Below are some terms encountered in digital adverting. The definitions offered are by no means all-inclusive or final; As with any viable industry, the lexicon changes and grows over time.
| Term | Definition | Source or Additional Info |
|---|---|---|
| 3rd Party Data | any data that a marketer can purchase in order to better identify and target their audiences. Can include demographic or psychographic data, past purchase history, financial data, and more.
Where it comes from: Data Exchanges or individual 3rd party data providers. How it’s used: 3rd party data is used to compile audience databases or “cookie pools.” |
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| Ad Exchanges | online auction marketplace that facilitates buying and selling of inventory across multiple Ad Networks and DSPs
Who uses: Advertisers, Agencies to reach audiences; Ad Networks and DSPs to sell Publisher-partners’ inventory Benefits: Make buying across multiple Ad Networks more efficient by consolidating inventory across Networks and allowing advertisers to set rules for how much they are willing to pay per imp based on expected return against campaign goals Considerations: Exchanges focus on providing access to large volumes of inventory, with dynamic and variable pricing; typically do not provide additional services required for a media plan, such as data targeting and media verification. Consequently most advertisers use Ad Exchanges WITH other Ad Network or DSP partners |
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| Ad Network | typically include other services with media campaigns, such as ad serving, media verification, privacy notification, reporting, data and/or audience targeting
Who uses: Advertisers, Agencies to reach audiences; Publishers to sell remnant inventory Benefits: Buying inventory across multiple sites simplified for advertiser, costs aggregated within 1 IO; can be cost effective for advertisers/agencies to use with inclusion of other services offered (targeting, media verification) Considerations: Ad Networks typically do not provide complete transparency into inventory costs</p |
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| Data Exchanges | online auction marketplace where advertisers acquire 3rd party data that helps them better reach their target audiences with display
Who uses: Ad Networks, DSPs Benefits: Ease of access to data for targeting Considerations: Require ongoing testing and analysis to learn how to mix and match data types to yield best results (time consuming) |
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| Data Scrape | technique in which a computer program extracts data from human- readable output coming from another program, with the output intended for display to an end-user (rather than another computer/program) | http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_scraping |
| Demand Side Platforms (DSPs) | ad tech platform that allows marketers to manage online media campaigns by enabling buying auction-based display media and audience data across multiple inventory and data suppliers in a centralized management platform
Who uses: Agencies, Marketers Benefits: Gives control and transparency into buying Considerations: Transparency, but resource-intensive. Some DSPs may have added costs for added services, like ad serving, data and media verification. |
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| Demographic | 3rd party data type
socio-economic, including geolocation, age, income |
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| Direct Response (DR) | the business of selling products or services directly to the public, e.g., by mail order or telephone selling, rather than through retailers | |
| Data Management Platform (DMP) | unified technology platform that takes in separate first-, second-, and third-party data sets, normalizes or organizes the data so you can do segmentation on that data | |
| Dynamic Creative | digital ad creative that contains design elements, which integrate with programmatic and real-time bidding strategies. It enables advertisers to deliver a message that’s tailored to the audience viewing it and the environment on which it’s being viewed | https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/articles/programmatic-merging-data-and-creative.html#utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=paid-media&utm_campaign=ph2-sp-tweet |
| Dynamic Prospecting | process of selling to users without first cookie-ing them (unknown users) | |
| In-Market/ Intent | 3rd party data type
indicates an audience with the intention to take a certain action, e.g. purchase a product or book a trip to a specific location. Data comes from research sites, shopping or comparison sites, online travel aggregators, and vertical search engines. These sites identify user interests down to a specific product or travel destination and then sell these users to Data Exchanges. |
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| Key Performance Indicators (KPI) | performance indicator; for a website, includes visitors/day, pageviews/visitor, time on site, bounce rate, etc. | |
| Lookalike (LAL) | 3rd party data type
potential customers modeled after actual customers on a marketer’s website. Attributes of marketer’s customers are matched against a larger audience, creating a pool of highly targetable users. This data can help marketers reach new, prospective customers. |
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| Programmatic | The use of technology to automate the buying of media and aggregation of data in real time | |
| Online Data Providers | any provider who sells data online, ex: Experian, Nielsen, OwnerIQ
Who users: Advertisers and their agencies, Ad Networks, DSPs, Data Exchanges Benefits: Provides data that can be used to build audiences to meet a marketer’s campaign goals Considerations: Every data type and provider and their respective combos yields different results. Require ongoing testing and analysis to learn how to mix and match data types to yield best results |
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| Purchaser | 3rd party data type
purchase history of users. Marketers can use this information to up-sell or cross-sell owners of specific products. |
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| Queries Per Second (QPS) | QPS is used to evaluate ad exchange and ad network size and power; the greater the qps it can handle, the larger & more active the network | |
| Remarketing (retargeting) | act of re-engaging with past visitors of a website through display advertising with the goal of driving them back to the site to complete an action | |
| Search engine marketing (SEM) | form of Internet marketing that involves the promotion of websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs) through optimization and advertising | |
| Sell Side Platforms (SSPs) | advertising technology platform which represents the suppliers (Publishers)
Who uses: Publishers Benefits: Allows Publishers to max audience revenues by making them accessible to max number of advertisers (via Ad Exchanges, Ad Netwokrs, and DSPs), while providing efficiency of working with 1 partner Considerations: SSP revenue can compete with direct sales, so publishers use them warily |
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| Social Graph | 3rd party data type
with social data, a person’s interests are inferred based on their connection to others on social network sites. Marketers can target a graph of similarly minded people who may share interests in order to expand the reach of their campaigns. |
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| Trading Desk | Digital ad trading desks are centralized management platforms used by ad agencies that specialize in programmatic media and audience buying. They are typically layered on top of a DSP or other audience buying technologies. | http://blog.srds.com/blog/we-love-media/what-is-an-agency-trading-desk#sthash.2mAVyn0m.dpuf |
| Viewability | online advertising metric that aims to track only impressions that can actually be seen by users
IAB defiition of viewability has been updated several times in the past few years |
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| Yield Optimizers |
see SSP |
Technically Writing 