Payment & Metrics
Baseline
The initial performance figure used as a reference point for measuring change.
A baseline is the initial performance figure captured before a change, used as the reference point for measuring whether the change moved anything. Without a recorded baseline — cost per FTD, CR, EPC over a defined window — any post-change number is uninterpretable, because you have nothing rigorous to compare it against.
Disciplined teams baseline before every meaningful intervention: a new lander, a bid strategy change, a payout renegotiation, a fresh creative batch. The common failure is baselining over too short or unrepresentative a window — comparing a payday-week baseline against mid-month performance manufactures fake wins and losses. Fix the measurement window, keep traffic mix constant where possible, and write the baseline down; memory-based baselines drift toward whatever story the buyer wants to tell.
In buyer speech
“Log this week's $95 cost per FTD as the baseline before we flip the new landers on, or we'll never know if they worked.”