records using signals that suggest the same person, such as device, IP, location, or behavior patterns, but do not prove it.
Propensity Model
A propensity model estimates how likely a specific customer is to take a specific action, such as purchasing, churning, clicking, or converting.
Pseudonymization
Pseudonymization replaces direct identifiers with artificial IDs, so records can be processed without directly exposing the person's identity.
Publisher First-Party Data
Publisher first-party data is audience data owned by publishers or media companies, collected directly from their own readers and viewers.
Q
Quality Assurance (QA)
Quality assurance (QA) is the practice of systematically checking that something works as intended before it goes live. In a data stack, that means checking tracking, consent, and campaigns.
Query Parameter
A query parameter is a key-value pair appended to a URL after a question mark that passes extra information to the page or to analytics, as in ?utm_source=newsletter.
Queue
A queue is a holding area for data or tasks waiting to be processed, used to absorb bursts, retry failures, and decouple systems that run at different speeds.
R
Real-Time Activation
Real-time activation is triggering a message, offer, or decision as soon as possible after a customer signal, instead of on a schedule.
Real-Time Profile
A real-time profile is a customer profile updated as soon as new behavior is processed, rather than in a nightly batch.
Recommendation Engine
A recommendation engine is a system that suggests products, content, or offers to a customer based on behavior, context, or similarity to other customers.
Retail Media Network (RMN)
A retail media network (RMN) is an advertising network run by a retailer, using its own shopper data and inventory to let brands target and measure ads.
Reverse ETL
Reverse ETL is the process of sending modeled data from a data warehouse back into the business and activation tools that act on it.
S
Second-Party Data
Second-party data is another organization's first-party data, shared through a direct partnership rather than bought from a third-party broker.
Segment
A segment is a defined group of customers who share criteria, such as recent buyers, lapsed subscribers, or high-value customers, used for targeting and analysis.
Server-Side Rendering
Server-side rendering means the final markup is generated on the server before it reaches the browser, rather than being assembled by JavaScript in the visitor's browser. The browser receives finished output.
Server-side tracking
Server-side tracking sends event and identity data to a server you control, which then forwards it to your analytics and marketing tools, instead of the browser sending it straight to each vendor. Moving collection off the browser keeps it out of reach of ad blockers and some browser privacy limits.
Sign-up Form (Klaviyo)
A sign-up form in Klaviyo is a popup, flyout, embedded, full-page, or banner form used to collect email and SMS subscribers and their consent directly on a website.
Single Customer View
A single customer view (SCV) is one unified profile per customer, replacing the scattered records the same person leaves across systems.
Smart Sending (Klaviyo)
Smart Sending is a Klaviyo setting that skips contacts who were recently messaged on the same channel, to prevent over-messaging.
SPF
A DNS TXT record on your domain listing which servers are allowed to send email on its behalf. Receiving mail servers check it on every message; without it, they cannot verify your senders, which hurts deliverability and invites spoofing. Publishing SPF is a DNS edit, not a software project.
Suppression Audience
A suppression audience is a group deliberately excluded from a campaign, such as recent buyers, opted-out customers, or existing subscribers.
T
Third-Party Data
Third-party data is data collected and aggregated by outside providers, then sold for targeting, with no direct relationship to the customer.
Transactional Data
Transactional data is records of purchases, orders, subscriptions, payments, and refunds.
Trifft
Trifft, marketed as TRIFFT Loyalty Cloud, is a full-featured loyalty platform for building points, tiers, and reward programs, with a native two-way integration into Bloomreach Engagement.
U
Unified Customer Profile
A unified customer profile is a single record that combines a customer's identity, behavior, transactions, consent, and attributes from every source.
UTM Parameter
A UTM parameter is a tag added to a URL's query string that tells analytics tools where a click came from. The five standard ones are utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, utm_term, and utm_content.
V
Value-Based Segmentation
Value-based segmentation groups customers by their economic value to the business, such as predicted lifetime value, rather than by demographics or behavior alone.
Variant ID
A variant ID is the identifier for a specific purchasable version of a product, such as a particular size and color, as distinct from the parent product ID.
Visitor ID
A visitor ID is an identifier assigned to an anonymous visitor, usually stored in a cookie, that ties their activity together before any hard identifier, such as an email address, exists.
W
Warehouse-Native CDP
A warehouse-native CDP is a CDP approach where the data warehouse, such as BigQuery, Snowflake, or Databricks, is the single source of truth, with profiles and activation built directly on it.
Web Analytics
Web analytics is the measurement of website traffic and on-site behavior, such as pages viewed, sessions, and conversions, to understand how visitors use a site.
Webhook
A webhook is an automated HTTP request one system sends to another when an event happens, used to push data or trigger an action in near real time.
Weblayer
A weblayer is a Bloomreach Engagement overlay injected into a website: a popup, banner, inline block, slider, or any other on-page surface. It's configured as three fields, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, that Bloomreach renders and delivers to the visitor's page, controlled by segments and scenarios.
X
X-Header
An X-header is a custom, non-standard email header, conventionally prefixed with X-, used to carry extra metadata such as campaign or system information alongside a message.
XML Feed
An XML feed is a structured file, in XML format, that a system publishes so other systems can import its data. It is commonly used for product catalogs, pricing, and content syndication.
Y
Year-over-Year (YoY)
Year-over-year (YoY) is a comparison of a metric to the same period a year earlier, used to measure growth while controlling for seasonality.
Yield Management
Yield management is the discipline of setting price and allocating limited inventory to maximize revenue, originally from airlines and hotels, and now applied to media and retail slots.
Yield Optimization
Yield optimization is the practice of maximizing the revenue earned from a limited inventory, such as ad impressions, media placements, or retail-media slots.
These definitions come out of the work.
If a term describes a problem you are dealing with, we design and implement the systems behind it.