Every metric, defined once.

ADS-B (Automatic Dependent Surveillance–Broadcast) is a surveillance technology in which an aircraft determines its own position, usually from satellite navigation, and automatically broadcasts it with its identity, altitude and velocity, about twice per second for airborne position. Ground stations, other aircraft and anyone with a receiver can pick up the broadcast.

AIS (Automatic Identification System) is a VHF radio system that ships use to broadcast their identity, position, course, speed and navigational status automatically to other ships, shore stations and aircraft. IMO rules under SOLAS require it on most larger ships and all passenger ships.

ARR (annual recurring revenue) is the annualized value of the recurring subscription and contract revenue a company has under contract at a point in time, usually MRR × 12. It excludes one-time revenue such as setup fees, services and hardware.

An attribution model is the rule or algorithm that assigns credit for a conversion across the marketing touchpoints that preceded it, such as last click, linear, position-based or data-driven attribution.

The burn multiple is net burn divided by net new ARR for the same period: how much cash a startup consumes for each dollar of annual recurring revenue it adds. Lower is more efficient.

CAC (customer acquisition cost) is the total sales and marketing cost of acquiring new customers divided by the number of new customers acquired in the same period.

CAC payback period is the number of months of gross profit a new customer must generate to repay their acquisition cost: CAC ÷ (new MRR per customer × gross margin).

Change data capture (CDC) identifies every insert, update and delete in a source database and delivers those changes downstream, usually by reading the database’s transaction log, so replicas and analytics stay current without full reloads.

Cohort analysis groups customers or users by a shared starting event, such as signup month, and tracks each group’s retention or revenue over time, so changes in quality are not hidden by overall growth.

CTR (click-through rate) is the percentage of impressions that result in a click, calculated as clicks divided by impressions. It is used for ads, organic search results, emails and social posts.

Data fusion is the process of combining observations from multiple sources about the same objects or events into one estimate that is more accurate, complete or trustworthy than any single source. In air surveillance it means merging radar, Mode S, multilateration and ADS-B reports into one track per aircraft.

A data model is a structured description of the entities a business tracks, their attributes and relationships, and the grain of each table. In analytics it turns raw source tables into clean, joinable tables that metrics can be computed from.

Data residency is a requirement or commitment that specific data is stored, and often processed, only in a defined geographic location, such as the EU or a single country. It is related to but narrower than data sovereignty, which concerns whose laws govern the data.

ETL (extract, transform, load) transforms data before loading it into the analytics store; ELT (extract, load, transform) loads raw data first and transforms it inside the warehouse, usually with SQL. ELT suits cloud warehouses because it uses their compute and keeps raw data available for re-modeling.

Engagement rate is the percentage of people or sessions that actively interact with content: on social media, engagements divided by impressions or followers; in GA4, engaged sessions divided by total sessions.

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of optimizing content so AI answer engines such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews retrieve, cite and accurately represent it in their generated responses.

GNSS interference is radio-frequency disturbance that degrades or falsifies satellite navigation signals. Jamming blocks the signal; spoofing feeds the receiver false information. In aviation it shows up in ADS-B as drops in the navigation accuracy (NACp) and integrity (NIC) values that aircraft report.

Gross revenue retention (GRR) is the percentage of starting recurring revenue retained from existing customers after downgrades and churn, excluding any expansion. It cannot exceed 100%.

Incrementality is the portion of conversions or revenue caused by a marketing activity that would not have occurred without it, measured by comparing an exposed group with a randomized holdout.

The LTV:CAC ratio divides customer lifetime value (the gross profit a customer generates over their relationship) by customer acquisition cost. A ratio above 3 is commonly cited as healthy for SaaS.

Media mix modeling (MMM) is a statistical technique that estimates each marketing channel’s contribution to sales from aggregated time-series data, modeling carryover and diminishing returns without user-level tracking.

MER (marketing efficiency ratio) is total revenue divided by total marketing spend over the same period. It is an attribution-free measure of overall marketing efficiency, sometimes called blended ROAS.

Mode S (Mode Select) is the secondary surveillance radar mode in which each aircraft’s transponder has a unique 24-bit address, so ground stations can interrogate aircraft individually and receive identity, altitude and, with Enhanced Surveillance, extra aircraft parameters. ADS-B on 1090 MHz is broadcast as a Mode S extended squitter.

MRR (monthly recurring revenue) is the total monthly-normalized value of all active paid subscriptions at a point in time, excluding taxes, free plans and one-time charges. Annual plans count as one-twelfth of their price.

Multilateration (MLAT) locates an aircraft from the differences in the time its transponder signal arrives at several synchronized ground receivers. Four receivers give a 3D position, or three if altitude is known. Because the position is computed on the ground, it does not depend on the aircraft’s own navigation.

Net revenue retention (NRR) is the percentage of recurring revenue kept from existing customers over a period, including their expansion and net of downgrades and churn. NRR above 100% means the existing base grows revenue on its own.

OSINT (open-source intelligence) is intelligence produced from publicly or commercially available information to answer a specific question or requirement. The information is open; the intelligence comes from the disciplined identification, collection, preservation, verification and analysis applied to it.

An outbound-only tunnel is a secure connection that an agent inside a private network opens out to a remote service, which then sends requests back over that established connection. Because nothing listens for inbound traffic, the network needs no open ports, public IP or inbound firewall exceptions.

Query pushdown is an optimization in which a query engine sends filters, column selections, aggregations, joins or limits down to the source system to execute there, so only the much smaller result travels back. It cuts data transfer and, in a bridge architecture, keeps raw rows at the source.

ROAS (return on ad spend) is attributed revenue or conversion value divided by advertising spend. A ROAS of 5 (or 500%) means $5 of attributed revenue per $1 of ad spend.

Row-level security (RLS) is a database feature that restricts which rows of a table a user can read or modify, using a policy evaluated on every query, so two users running the same SELECT see different, authorized subsets.

The Rule of 40 states that a software company’s revenue growth rate plus its profit margin (usually EBITDA or free-cash-flow margin) should equal or exceed 40%.

Runway is the number of months a company can operate before running out of cash, calculated as cash on hand divided by average monthly net burn.

A semantic layer is a governed layer between raw data and the tools that query it. Business entities, metrics, dimensions and join paths are defined there once, in code, so every dashboard, spreadsheet and AI assistant computes them the same way.

Share of voice (SOV) is a brand’s portion of total visibility in its category, classically its advertising spend divided by total category ad spend; it is also measured in search, social, press and AI answers.

A squawk code is the four-digit octal code (0000–7777) that an aircraft’s transponder sends as its Mode A identity, used by air traffic control to tell flights apart. Three codes are reserved for emergencies: 7500 (unlawful interference), 7600 (radio failure) and 7700 (general emergency).

UTM parameters are tags appended to a URL, such as utm_source, utm_medium and utm_campaign, that tell analytics tools which source, channel and campaign a visit came from. Their values are case sensitive.