ONLINE ADVERTISING GLOSSARY

Católica Lisbon – ONLINE ADVERTISING 2022

A/B Testing: A method used to compare different versions of digital ads or

website landing pages in order to determine which one performs better. A
typical A/B test for ads involves running the two ads simultaneously and then
measuring which version gets a better response from the audience.When
running an A/B test, only one element of the ads should be changed at a time.
This is because the goal of these tests is to determine which variables
generate the best responses from the audience. Once a winner is selected, it is
then used as the next control and compared with another version to isolate
and identify, the ad element that causes the audience to respond favorably to
the ad.

Above the Fold/ Front Fold: A term derived from the print advertising
industry. It describes the area of a web page that’s visible before the website
visitor scrolls down the page. Note: There is no set pixel size for the fold; it will
vary depending on the visitor’s screen size and resolution.

Account-based Advertising: One tactic in an account-based marketing

(ABM) strategy. It’s the practice of serving display advertising only to specified
titles at the target accounts you designate. For example, if you’re marketing a
new type of food packaging to General Mills, you might target multiple levels of
responsibility, such as Senior Product Manager, Senior Product Marketer, VP
of Product Marketing. Only people who work at General Mills and have these
titles would be shown your ads.

Ad Audience: The total number of people that have been exposed to or could
possibly be exposed to an ad during any specific time period.

Ad Banner: The most common form of digital advertising. These ad units,

which include static graphics, videos and/or interactive rich media, are
displayed on a web page or in an application.

Ad Click: The action taken when a user interacts with an ad by either clicking
on it with their mouse or by pressing enter on their keyboard.

Ad Exchange: A technology-facilitated marketplace that allows Internet

publishers and advertisers to buy and sell advertising inventory in real-time
auctions.Ad exchanges are a departure from the historical method of buying
ad inventory, where advertisers and publishers would enter price negotiations

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in order to show ads on a particular website. With an ad exchange, an auction
is conducted in real-time, providing instantaneous bidding for ad space that’s
available across the Internet.

Ad Impressions: The number of times an ad has been served, regardless of

whether the user has actually seen or interacted with the ad in any way. (Also
see: Ad Serving)

Ad Inventory: Website publishers serve ads to visitors when they visit a web
page. The number of potential ads that can be served is considered their ad
inventory. For example, if The Gotham Times averages 1,000 visits to their
home page in any given week, and they have space for two display ads on
their home page, then their potential ad inventory is 2,000 impressions per
week.

Ad Network: A vendor that connects advertisers to publishers. Ad networks

act as a single point of contact between publishers and advertisers, helping
negotiate supply and demand.

Ad Serving: The delivery of an ad from a web server to the end user’s device,
where the ads are displayed on a browser or an application.

Ad Targeting: Delivering ads to a pre-selected audience based on various

attributes, such as geography, demographics, psychographics, web browsing
behavior and past purchases. (Also see: Behavioral Targeting, Contextual
Targeting, and Geographic Targeting.)

Ad Unit: A size-and-format specification for an ad. The Interactive Advertising

Bureau, a trade association promoting digital ad standard and practices, has a
set of guidelines for sizes.

Affiliate Marketing: Publishers have websites that get traffic and advertisers
want to promote their products to the people who visit those websites. Affiliate
marketing is an agreement between a publisher and an advertiser where the
publisher receives compensation for every click delivered and/or every sale
made of the advertiser’s product or service.

Analytics: Data and statistics about the users of a website and how they
interact with the website. Analytics can be used to uncover information about
how many people browse a website, how much time they spend on the
website and the specific actions they take on the website.This information is
then used to target audiences, understand consumer behavior, improve user
experience and optimize advertising campaigns.

Attribution: The goal of attribution is to identify which touch, of the many

possible, is most (or partially) responsible for a conversion, so ROI can be
calculated. First touch, last touch, and multi-touch are common attribution
models. For example, a sale might begin with an ad, lead to an email

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campaign, and end with a phone call from a sales person. With first-touch
attribution, the ad would get the entire credit for the sale. With last-touch, the
phone call gets all the credit. With multi-touch, the ad, the email and the phone
call each get partial credit.

Bounce Rate: A bounce is a website visit in which the visitor looked only at the
single page they landed on, did not interact with it, and then left the site. The
bounce rate expresses such visits as a percentage of the total visitor sessions,
within a specific time frame.For example, suppose a website has 100 sessions
in one day. (Note that this is different from 100 visitors. Any visitor could visit
multiple times, and each time would count as a session.) If 75% of the visits are
bounces, then the bounce rate will be 75%. A high bounce rate is often
indicative of a poorly designed landing page. It can also indicate that a page
completely fulfilled what the visitor was looking for, so the visitor did not need
to keep clicking to find out more. (But more often it means the page failed,
underscoring how important it is to design landing pages for visitor
engagement.)

Brand Awareness: The extent or level to which a potential consumer can

recall and identify a particular product or service. Increased brand awareness
is one of the two customary important goals for a digital advertising campaign
(the other being a conversion of some kind).

Call to Action (CTA): A phrase included within an ad, or a graphic element

such as a button, which invites the audience to take a certain action.Examples
include phrases such as Click to Read More, Download Your Free eBook
Now, or Click Here.

Channel: A distribution method; In advertising, it’s an outlet used by

advertisers to reach audiences, such as direct mail or radio. Digital advertising
includes channels such as display advertising, social media advertising, and
mobile in-app advertising.

Click-through Rate (CTR): Expressed as a percentage of total impressions,

this statistic shows how often people who are served an ad end up clicking on
it.An ad’s CTR is calculated by dividing the number of clicks an ad received by
the number of times it’s been served, then converting that into a percentage.
For example, if an ad received 5 clicks and was shown 1000 times, the CTR is
0.5%. The higher the CTR on an ad, the better it’s performing.

Contextual Targeting: Selecting audiences based on the type of content

being displayed on a particular webpage.An example of contextual advertising
is placing ads for hair care products on the Vogue website.

Conversion: When launching a campaign, advertisers select a specific action

or set of actions they want audiences to take. Each time a member of the
audience takes this action, it is counted as a conversion. Conversions include

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actions such as signing up for a newsletter, or making a purchase on a
website.

Conversion Pixel: A 1×1 image pixel placed on a web page (such as a thank-
you page) which is triggered whenever a conversion occurs. Usually
transparent.The first is by the taking the number of users who completed the
conversion and dividing it by the total number of impressions served.The
second, more common way, is by taking the number of users who completed
the conversion and dividing it by the total number of users who clicked on the
ad.

Conversion Rate: Expressed as a percentage, a conversion rate can be

calculated in two ways:

Conversion Tracking: Monitoring how many conversions have occurred

during any specific time period, and analyzing which ads led to the
conversions.

Cookie: Information stored on a website visitor’s browser. A cookie tracks the

visitor’s movement on the website and is used to remember the visitor’s
behavior and preferences. These do not transfer across browsers.

Copy: Text in an ad, or text written to be delivered audibly.

Cost per Acquisition (CPA): The cost of acquiring one customer. Typically
calculated by dividing the total amount spent on an advertising campaign by
the number of customers acquired through that campaign.

Cost per Click (CPC): How much an advertiser pays, on average, for each ad
click. CPC is calculated by dividing the total amount spent on a campaign by
the number of clicks generated.

Cost per Lead (CPL): How much an advertiser pays, on average, for each ad
click that results in a lead conversion. CPL is calculated by dividing the total
amount spent on a campaign by the number of leads generated.

Cost per Thousand (CPM): Metric that shows how much it costs to serve
1,000 ad impressions. Also used as a standard measure for buying display ads,
as inventory is generally sold on a CPM basis.

Cross-Device Targeting: Serving the same buyer targeted ads across

multiple devices.Cross-device targeting allows advertisers to reach their
audiences in a sequential, repetitive manner regardless of the device they’re
on, whether it’s a tablet, desktop or smartphone. This has a similar effect to the
old-school tactics of gaining reach and frequency through using a range of
channels such as radio + newspaper + billboards + direct mail.

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Demand-Side Platform (DSP): A system that allows advertisers to bid for and
purchase inventory from multiple ad exchanges, through one single interface.

Direct Response: A campaign or ad specifically created to encourage

audiences to take immediate action.

Display Advertising: A digital advertising format where graphic ads are

shown on a web page. The term originated in newspapers, and the principles
still apply.Display ads can be graphics, videos, interactive images (a quiz or a
game), and expandable (Also see: Expandable Banner).

Email Advertising: Clickable banner ads and links that appear within emails
and e-newsletters.

Expandable Banner: Banners that increase in size when a user hovers over
them.

Frequency: The number of times an ad is served to the same consumer during

a specific time period.Since multiple users can often access the Internet from
the same device, frequency is calculated based on the number of times an ad
is delivered to a particular device’s browser.

Frequency Capping: Setting a limit on the amount of times an ad should be

shown to a consumer within a specific time period.

Geographic Targeting: Selecting an audience for a campaign based on zip

codes, designated marketing area (DMA), cities, states and countries.

GDPR: Commonly referred to by its acronym, GDPR is the European

Union’s General Data Protection Regulation. It became effective on May 25,
2018. We’ve produced quite a bit of information about the regulation, including
podcasts, blog posts, eBooks and webinars on our GDPR resource hub.

Impression: See: Ad Impression

In-Stream Video Ads: Video ads played before, during or after the video
content the publisher is delivering to the consumer.

Interstitial Ads: Ads that appear between two different content pages, served
when a website visitor navigates from one page on a website to another. A
best practice in mobile marketing is to avoid using an interstitial as a popup
that blocks initial access. For example, when the user tries to access the
Gotham Times on their mobile, they are interrupted by an interstitial ad
(offering the Gotham Times app) that they have to either accept or close
before they can proceed to the site.

Keyword: A specific word or phrase chosen by advertisers to trigger and

include their ad within search engine results. The advertiser doing contextual

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advertising also chooses keywords, so that their ad will show up within pages
that are returned for that keyword.In search advertising, the position of the ad
within the results is determined by bidding. The highest bidder on a keyword
usually gets the top position.

Landing Page: The web page users are directed to after they click on a display
or paid search ad.

Lead: A potential customer. In digital advertising a lead is someone who has

given you their contact information, often by signing up for a newsletter or
filling out a form to download an eBook or other gated content.

Lookalike Audience: If you’re like most businesses, you know who your
customers are from a demographic and even psychographic point of view. A
Lookalike Audience targets people who are similar to your existing customers
which helps improve your conversion rates. You can use Lookalike Audiences
when you’re running online display, Facebook, mobile display or just about any
other kind of digital marketing campaign.

Mobile Search: Any Internet search conducted via a mobile device.

Native Advertising: Any paid advertising that is indistinguishable in form from

the channel being used to present it.

Overlay: Advertising that floats over webpage content, graphics or videos.

Overlays cannot be blocked by ad-blocking software. One kind of overlay is
called a lightbox. These ads begin as a standard, scalable ad unit. If a user
engages by hovering over the ad for some set amount of time (often two
seconds), the ad expands (to as much as near full-page), while the page
behind it dims, increasing emphasis on the ad. Advertisers pay for the number
of times the ad is expanded.

Paid Search: The placement of ads within search engine results.

Pay per Click (PPC): Pricing model where advertisers pay vendors or
publishers based on the number of clicks received in a campaign.

Publisher: A platform, individual or organization that generates, prepares and

adapts content for distribution on one or multiple websites or other digital
platforms for commercialization or other purposes.

Pop-up: Opens in a new browser window that loads on top of the current
webpage. Pop-ups are operated by script (e.g., Javascript); thus, can be
blocked and commonly are by a wide variety of available software.

Pop-under: Identical to a pop-up except it loads under your current webpage.

It’s generally assumed to be less intrusive than a pop-up because visitors often
don’t see it until after they’ve clicked to close their current browser session.

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Programmatic Media Buying: An automated method of buying media
which ensures that advertisers are reaching the right person, at the right time,
in the right place. The ads are bought based on a set of parameters pre-
defined by the company placing the ads. Programmatic advertising uses data
to make decisions about which ads to buy in real time, which improves
efficiencies and increases the effectiveness of the ads. (See also, Ad
Exchange.)

Post-roll: A video ad shown at the end of a video.

Pre-roll: A video ad shown at the beginning of a video.

Reach: The total number of people who see your message. One person who is
served your ad five times and clicks on it once yields a reach of 1, 5
impressions, and a click-through rate of 20%.

Retargeting/Remarketing: Serving ads to people who have previously visited

your website.

Rich Media: Interactive media such as quizzes, games, and ads with video and
special effects. This category is growing quickly. Check out the IABs Rising
Stars examples of new types of ad units such as the Pushdown and the
Sidekick.

Search Advertising: Another term for Paid Search.

Social Advertising: Running paid ads on online social networking platforms,

such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.Examples of native advertising
include sponsored content on news websites and Facebook timeline ads.

Sales Funnel: The definition of the sales funnel (also known as a revenue
funnel or sales process) refers to the buying process that companies lead
customers through when purchasing products. A sales funnel is divided into
several steps, which differ depending on the particular sales model.

Search Engine: A platform that sorts the information available on the internet,
and presents it as an index when a user performs a specific search on a topic.

Search Engine Optimization – SEO: A group of actions and techniques aimed

at positioning or ranking a website on the first few pages of the search results
when users search using certain keywords (see Keywords).

View Through: Used to measure a consumer’s behavior after they’ve been

served an ad. If the view through window is set to 90 days, the consumer’s
relevant actions within that time period can be attributed to the ad.So, if a
customer purchases a pair of headphones within 90 days of being served an
ad for those headphones, the ad will be get partial or full attribution for that
purchase.

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Website Pixel: Pixels are snippets of code that allow you to gather valuable
information about website visitors and what actions they took, so you can send
them ads that are most relevant to them. Pixels are vital for measuring
campaign performance, tracking conversions, and automatically building
audiences based on behavior.