This is a completed activity that is defined as important to your client’s campaign and could include a land on a web page, start a quote, or watch a video for example
It is the practice of fraudulently representing online traffic, impressions, clicks, conversion or data events in order to generate revenue. Also referred to as Invalid Traffic (IVT).
Provide an outsourced sales capability for publishers and a means to aggregate inventory and audiences from numerous sources in a single buying opportunity for media buyers. Ad networks may provide technologies to enhance value to both publishers and advertisers, including unique targeting capabilities, creative generation, and optimization.
A Google value that's used to determine your ad position, whether your ads will show against a query and the price you pay. Calculated using your bid amount, and your Quality Score and the expected impact of extensions and other ad formats
The technology and service that places (serves) Ads on websites/applications and collects and reports performance data.
An ad tag is a snippet of code on a website that communicates with ad servers to make the correct digital ad appear on a webpage or in an app
The process of setting up ads in the adserver so that when an ad request is made to the ad server the correct ad will be returned and played.
Technology that lets you show different ads to different audience segments watching the same TV program on internet protocol TV (IPTV) and set top boxes. Those segments could be defined by behavioral, demographic, and geographic factors from 1st, 2nd, or 3rd party data sets.
Google’s online ad program where you can research, set up and manage SEM campaigns, and track and report on performance
Agency commission, also known as Settlement Discount, is a discount offered by some media vendors to agency businesses for on time payment, customarily 10%.
A set of rules used by computers to solve problems. Search engines use algorithms to determine the rankings on a search page.
A word or phrase that describes the content of an image. This is displayed if an image is not loaded, and it also helps search engines to index a page.
The process and practice of drawing attention to your content so more people visit your site, read your posts, share your content, link to it, ect.
The clickable text that forms part of a hyperlink. For example, if clicking 'photo gallery' on a webpage takes you to 'www.mywebsite.com/images', then 'photo gallery' is the anchor text.
An ATD is developed within a 'traditional' agency and helps manage programmatic media acquired through a bidding system that intends to seek a certain audience. ATDs are set up to benefit a particular advertising agency and their clients. They allow purchases of media in real-time rather than before its needed.
The process of connecting an ad event to a consumer action or desired response. Advertisers work with attribution modelling to quantify the contribution of various media activity to the performance of a campaign.
For each ad impression, ad auction system selects the best ads to run based on the ads' maximum bids and ad performance. All ads on Facebook compete against each other in this process, and the ads that the system determines are most likely to be successful will win the auction.
A specific audience, based on their demographics, interests, life stage, or most likely, a combination of these. This can be measured through Nielsen’s digital campaign ratings system.
An auditing service that allows advertisers to control that ads are actually served to the intended targeted profile of audience
Detection that audio content of an ad was played. This could be audio for an audio specific ad or audio for a video ad.
A video ad or an ad linked with video content that initiates ‘‘play’’ without user interaction or without an explicit action to start the video (essentially automatically starting without a ‘‘play’’ button being clicked by the user).
The practice of using individuals’ web-browsing histories for targeting. Interest, environments and online activity are tracked from past online activities, using cookies.
Bid amount ($) determines how effectively we can optimize your ad delivery. Your bid competes in an auction with other advertisers, who also want to reach the same target audience.
A blacklist is a list of IP addresses that are suspected to be sources of spam, or are suspected to be fraudulent and have been placed on an anti-spam database. Public blacklists are databases that are openly available, but companies often also have their own private black lists
Short for 'weblogs' this is a special kind of website for self-publishing, often done by the owner of the site (the "blogger"), but sometimes by a committee of authorised authors.
An individual who generates content for blogs, either personal or professional. Some professional bloggers generate levels of esteem and prestige equivalent to that of journalists.
Bot Traffic consists of ad impressions made by bots rather than humans. Bots, or web robots, are software applications that perform simple tasks on the Internet. While they have some constructive uses, they are most often associated with fraudulent activities, such as mimicking a human's view of an ad
A program that browses and indexes content on the internet. This data is then used to help search engines deliver relevant search results.
Refers to the percentage of a given page's visitors who exit without taking an action on the page or website.
Percentage of impressions that were displayed in brand safe environments. Technology can be used to block ads appearing on webpages where its appearance might negatively impact the Advertiser's brand.
A brand's exposure to an environment and/or context that will damage or be harmful to the brand. This could be an ad pubished next to, beore, or within an unsafe environment such as religious extremism or CENSOREDography.
Not to be confused with 'Brand in-appropriateness/Brand un-suitability'.
In terms of anchor text, a branded link is a link in which contains to company brand or similar derivative in the anchor text. Example branded link for Search Candy would be "Search Candy", "SearchCandy" and "SearchCandy.uk"
The method by which you pay for, target and measure ads in your campaigns: through dynamic auction bidding, fixed-price bidding, or reach and frequency buying.
Video content that is controlled, enabled, and consumed whenever a viewer wants after its official release date or original air date and time. VOD content can be found on set top boxes, OTT devices, mobile web, mobile apps, and video streaming services
The number of times a checkout was completed on your website as a result of your ad.
This is the web link that sit behinds the creative OR the action of clicking through on an ad
The number of times an Ad is clicked. A click refers to the opportunity for a user to download another file by clicking on an advertisement, as recorded by the server. A click is also the result of a measurable interaction with an advertisement or key word that links to the advertiser's intended website or another page / frame within the website.
Content generated by users in response to an inital publication, most notable blog posts. These are usually posted below the blog entry, and can often be vehicles for creating advanced levels of discussion that increase the lifespan of blog posts. Comments are also typically associated with news articles, videos, media-sharing sites, and Facebook posts.
Represents the portion of viewers that watched an Ad to completion. This is calculated by total 100% completed views divided by total impressions.
A television set that is connected to the Internet and is able to access a variety of web-based content. A connected TV may have built in internet capability, eg a smart TV, or use an over the top device (OTT), eg streaming box, bluray device, gaming console.
A basic level of targeting by placing the Ad on sites or in relevant sections for the advertiser. Allows your Ad to be seen in the “right place”, where a user may expect and want to see your Ad.
This is a completed activity that is defined as important to your client’s campaign and could include a land on a web page, start a quote, or watch a video for example
The average number of conversions per ad click, shown as a percentage. It is calculated by taking the number of conversions and dividing that figure by the number of total clicks that can be tracked to a conversion during the same time period. For example, 50 conversions from 1000 clicks; conversion rate would be 5% (50/1000).
Cookies are a small piece of data sent from a website and stored on the user's computer by the user's web browser while the user is browsing
The price an advertisr pays everyt ime a video ad runs through to completion. Rather than paying for all impressions, some of which may have been stopped part-way, an advertiser only pays for ads that are viewed to completion (CPCV= Cost / Completed views)
Cost of advertising based on a visitor taking some specifically defined action in response to an ad. 'Actions' include things such as a sales transaction, a customer acquisition or a click.
CPA = Total COST/Acquisitions
Some trading models and search auctions charge only when a user clicks on the ad to go through to the advertiser site. Calculated as total cost / number of clicks CPC = TOTAL COST / Number of Clicks
The price an advertiser pays every time a video ad runs through to completion. Rather than paying for all impressions, some of which may have been stopped before completion, an advertiser only pays for ads that finished (CPCV = Cost ÷ Completed Views).
The price an advertiser pays every time a user actually interacts or engages with the ad (as defined and agreed). Rather than paying for all impressions, an advertiser only pays for ads that a user interacted with (eg moused over a Light Box ad to expand) (CPE= Cost ÷ Engagement volume).
Cost per Thousand (Mille) – transaction metric based on the cost to deliver 1000 ad impressions. CPM = Total Cost / Impressions x 1000
A pricing model where the advertiser only pays for a video start. Typically sold at 1000 impressions.
A system for increasing the percentage of visitors to a website that convert into customers, or more generally, take any desired action on a webpage.
Tracking and measurement of video metrics across Mobile/Tablet/Out-of-Home/TV/Connected TV/Desktop.
Click through Rate which is defined as total volume of clicks for that placement divided by total volume of impressions for that placement x 100. It’s an indication of how effective a placement is at generating a click. CTR = Total CLICKS / Impressions x 100
A Custom Audience from a customer list is a type of audience you can create made up of your existing customer or database. You can target ads to the audience you've created on Facebook, Instagram, and Audience Network.
A page post created in Power Editor that will appear in News Feed but not on your Page. It allows you to create an ad for that post without it appearing on your Page's Timeline. This can be useful for example for a special offer for a new travel insurance prospect that you don’t want existing policy holders to see.
A data store that uses a persistent identifer to store data at a disaggregated level pertaining to campaign performance, client data and audience attributes
An option which restricts the advertising to only run at a time of day when it’s most likely to reach and engage the target audience.
A display ad technology that creates personalised ads based on data about the viewer at the moment of ad serving
A unique number assigned to an automated ad buy that allows the buyer and seller to identify one another
A data store that uses a persistent identifier to store data at a disaggregated level pertaining to campaign performance, client data and audience attributes.
A technology platform that allows buyers of digital advertising inventory to manage multiple ad exchange and data exchange accounts through one interface.
Media activity relating to a company or brand that is generated by external sources such as customers or journalists
Brand activity that directly engages consumers and invites and encourages them to participate with the brand.
A link that points to a different website than the link is found on. For example a link from http://www.domaina.com/ to http://www.domainb.com/
First-party data is YOUR data. This can include data from behaviours, actions or interests demonstrated across your website(s); data you have in your CRM; subscription data; social data; or cross-platform data from mobile web or apps. EXAMPLE – your client’s data.
An area on a website (or an entire website) dedicated to user conversation through written comments and message boards, often related to customer support or fan engagement.
The number of times a user is estimated to be exposed to an ad. Managed as a frequency cap (setting the maximum number of times a user will be served an ad), or an average frequency. Calculated as total number of impressions / reach.
Restricting (capping) the number of times (frequency) a specific visitor to a website is shown a particular advertisement
A common format for image files, especially suitable for images containing large areas of the same colour. GIF format files of simple images are often smaller than the same file would be if storing in JPEG format, but GIF format does not store photographic images as well as JPEG.
Traffic that comes from known non-human sources on publicly available IP lists.
A platform created by Google for people to better manage how their websites are seen in the search engine results.
The sum of individual TARPs for a TVC campaign. GRPs indicate the total weight of a schedule or gross audience (i.e. including duplication).
A symbol (#) placed directly in front of a word or words to tag a post on Twitter. It is often used to group tweets by popular categories of interest and to help users follow discussion topics.
The heading element in HTML defines a structure for headings in a document. Starting with H1 as the most important heading, descending to H6, heading tags are a standard part of HTML. The H1 tag is the most important heading element on a web resource. Generally there should only be one H1 on a page, but it is not a major problem to use more than one if it helps to describe the content of a page ie, if there is more than one section on a page.
Hypertext markup language (HTML) refers to the text-based language which is used to create websites
Known as “link” for short, is a word or phrase which is clickable and takes the visitor to another Web page.
Also known as "frames", these HTML tag devices allow 2 or more websites to be display simultaneously on the same page. Facebook now allows companies to create customised tabs for its fan pages using iFrames, a process which developers find much easier than using the previous "FBML", or Facebook markup language.
The Impression Multiplier is the factor used to determine how many impressions a Digital Out of Home (DOOH) screen gets - as several people are likely to be looking at a DOOH screen at any given moment, meaning that one play of an ad needs to be counted as several impressions. Currently there is no standardised methodology to calculate the Impression Multiplier, with each SSP determining their own approach.
The number of impressions delivered divided by the number of total eligible impressions. Some brands like to use this as an indicator of market share, more accurate to use it as an indicator of your participation, relevance and bid strategy in auctions.
An instance of an ad being served on a particular web page and the presentation is tracked.
Made available (often a purchase) within a particular app or mobile device without the need to visit a seperate site.
A form of video advertising that takes place outside of In-Stream Video content and includes Native Video, In-Feed Video, In-Article/Read Video, In-Banner Video, and Interstitial Video.
Ad Ad with appears in a viewable space on the users screen. Percentage of impressions that met the agreed viewability standards.
A person who has the power to influence many people, through social media or traditional media. A person whose livelihood revolves around their online presence or being famous in some way.
A type of digital video creative that can take user input to perform some enhanced actions through elements integrated above and beyond the standard video playback controls (i.e., play, pause, rewind, and mute). These interactions can include varied calls-to-actions, forms, polls/surveys, links, chapter menus and hot-spots that may affect story progression of the video content and/or drill down on specific parts of the content itself. The goal of the creative is to give the user various options to engage with the message beyond viewing the video
An internal link is a link that points to a resource found on the same website that the link is found on. For example a link from http://www.domain.com/about/ to http://www.domain.com/contact-us/
The aggregate number of opportunities for a publisher / media owner to display advertisements to visitors
This series of numbers and periods represents the unique numeric address for each Internet user
Third party company that license and supports DSP technology to act as a trading desk for Advertisers/Agencies
Percentage of fraudulent (non human) traffic. Also referred to as Ad Fraud %.
Such as news, sports or entertainment from publishing platforms such as News, Fairfax or BBC - considered premium content
The ability to serve Ads, alongside relevant content, based on users search terms.
Google's estimated monthly searches for a particular keyword in a particular country. Helps to prioritise keywords to target.
A stand-alone Web page that a user “lands” on, commonly after visiting a paid search-engine listing or following a link in an email newsletter
Is a hyper-link that when clicked will take a user from one resource or area of a page to another.
The number of clicks on links appearing on your ad or Page that direct people to other content/sites as a result of your ad.
A listing is a website’s presence in a search engine or directory, and is not necessarily indicative of its search-engine positioning
Is tailored and relevant messages based on a user’s location. The additional benefit is reduction of impression wastage and media costs. Possible due to the plethora of data available and the importance of the mobile device to our audience.
Long form video is generally regarded as single content pieces lasting more than 10 minutes, usually TV shows, and series and documentary type videos. If the content is ad supported, it typically contains breaks (mid-roll).
Aggregated inventory from less popular or well-known publisher sources. Programmatic enables advertisers to combine disparate sources of long-tail inventory to reach highly targeted niche audiences
Allows you to find people who are similar to your customers or prospects by building a look a like audience.
For CPC bidding campaigns, you set a maximum cost-per-click bid, the highest amount that you're willing to pay for a click on your ad. Your max CPC is the most that you'll typically be charged for a click, but often less. The final amount that you're charged for a click is called your actual CPC.
An image, video, text ect., typically humorous that is copied and spread rapidly. Often captioned photos.
A short list of words that describe the content of a webpage. These aren't used by search engines.
A snippet of text in a web page's code that describes the context of the page, and is used as the website's description in a search engine results page. E.g. the title tags are clickable blue links in search results and the black text is often the meta description of the page.
Everyday people with a decent sized following (ie less than 10,000), who can influence people through their social media channel. As opposed to a Mega-influencer ie Kim Kardashian.
A microblog is a social media utility where users can share short status updates and information. The most famous example is Twitter, which combines aspects of blogs (personalised Web posting) with aspects of social networking sites (making and tracking connectings, or "friends").
Medium Rectangle, or Mrec for short, is a common online banner format measuring 300x250 pixels.
A form of online advertising that matches the form and function of the platform on which it appears. For example,an article written by an advertiser to promote their product,but using the same form as an article written by the editorial staff. The word "native" refers to the content's coherence with other media on the platform.
Type of advertising, mostly online, that matches the form and function of the platform upon which it appears.
Is the constantly updating list of stories in the middle of your home page. News Feed includes status updates, photos, videos, links, app activity and likes from people, Pages and groups that you follow on Facebook.
A biddable open market system in which any seller can make digital inventory available for purchase by any buyer
Also known as “natural” listings, these are search-engine results that have not been purchased
Search engines have results that consist of paid ads and unpaid listings. The unpaid / algorithmic listings are called the organic search results. Organic search results are organized by relevancy, which is largely determined based on page content, usage data, and historical domain and trust related data.
Over the page (OTP) is an ad unit format which is served over the publisher webpage and is displayed for about 5 or 10 seconds. After that, the initial ad disappears and is replaced on the webpage by a more traditional ad unit.
Include data from trusted data partners. The data from these partners allows you to target people based on certain attributes like their income and whether or not they're a homeowner. You may also be able to target people based on things they do off of Facebook, like purchasing a new truck.
A paid-search system nearly identical to (and essentially synonymous with) pay-per-click
An invitation only RTB auction where one publisher or a select number of publishers invite a select number of buyers to bid on its inventory
A series of audio or video content which can be downloaded and listened to/viewed offline (of a particular episode in that series, e.g. podcast #6 of The Sporkful). Podcasts are sometimes created to provide stand-alone copies of existing radio or television programming but they may also consist of entirely unique content intended for devoted Web-based subscribers.
A joint ventures between big local media players, global sites and publishers who own multiple sites.
Facebook advertising tool designed for larger advertisers who need to create lots of ads at once and have precise control of their campaigns.
Paid search advertising, most common transaction mechanic, advertisers only pay the search engine when a user clicks on the ad to go to your site
Premium inventory is ad space on a site that a publisher has deemed higher-quality, and subsequently attempts to sell at a higher price.
A biddable environment in which a publisher can limit access to inventory to certain advertisers with established pricing rules
Communication that gives consumers the opportunity to be pulled into a brand experience ie blog where a brand is integrated into a segment.
Search Engine’s estimate of the value of your ad, based on click through rate, ad relevance and the landing page experience (landing page experience includes relevance of content to the search query, and other factors such as site load speed, mobile optimisation etc). The higher your quality score, the better your ad will perform and the lower your CPC
The process of exposing Ads to an audience which has already been exposed to a message, offer or advertiser’s website. It’s an opportunity to target users who have visited but not converted on what they have previously browsed.
A rating of 1 to 10 based on how your audience is responding to your ad. This score is calculated after your ad receives more than 500 impressions. Facebook considers how relevant an ad is when determining which ads to show. When your ad is relevant to your audience, its relevance score is higher and it is more likely to be served than other ads targeting the same audience. As a result, you pay less to reach your audience.
A publisher’s non-premium inventory, which is usually sold at a discounted rate by a third party via non-guaranteed programmatic buys.
Advertisements with which users can interact (as opposed to solely animation) in a web page format. These advertisements can be used either singularly or in combination with various technologies, including but not limited to sound, video, or Flash, and with programming languages such as Java, Javascript, and DHTML. These Guidelines cover standard Web applications including e-mail, static (e.g. html) and dynamic (e.g. asp) Web pages, and may appear in ad formats such as banners and buttons as well as transitionals and various over-the-page units such as floating ads, page take-overs, and tear-backs.
A type of programmatic buying by which multiple parties submit bids on inventory in real time
A system for searching the information available on the Web. Some search engines work by automatically searching the contents of other systems and creating a database of the results. Other search engines contain only material manually approved for inclusion in a database, and some combine the two approaches.
Second-party data is basically first-party data that you are getting directly from the source. You can make a deal with a particular publisher, whether through your DMP or elsewhere, to offer specific data points, audiences, or hierarchies to that other company. The terms of sale are determined by both parties in advance, and this sharing of high-quality first-party data gives you access to many non-endemic audiences you might not have previously been able to reach. EXAMPLE – Fairfax, News Corp data
Search Engine Marketing usually Paid Advertising/Search Advertising. Also known as Pay per click (PPC). Is the paid results, where advertisers bid in an auction for their Ad to appear against a particular keyword or search query.
Search Engine Optimisation. A Marketing discipline focussed on growing visibility in organic (non-paid) search engine results
Is the measure (% share) of advertising expenditure out of the total advertising expenditure over a defined period expressed as a percentage. SOE can be calculated based on a defined set of advertisers e.g., competitor set (category) or all advertisers. Calculation: $ expenditure ($100) / total $ expenditure ($1000) x 100 = 10% SOE.
Is the measure (% share) of audience received by an advertiser or category, out of the total audience available over a defined period and expressed as a percentage. SOV can be calculated based on a defined set of advertisers e.g., your competitor set (category) or all advertisers. Calculation = advertiser audience (20 ratings) / total competitor set audience (200 ratings) x 100 = 20% SOV for the advertiser versus the competitor set.
Television - SOV is calculated based on TARPS
Radio - SOV is calculated based on audience thousands
Digital - SOV is calcuated based on the number of impressions (compared to the number of impressions available)
Sponsorships - SOV is calculated based on audience for traditional channels OR the number of ad formats available (Digital)
Short form video is generally under 10 minutes, eg News Updates, how to videos, YouTube clips
SIVT traffic that is more difficult to detect and requires advanced analytics and significant human intervention to analyse and identify.
Slide hosting service, allowing users to upload files publicly or privately. To be viewed on site or embedded on other sites.
Managing, interactions or listening to a social community using tools provided by each social network to share posts and respond to customers.
Paying for influencers to create content and organically reach their audiences (mainly via Instagram)
A site or community on the Internet where members can interact with one another and share content
In email marketing, this refers to any message that is deemed by users or email providers to be an unsolicited commercial offer. Also called "junk mail".
SSP is the technology that enables the selling of digital ad impressions in automated auctions.
Publishers can sell and manage display, video or native ad inventory on desktop and mobile through SSPs.
The delivery of video or audio content stored in bits which enables it to be played in real time and without viewers having to wait for all the data to arrive.
A piece of code that is a unique identifier for each Ad, that informs your Ad server and publishes "I belong to this Ad/Creative, ad targeting criteria and specific size"
Target Audience Rating Point. The percentage of an advertiser’s target audience that is exposed to a campaign. Typically advertising is bought against a specific demographic or audience segment. Calculation: 720,000 people of your target audience exposed to your campaign / 4,800,000 target audience universe = TARP of 15
Small, crypic, challenging ads that anticipate a larger, full blown campaign or important event.
Text based ads on the search network, can also have ad extensions, with phone numbers and maps, shopping ads, app downloads or image ads
Third-party data is generated on other platforms and often aggregated from other websites. There are many companies out there that sell third-party data, and it is accessible through many different avenues. EXAMPLE – Lotame, Blue Kai, Eyeota
Timeline is the space on your profile where you can see your own posts, posts from friends and stories you're tagged in organized by the date they were posted.
The title of a web page as indicated in the HTML. Also often used as the title of your page in a search engine results page.
The total number of unique people (de-duplicated) that visited a site at least once during the specified time period.
A page containing structured links to every other important page on a particular website grouped by topic or navigational hierarchy
Commonly abbreviated as "UGC", it is any piece of content created by a member of a given website's audience for use on that website and sometimes to be freely distributed on the Web. Wikis (and Wikipedia) are examples of UGC.
VAST is a specification developed by the IAB for serving video ads. It provides a generic framework for embedding in-stream video ads, and is designed to facilitate and standardize the communication between video players and video ad server
The percentage of all video ads that play through their entire duration to completion. Also known as View Through Rate (VTR).
Video content that is controlled, enabled, and consumed whenever a viewer wants after its official release date or original air date and time. VOD content can be found on set top boxes, OTT devices, mobile web, mobile apps, and video streaming services
Is the abiliity for the digital ad to be seen by an actual consumer. An online advertising metric that aims to track only impressions that can actually be seen by our users
Video Player Adserving Interface Definition – Establishes a common interface between the video ad and video player. VPAID facilitates the interactions between ad units and video player focused on enabling rich interactive in-stream ad experience.
The percentage of all video ads that play through their entire duration to completion. Also known as Video Completion Rate (VCR).
Techniques that are used by some websites to try and cheat their way to the top of search sites to link to yours. This is considered bad practice because truly relevant websites get buried in the results.
How strong a website is. This can determine its ranking and it is based on many factors including history, links pointing to the website and the popularity of the website in visits/engagement
A white list is a database of approved websites where an advertiser is happy for its ads to appear. It's opposite number is a black list