Ad Operations Basic Terms 2023

• Advertiser: Any individual or entity purchasing online advertising space including agency media buyers, OEM media buyers, and sole proprietors.

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• Ad: A creative that is typically interactive. Banners, Video, interstitials are all examples of online advertisements. The digital ad can be text, static graphic, animated graphic, video, audio or other.

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• Ad Auction: For each ad impression, auction system selects the best ad to run based on the given bids and targeting criteria. All Ads compete against each other in this process, and the ads that the system determines are most likely to be successful, will be shown.  If you’d like to make your ad more competitive in the auction, you should raise your bids.

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• Ad exchange: A Platform which brings web publishers and advertising buyers together to participate in auctions for ad space. Used for the buying and selling of digital advertisements, an ad exchange is a marketplace where publishers and advertisers can find and execute advertising transactions (similar to what happens on a stock exchange).

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• Ad Network: An advertising company that connects between web site publishers and advertisers. Larger ad networks aggregate sites into general categories so that they can offer advertisers targeted buys.

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• Ad Rotation:  Ad rotation can be static (one ad per page view) or dynamic (more than one ad per page view cycled based on elapsed display time). This is usually done automatically by software on the website.

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• Ad server:  The ad server typically is responsible for selecting the appropriate ad to serve by frequency control and targeting. The ad server also performs a variety of other administrative tasks including the counting of impressions and clicks, and report generation. Use of an ad server helps establish trust between an advertiser and publisher.

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• Ad Space: The space on a web-page reserved to display advertising.

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• Agency: An organization beholden with the responsibility to design, produce and manage the advertising for its customers. Agencies that handle digital creative and online campaigns are typical called interactive agencies. Many agencies handle both interactive and traditional media.

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• Banner: A graphic that appears on a web page that is usually hyperlinked to an advertiser’s web site. May appear in a variety of file formats including GIF, JPEG, Flash, HTML, Java, JavaScript & more.

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• Behavioral targeting: A form of online targeted advertising by which online advertising is delivered to consumers based on previous internet actions that did not result in a conversion in the past.

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• Bid: The maximum rate you’ve indicated you’re willing to pay per unit. This bid helps determine your ad’s strength in the ad auction, and therefore its likelihood of appearing on the site.

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• Browser: An application used to access files from the Internet.

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• Category Targeting: The controlled delivery of creative to categorized websites. Categories focus a campaign to those users most likely to be interested in the products or services being offered, thus increasing the effectiveness of the campaign.

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• Channel: An area on a Web site, or a collection of websites and/or web-pages which contains information or content on a specific topic.

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• Clicks: Clicks are counted each time a user clicks through an ad to reach a landing page.

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• CTR: The percentage of impressions that resulted in a click through. Calculation is dividing the number of clicks by the number of impressions.

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• Click-through URL: When users click on a banner or text link, the click-through URL is the new destination to which they are directed.

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• Click Tracking: The process of counting and auditing the clicks for a campaign.

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• Conversion (Web): Term used to describe the process of getting a web visitor to accept an offer or become a paying customer.

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• Conversion Pixel: Pixels are HTML codes that can be inserted into advertiser’s action page to track post-imp/post-click actions

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• Cookies: A process by which a small file is sent from a web server to the local users computer to store information unique to that browser. Often used by advertisers to keep track of the number and frequency of advertisements that have been shown to a visitor or by sites to help them determine the number of unique visitors.

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• Cost per 1,000 Impressions (CPM): is one of the online payment models by which advertisers pays for every 1000 impressions of their advertisement.

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• Cost per Action or Acquisition (CPA): is one of the online payment models by which advertisers pays for ever action (sale or registration) completed as a result of a visitor clicking on their advertisement.

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• Cost per Click-through (CPC): is one of the online payment models by which advertisers pays for each click through made on their advertisement.

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• Cost per Engagement (CPE): An online advertising payment model which attempts to measure the value of a user’s engagement with a company’s brand.

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• Demographics: Statistical data that describes the makeup of a given user base, and includes information such as age range, gender, education levels, and average household income.

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• Flight, Flight Dates: The time period, and associated start and end dates, over which an advertising campaign runs.

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• Frequency: The rate a particular user is exposed to a particular creative or a particular campaign during a single session or period of time.

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• Geo-targeting: Serving of ads to a particular geographical area.

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• Home Page: The first page or front page of a Web site

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• House Ads: Type of banner advertisement that a web site publisher runs in an ad space when no paying advertisement is available to fill the space. Typically filled with an advertisement promoting one of the website’s services, products or features.

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• Hyperlink: HTML code that when clicked on redirects ones browser to another web page. Most banners are hyperlinked to an advertiser’s web page.

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• Hypertext Markup Language (HTML): A coding language used to make hypertext documents for use online.

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• IAB: The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is the leading online global advertising industry trade association.

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• Impression: The display of a single creative to a consumer on a website.

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• Post Order (PO): Online or printed document that specifies the details of an advertising campaign. The terms of the agreement may also be specified on the insertion order or they may be placed in a separate document but are almost always referred to the insertion order if not present.

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• Inventory: The number of ad spaces available for sale on a web site or network during a certain time frame.

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• Keyword: A word or phrase used to focus an online search and to target advertising. Advertisers can purchase keywords on search engines to guarantee that their website information is displayed prominently and/or display an associated creative.

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• Landing Page: The page on a web site where one is taken after clicking on a advertisement. While this can be any page, it is often a page designed to expand on the service or product mentioned in the initial advertisement.

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• Media Buyer / Media Planner: An individual working directly for an advertiser, or for an advertising agency, charged with the responsibility of purchasing advertising space. An interactive media buyer makes online ad space purchases, sometimes through an ad network.

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• Pacing: Your daily budget is the amount (money or ad unit) you’ve indicated you’re willing to spend on a specific campaign per day.

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• Page View: The loading of a webpage by a browser. A single User Session may result in multiple page views and numerous Impressions. Reload of the same page is another page view.

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• Proxy: A technique used to cache information on a Web server. It acts as an intermediary between a Web client and a Web server.

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• Publisher: An individual or entity selling online advertising space, including portal media planners, Webmasters and other ad networks. Publisher, web publisher, Webmaster and host are synonymous with respect to online advertising.

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• Rate Card: A presentation of the current rates to buy and sell advertising space on an ad network.

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• Reach: The number of unique visitors that visited a site over the course of the reporting period, expressed as a percent of the universe for the demographic category. Also called un-duplicated audience

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• Redirect: When you type in a URL and hit “enter” but notice that the browser automatically sends you to another URL, you are experiencing a redirect.

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• Refresh: To reload the same web page.

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• Re-targeting: Serves ads to people more frequently after they’ve left an advertiser’s website. Retargeting helps companies advertise to website visitors who leave without a conversion.

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• Return on Investment (ROI): Return on investment (ROI) is the process used to determine whether the monetary benefits from an expenditure, such as a advertising campaign, are above or below the amount of money spent on the campaign.

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• Rich Media: A type of advertisement technology that often includes richer graphics, audio or video within the advertisement. Unlike static or animated GIF banner advertisements, rich media advertisements often enable users to interact with the banner without leaving the page on which it appears.

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• Tag: HTML fragment that enables a website to serve an impression.

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• Targeting:  The control of the distribution of ad creative to only those websites or those users that fit within the particular targeting parameters.

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• Traffic: The volume of visitors to a website

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• Uniform Resource Locator (URL): an HTTP address used by the World Wide Web to specify a certain site.

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• Unique Page Views: The total number of unique pages on a website by a unique visitor.

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• Unique Visitor and User Session: A unique IP address visiting a website for the first time in a specified period. Unique visitor is more often associated with long periods of time, such as a month. User session is more often associated with shorter periods of time, such as 30 minutes.

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• User: A term that defines the online audience, it also refers to anyone who uses a computer.

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• Website: A virtual location online designated by a unique URL. A website is made up of one or more Web-pages​