A

Advertising Network: A group of Web sites which share a common banner server. Typically a sales organization which manages the commerce and reporting. An ad network has the ability to deliver unique combinations of targeted audiences because they serve your banner or ad across multiple sites. The role of the modern Internet advertising network is to transact, serve, track and report the distribution of creative from advertisers to publishers using an efficient, interactive marketplace.

Ad server: Name for the organization, hardware, and software that deliver advertising creative to the user’s browser. 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.

Ad Space: The space on a webpage reserved to display advertising.

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.

Ad view: An ad view, synonymous with ad impression, is a single ad that appears (usually in full view without scrolling) on a Web page when the page arrives at the viewer’s display. Ad views are what most Web sites sell or prefer to sell. A Web page may offer space for a number of ad views. In general, the term impression is more commonly used.

Affiliate marketing: Affiliate marketing is the use by a Web site that sells products of other Web sites, called affiliates, to help market the products. Amazon.com, the book seller, created the first large-scale affiliate program and hundreds of other companies have followed since.

 

B

Bandwidth: Digital throughput capacity. A measure of how much digital signal or information can be passed through a device or interconnect. Bandwidth is usually measured in bits per second. A 2400 baud modem can handle 2.4 kilobits per second. A T3 industrial interconnect can handle 45 megabits per second. A 100 base-T ethernet interconnect can handle 100 mega-bits-per-second. Bandwidth is analogous to the size of a water pipe.

Banner: An interactive online advertisement in the form of a graphic image that typically runs across the top or bottom of a webpage, or is positioned in a margin or other space reserved for ads. Banner ads are historically GIF images. Many ads are animated GIFs since animation has been shown to be more effective. The standard banner is 468 pixels wide by 60 pixels high. The standard banner is still the mainstay of online advertising, but is quickly giving up ground to newer, potentially more effective forms of online advertising, such as email and interstitials.

Banner Burnout: Overexposure of advertising creative that contributes to a drop in click-through rates. Frequency control reduces burnout for a particular creative or campaign.

Booked Space: Website advertising space that is already sold or otherwise unavailable to receive new campaign commitments.

Branding: A traditional advertising method used to elicit a latent response from a target based on cumulative impressions and positive reinforcement. The most successful brands are considered "trustmarks" and enjoy loyal, lifelong customers.

C

Clickstreams: The electronic path a user takes while navigating from site to site, and within site, from page to page.

ClickThrough: The act of clicking on a banner or other ad, which takes the user through to the advertiser's Web site. Used as a counter point to impressions to judge the response-inducing power of the banner.

ClickThrough Rate (CTR): The response rate of an online advertisement, typically expressed as a percentage and calculated by taking the number of clickthroughs the ad received, dividing that number by the number of impressions and multiplying by 100 to obtain a percentage:
Example: 20 clicks / 1,000 impressions = .02 x 100 = 2% CTR

 

CPC - Cost Per Click: The price paid by an advertiser to a content site. When buying on a Cost Per Click model, the advertiser and content site have mutually agreed that the content site will continue to display the advertiser’s ad creative until X number of clicks have been delivered - the amount purchased. As with other forms of online advertising, is dependent on content, audience reached and targeted delivery - Untargeted being lower priced, targeted to an affluent audience being at the high end of the rate scale.

CPM - Cost Per Thousand (Roman Numeral) Impressions: The price paid by an advertiser for a content site displaying their banner 1,000 times.

 

Cookies: Client-side text file that is used by Web servers to store information about the site visitor and visitor behavior. Information pertaining to a site can only be read by the side that wrote the information. Used to identify repeat visitors .

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.

Click Tracking: The process of counting and auditing the clicks for a campaign. Click tracking can be done by a different entity than that which serves the creative.

Cache: To store pages, images, or other items, on a local server or user's computer to speed the rate at which webpages load. Ads, like other images, are cached unless some sort of cache-busting technique is used. When ads are cached, they will be served but will not be counted by an ad server. This can lead ad servers to under count the number of times a page is viewed, and this can in turn skew monitoring techniques.

Cache Busting: The process of blocking the caching of certain files to guarantee new delivery from the external server for each page view. Cache busting is necessary for the successful execution on online advertising.

Campaign: A contracted agreement between an advertiser or advertising agency and either a publisher or a representative of a publisher. The campaign is specific to the creative to be published and the issue, or duration of the publication. Online advertising campaigns are defined by a number of variables, including the digital creative, the duration or flight dates, the pricing program, the publishers to be used and any user targeting applied.

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.

Commission: The percentage of the advertising fee paid to the Publisher for hosting the creative on their website Typical commissions range from 50 to 75 percent

E

Effective Frequency: The number of times an ad should be shown to one person to realize the highest impact of the ad without wasting impressions on that individual.

Even Delivery: The uniform distribution of advertising creative across designated websites and over the flight of the campaign given targeting parameters, if any. Reputable ad serving systems have a variety of methods to maximize even delivery.

Exclusive: A contract that forces a Publisher to sell all specified inventory through a certain channel for a specified period of time. Advertisers can also be bound to purchase media only through a certain channel for a specified period of time. e-zbanner does not use exclusive contracts

F

Frequency: The number of times a given person will see an ad in a given time period.

G

Gross Exposures/Gross Impressions: The total number of times an ad is shown, including duplicate showings to the same person.

Geo-targeting: Serving of ads to a particular geographical area or population segment

H

Hits: Every time a file is sent by a server, be it text, graphic, video, and so on, it is recorded as a hit. Not a reliable gauge to compare different sites, as one page with five graphic elements will register six hits when viewed, while a page with no graphics will only register one hit. The sending of a single file from a web server to a user's computer. Most webpages contain several files, including all HTML, graphics, audio, etc. Hit is not the same as impression, page view, or number of unique visitors. Information about hits is valuable to the provider for server loading and bandwidth predictions, but used alone, it is of little value as a metric of online advertising, or online use in general.

I
Impression: The Opportunity To See (OTS) a banner or other ad by a surfer. When a page that includes a banner is viewed, it is considered an impression.

Inventory: The amount of available space for banners on a Web site that can be delivered in a given time period. Also known as the amount of gross impressions per month (or clicks if the publishers is selling on a Cost Per Click rate model) available for sale to advertisers by a Web publisher.

Interactive Agency: An advertising agency, or division of an advertising agency dedicated to interactive advertising, primarily published online.

Interactive Media: The online, Internet, or web environment is the primary interactive media for advertising. It is dubbed interactive because the user, or advertising target, can typically interact with the content and advertising

IP address: Internet Protocal address. Every system connected to the Internet has a unique IP address, which consists of a number in the format A.B.C.D where each of the four sections is a decimal number from 0 to 255. Most people use Domain Names instead and the resolution between Domain Names and IP addresses is handled by the network and the Domain Name Servers. With virtual hosting, a single machine can act like multiple machines (with multiple domain names and IP addresses

L

Link: A hypertext connection between two documents, image maps, graphics, and the like.

M

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

Mailing List
Online a mailing list is an automatically distributed email message on a particular topics going to certain individuals. You can subscribe or unsubscribe to a mailing list by sending a message via email. There are many good professional mailing lists, and you should find the ones that concern your business.

P

Pageview: When a Web page is requested by somebody through a browser. Pageviews are often used to track the number of impressions a banner gets.

Pop-Under: A window that pops (launches automatically) behind the current browser window. Also known as a pop-behind or go-behind .

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.

R

Run-of-network: A run-of-network ad is one that is placed to run on all sites within a given network of sites. Ad sales firms ,handle run-of-network insertion orders in such a way as to optimize results for the buyer consistent with higher priority ad commitments.

Run-of-site: A run-of-site ad is one that is placed to rotate on all non-featured ad spaces on a site. CPM rates for run-of-site ads are usually less than for rates for specially-placed ads or sponsorships.

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

Reach: A metric that estimates, for a given reporting period, the Unique Visitors to a website or network of websites, as a percentage of all Unique Visitors considered accessible to that website or network of sites. Percent of the audience "reached".

Redirect: The process of forwarding a call for a creative to another server based on availability and frequency capping, among other criteria.

Referral: A new member of the ad network (either a publisher or advertiser) referred directly by a current member through a button link or other means

Rich Media: A general term used to describe advances in online creative that take advantage of enhanced sensory features such as animation, audio and video. Rich media takes many different digital file forms. The serving of rich media creative can require more bandwidth and software modifications for older systems. Rich media creative will become more useful as user bandwidth increases.

S

Stats: Data about the use of a website or the effectiveness of an ad campaign. The depth and breadth of stats is unlimited.

Stickiness: A performance metric based on the ability of a website to hold a visitor's attention. A website's stickiness is average duration per user session or per unique visitor.

Surplus Inventory: Website ad space available for purchase. Surplus inventory is often Remnant Space.

Server
Servers are the backbone of the internet, the computers that are linked by communication lines and "serve up" information in the form of text, graphics and multimedia to online computers that request data -- that's you. (When a server "goes down" it loses its online link and the information it holds can not be accessed.)

Session
A series of transactions or hits made by a single user. If there has been no activity for a period of time, followed by the resumption of activity by the same user, a new session is considered started. Thirty minutes is the most common time period used to measure a session length.

T

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

Targeting: The control of the distribution of ad creative to only those websites or those users that fit within the particular targeting parameters. The depth and breadth of potential targeting parameters is unlimited. Targeting has the potential to dramatically improve the advertiser's ROI. Typical targeting parameters are: local user time of day, website category, user country, user age, etc.

Third Party Auditing: The use of an "independent" serving authority to provide the definitive accounting of the execution of an ad campaign. The campaign contract is usually written so that the auditor's numbers are final, rather than those of either the advertiser or publisher. Third party auditing is sometimes performed by a separate enterprise than third party serving, thus involving a total of four parties. If third party remnant space or affiliates are involved, the total number of entities involved in a single interactive advertising event can be five or more.

Third Party Serving: The task of managing the frequency capping, redirection and accounting of advertising events between publishers and advertisers.

Tracking: The collection and automated analysis of data associated with the serving of digital creative. Tracking provides the frequency control, accounting, stats data and anti-fraud components of a campaign.

Traffic: The volume of visitors to a website. Traffic is the currency of online success, but is not the only factor. Massive, low grade traffic to a website with poor content will inevitably result in failure. To an ad network Traffic Management is the ongoing effort to balance Publisher inventory with booked campaigns

U

Unique visitor: A unique visitor is someone with a unique address who is entering a Web site for the first time that day (or some other specified period). Thus, a visitor that returns within the same day is not counted twice. A unique visitors count tells you how many different people there are in your audience during the time period, but not how much they used the site during the period.

V

View: A view is, depending on what’s meant, either an ad view or a page view. Usually an ad view is what’s meant. There can be multiple ad views per page views. View counting should consider that a small percentage of users choose to turn the graphics off (not display the images) in their browser.

Website Categories: System of grouping based on content or demographic interests. These may include women’s interests, automotive, and financial sites, etc

Visit: A visit is a Web user with a unique address entering a Web site at some page for the first time that day (or for the first time in a lesser time period). The number of visits is roughly equivalent to the number of different people that visit a site. This term is ambiguous unless the user defines it, since it could mean a user session or it could mean a unique visitor that day.