Advertisement Vocabulary:

I am listing down some important and good to remember advertisement terminology.

Advertisers: Marketers from brands and business who buy advertising. Can be broken down into two main types. The first are called “Brand or Institutional” advertisers and the second “Direct Response” advertisers. Brand advertisers focus promoting a brand’s image or a particular initiative. Direct response advertisers focus on driving app downloads, generating sales and generating leads. 

Advertising Option Icon: The “i” triangle button is placed on ad creatives so a consumers can learn how their data is collected and used. Administered the AdChoices, an industry consortium dedicated to self regulation. 

Ad Blockers: Software enabled through a person’s web browser or mobile device which can prevent ads from being displayed.

Ad Exchanges: A marketplace that automates the ad buying process for both the advertiser (buyer) and the publishers (seller). There are 

many different types of exchanges and they operate under various models.

Ad Integration: The technical process of defining and making available ad slots within a publisher’s site or app. 

Ad Network: An Ad Network is a company that connects advertisers to publishers. The network model aggregates many different publishers into one generic ad buy, usually at steep discount. Buyers have very little control over where the ads are displayed. Some networks are totally blinded, they offer no insight into what sites and apps the ads appear on. While others are semi-blinded and provide the advertiser with a list of publisher that the ads will appear on. 

Ad Ops (Online Advertising Operations): The team and process which aid in the sales and delivery of online advertising. Specifically the process and systems that sell, input, serve, target and report on digital ad campaigns. 

Ad Request: The request made to an ad server to display an advertisement. The request doesn’t always result in an ad displayed for a variety of reasons, including mobile network latency. 

Ad Servers: The technology that disseminates a digital ad and measure the performance of that ad. 

Ad Slot: Refers to a space in an app that has been reserved for advertisement. 

Ad Unit: Any predefined advertising vehicle that can appear in an app or on a mobile website. For example, a rectangular banner is considered to be a common type of ad unit. 

Ad Verification: Tools that advertisers use to determine if impressions are displayed, where they are displayed and if they meet the advertiser’s privacy criteria. It’s popular to use an ad verification system to verify blinded buys and provide confidence that the proper audience has been reached. 

Agencies: Advertising agencies are businesses that are dedicated to creating, planning, and handling advertising for their clients. Many advertising agencies specialise in a specific area such as social media, online advertising, mobile advertising, and search engine marketing. 

Agency Trading Desks (ATDs): A media buying platforms owned and operated by an agency.

Algorithm: This is a step by step procedure for calculations. Algorithms are used for calculations, data processing, and automation. 

Algorithms are what powers the RTB and DSP space. 

Analytics:

• Third Party: Generally a survey based approach popular in traditional media. Examples include companies 
• First Party: Software tools (Google Analytics, Omniture, Webtrends among them) operated through tags on a site’s pages or in an app, which provide data on usage, sales conversion, clicks, impression and other digital metrics. 

API (Application Programming Interface): A predetermined way for a software components to interact with each other. API’s are commonly included in SDKs. 

Audience Targeting: The practice of using data to imply an audience, either by demography, life stage or intent. One example is targeting people who have searched for information on a cars or mobile phones. 

Beacons: A 1x1 pixel tag typically used by an advertiser or a third party ad server to track a unique user’s activity over times. 

Behavioural Targeting: What is now generally referred to as “audience targeting.” It’s the process of looking at behaviour instead of context as a method for ad targeting.

Big Data: A term used to describe a data driven approach to business. The Big Data approach stresses the use of data and quantitative analysis as the primary factor in business decision making. 

Blocked Sites: Publishers who an advertisers or ad buying platform have deemed inappropriate to appear on that site. Generally referring to a publisher that was available on a buying platform, but was blocked for violating the terms of service of the buyers. 

Brand Impact Studies: Studies which use control/exposed methodology to determine whether an ad that was served had an impact on metrics like ad recall, brand favourability and purchase intent. 

Call to Action: A statement or instruction, that explains to a user how to respond to an opt-in for a particular promotion or mobile initiative, which is typically followed by a notice. 

Click-to-Call: A mobile specific ad interaction type where a user clicks an ad which launches a phone call. Popular with paid search, direct response and small local businesses. 

Click Through Rate: A way of measuring the success of a digital advertising campaign. CTR is obtained by dividing the number of users who clicked on an ad by the number of impressions. 

Contextual Targeting: A contextual advertising system scans the text of a web for certain keywords and returns advertisements to the webpage based on ad messages that match with those keyword. Example: ads on the side of your Gmail that pop up text ads based on your email content. 

Natural Contextual Targeting: The traditional method of ad buying which looked at the contextual nature of the editorial content and placed relevant ads into it. An example would be a car advertisement running in a car review magazine. 

Conversion Tracking: Conversion tracking allows marketers to measure app installs driven from advertising and marketing. The technology is used primarily in cookie-less environments like in-app ads. 

Cookies:

• First party cookies: Used by an individual publisher to identify a visitor in an anonymised way. 
• Third party cookies: Used by an ad-server to identify and categorise a visitor into a targeting segment or classification.
• Cookie Deletion: The process of deleting cookies from your web browser to avoid detection by advertising technology.
• Cookie-less Technology: Any substitute to cookie based identification. Used in mobile app advertising to target and classify users generally through IFA (Identification for advertisers) from Apple. 

CPC (Cost per Click): A digital advertising business model where an advertiser only pays for ads clicked upon, popularised by Google when they introduced Adwords. 

CPI (Cost per Install): The cost required for a marketer to generate an app install. Typically this is a fixed price charged by a DSP to a marketer regardless of the CPM or CPC price. 

CPM (Cost per Mil): The Cost per Mil (thousand impressions delivered) is a method of ad buying where a given publishers charges on this basis of ad exposure. Poplar with brand advertising where click throughs are not relevant. 

eCPM: A mathematical process of calculating a publisher CPM from a different methods such as CPC. Generally performed by publishers who have buyers using both CPM and CPC. By calculating an eCPM they can better manage yield optimisation. The eCPM calculation is: cost/(impressions delivered/1000). 

Creative Optimisation: The process of favouring the highest performing creative by adjusting the frequency of creative exposure, typically on a direct response basis. 

DAA (Digital Advertising Alliance): A trade organisation that promotes industry self regulation including: AAAAs, AAF, ANA, DMA with support from the CBBB. The alliance includes over 5,000 member companies.

Data Aggregators: Platforms that aggregate ad serving data, conversion data and other 3rd party data sources including offline data. 

Data Leakage: The practice of scraping or matching user attributes from targeting data in an unintended way. Generally, but not always a violation of a platform’s or publisher’s terms of service. 

Device Type: A class of devices with identical capabilities. All devices of the same device type can be treated interchangeably. For example: iPhone 5 or Samsung Galaxy. 

DDM (Data Driven Marketing): An approach to marketing that stresses the use of quantitative analysis to determine the targeting, timing, and content of marketing promotions. 

Digital Fingerprinting: App tracking methodology that collects parameters about a specific mobile user such as the time stamp or network visited. This is used to track a mobile user’s activity in a completely anonymised fashion.

Direct Sold: Inventory sold by a publisher directly through their sales team. 

DMA (Designated Market Area): In the US a DMA represents counties, zip codes or sometimes split counties that contain a specific population that can be targeted by advertising. 

DMPs (Data Management Platforms): A platform used to collect unstructured audience data from analytical tools, CRM, point of sale data, social, advertising or any other available sources. 

DSP (Demand Side Platform): A platform that automates media buying across multiple sources. It generally provides the buyer with uni ed targeting, data, optimisation and reporting. 

Dynamic Pricing: The practice of publishers dynamically changing the price of their inventory in step with market demand.

Engagement Rates: Percent of total impressions that were clicked, liked, or commented on regardless of platform. 

Exchange: Used to define a business model where vendors place themselves as a middleware solution for the direct purpose of driving market liquidity between the demand side and the supply side. 

Fill Rate: The percentage of ad requests that are filled with ads.

Frequency Capping: The practice of managing the number of times a user views a specific ad creative. 

HTML5: The 5th revision of HTML code. Includes support for animation, video and other rich media functionality. Used exclusively by Apple as a replacement to Flash for delivery of rich media content. 

IDFA (Identifier For Advertisers): Tracking method used by advertisers for devices running Apple iOS 6 or higher. Allows for user opt out at the device level. This supplanted the use of UDID (Unique Device Identifier) prior to iOS 6. 

Impression: Measurement unit for digital advertising, where a single view of an ad is counted as one impression. Interstitial Ads: A full screen ad slot that appears between the current user state and next within an mobile app or game. 

Inventory: The estimated total amount of ad space a publisher has available to sell to an advertiser.

Premium Inventory: Ad impression which is in high demand and gives the advertiser the highest possible ROI. 

Remnant Inventory: Ad impression from low performing placements that publishers offer up to be resold as part of blinded or semi- blinded package. 

Latency: The length of time between, a user taking an action (such as clicking) and the response of the application to perform the task. This is generally used to refer to the length of time between a page loading and the ads appearing on that page. 

LUMA Landscape: A map of the marketing technology space which shows different technologies and where they sit in the ecosystem. It’s created by an investment banking rm called LUMA Partners. 

Media Silos: A term used to describe the specialisation of media buying and planning that happens in a large agency. Teams are generally based on a specific media type such as TV, outdoor, digital or social and don’t have domain knowledge of expertise in an area outside to their own. 

MMA (Mobile Marketing Association): The Mobile Marketing Association is the premier global non-pro t trade association established to lead the growth of mobile marketing and its associated technologies. 

Native Advertising: An ad unit that looks like a piece of content from a specific publisher. It generally is labeled as “sponsored content or post.” Publishers such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Buzz-feed already incorporate native ad formats into their published content. 

OPEN RTB: A project started in November 2010 by the IAB to develop an API specification for companies interested in an open protocol for the automated trading of digital media across a broader range of platforms, devices, and advertising solutions. 

Pre-roll: The streaming of a mobile advertising clip prior to a mobile TV/video clip. The mobile ad is usually 10-15 seconds in length. 

Private Marketplaces And Exchanges: The ability of a publisher through an SSP to carve out a portion of their inventory and sell it programmatically. Generally set up the following three ways: 

• Tiered Auctions: The publisher sells their inventory on a RTB exchange, however they create a priority “tier” to allow only certain advertisers access to the inventory ahead of other buyers. 
• Segmented Auctions: The publisher white labels an RTB platform and sells their inventory separately from that RTB platform. 
• Exclusive Access: The publisher allows buyers and sellers to negotiate predefined terms for pricing, availability of inventory, transparency, etc. RTB becomes the delivery vehicle for these terms. 

Programmatic Buying: The practice of automating the digital media buying process. 

Programmatic Selling: The practice of using a DSP to automate the sale of media assets. 

Programmatic Trading: The practice of fully automating both the buying and selling of online media with little or no human intervention. 

Publishers: Companies that produce the content on websites or apps where ads are placed.

Push Messaging: Any content sent by advertisers and marketers to your mobile device at a time other than when you requested it. Push 

messaging can include audio, SMS, e-mail, multimedia messaging, cell broadcast etc. 

Retargeting: A form of online advertising by which ads are targeted to consumers based on their previous internet activity. There are various types of retargeting including: 

• Site: Targeting users who visit a page of your website. 
• Email: Targeting users who open your emails. 
• Dynamic: Targeting users with ads of the specific items or products they were viewing. 
• Search: Targeting users who search for specific search queries in search engines. 
• CRM: Targeting offline users by on-boarding offline data such as a mailing address to a data provider and matching up IP addresses. 

ROI (Return On Investment): A metric that describes how much money is gained or lost on marketing relative to the
amount invested.

RTB (Real Time Bidding): Method of selling and buying online display advertising in real time one ad impression at a time. This happens instantaneously through a live auction, very similar to the automated stock trading on a stock market exchange. 

Second Price Auction Model: When an ad sale through fails to hit the floor or minimum pricing set and the publisher decides it’s worth putting it out again at a different price. 

Semantic Targeting: A more advanced version of contextual targeting. A technology that actually reads the text of a page and targets ad based on it’s ability to read the text, rather than just match individual keywords. 

Sentiment Analysis: Used to determine if the “sentiment” of the page is positive or negative.

Social mvv based on data from social networks and an individuals “social graph” or network of

friends.  

Stack: Used to describe the different technology layers in place to facilitate the buying or selling of digital advertising. Different vendors specialise on different parts of the “stack” and the pieces all operate together to form an ecosystem. 

Supply Side Platforms (SSP): A platform that automates publisher media optimisation process from multiple sources and provides uni ed reporting. 

Transparency: Generally refers to advertisers requesting a complete lists of sites and apps they can advertise on through either a network or an exchange. 

UDID (Unique Device Identifier): Hardware-based identifier unique to Apple’s iOS which was used by advertising companies to gather user data to improve ad relevance. Replaced in 2012 with IFA (Identifier for Advertisers). 

Unified Optimisation: The process of unifying tools and reporting available through an SSP so that a publisher can look at their inventory in a holistic manner and optimise their sales accordingly. 

Unique User: Refers to the number of distinct individuals requesting ads during a given period.

View Through: The practice of tagging a user that didn’t click, but did view an ad. If a conversion action is take such as a sale that is 

referred to as a View Through Conversion. 

Viewable Ads: A classification of ads placements that are actually seen by a users rather than just loaded on a page or into an app. 

VCs: Venture capitalists are a specialised segment of the financial industry who focus on early-stage, high-potential, high risk, growth companies. 

Yield Optimisation: The process a publisher goes through in order to optimise their demand partners and maximise ROI from the inventory being sold. Generally publishers give priority access to the demand partner paying the highest CPM and tier the partners access by CPM value.