Marketing and data engineering use the same words for different things. This collects every one I have run into, what each side usually means by it, and which guide goes into it properly. Search it, link to a single definition, or send someone the line that settles the argument.

Most of these came out of a six-part field guide sponsored by Databricks. They funded the work and reviewed it for factual accuracy, and had no say over any of the definitions. This page is not sponsored.

24 terms

Activation

You mean
Launching a campaign, or putting an audience to use.
They mean
Delivering eligible records to a destination with the right identifiers, permissions, freshness and format.
From Guide 1

Audience

You mean
Interchangeable with segment.
They mean
Often the exported copy of a segment, the version pushed to the destination, not the logic behind it.
From Guide 1

Computed trait

You mean
A useful number on a person, like lifetime value.
They mean
Something recalculated on a schedule, at a cost, for every person, forever.
From Guide 1

Copy

You mean
Downloading or exporting the data somewhere.
They mean
Any additional persisted version. Replication, materialised tables, caches, extracts, destination-side storage.
From Guide 1

Customer

You mean
A person.
They mean
An entity at a grain. Person, account, household or device, and which identifiers represent it.
From Guide 1

Data source

You mean
The tool or application where you see the data.
They mean
The system that produced it. Which system, how it arrived, and which version counts.
From Guide 1

Deduplication

You mean
Removing the doubles.
They mean
Identity resolution. A policy with thresholds. Too keen merges two people, too cautious splits one.
From Guide 1

Event

You mean
Something a customer did that you can target on.
They mean
A timestamped record with a schema, written once. The schema can change, and that affects ingestion and everything downstream.
From Guide 1

Field

You mean
A box in the segment builder.
They mean
A column with a type (what values are allowed), a nullability rule (can it be empty), and an owner.
From Guide 1

Golden record

You mean
The truth.
They mean
The output of rules a person wrote, which can be changed.
From Guide 1

Governance

You mean
The reason things take longer.
They mean
The reason the company has not had to disclose a breach.
From Guide 1

Integration

You mean
Two tools are connected.
They mean
A direction of travel with auth, field mapping, schema handling, rate limits, retries, monitoring and an owner.
From Guide 1

Latency

You mean
The delay before you see something.
They mean
Several delays that add up, measured at points you have not specified.
From Guide 1

Live

You mean
It is working now.
They mean
It is in production rather than in a test environment.
From Guide 1

Lookalike

You mean
Expanded reach, built from a seed audience.
They mean
A downstream black box they cannot inspect, explain or debug. Expect hesitation about depending on it.
From Guide 1

Model

You mean
A prediction, like propensity to churn.
They mean
The data model. Tables and how they relate. The worst offender on this page.
From Guide 1

Profile

You mean
Everything known about someone, in one view.
They mean
A join, several tables stitched on a shared key, computed at a moment and already slightly stale.
From Guide 1

Raw data

You mean
An unformatted export.
They mean
The untouched landing layer, preserved so downstream can be rebuilt.
From Guide 1

Real time

You mean
Soon enough that it does not feel broken.
They mean
Sub-second streaming, an always-on architecture, and a cost line that never stops.
From Guide 1

Refresh

You mean
The numbers change.
They mean
A pipeline run with dependencies, a schedule, and someone on call for it.
From Guide 1

Segment

You mean
A group of people to message.
They mean
Needs to know if you mean the definition or the result. Those cost differently.
From Guide 1

Source of truth

You mean
The dashboard you trust.
They mean
The designated system, governed dataset or semantic definition. There can legitimately be different ones per subject.
From Guide 1

Sync

You mean
The data shows up in the tool.
They mean
A job with failure modes, retries, and last night's failed records. Scheduled, change capture or event-driven.
From Guide 1