Glossary of Terms

Glossary

of Terms

Review the definitions of these digital marketing industry terms. Get familiar with some common terms and phrases below. As always, feel free to ask us about anything to help better your understanding of digital marketing!

Absolute Top Impressions: (Products: SEM)
The very first search result on the page.

Adset / Ad Group
A group of display ad sizes featuring the same creative.

Ad Interaction: (Products: Display)
Ad interaction includes hovers and in-banner video (IBV) plays. Hovers are tracked when the mouse pauses over an ad on desktop devices. If IBV is included in the Display creatives, we can also track how many users clicked the Play button on the video.

Addressable Campaign
Ad campaign targeting IP addresses.

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 can be used to target audiences, understand consumer behavior, improve user experience, and optimize ad campaigns.

Banner Ad
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.

Behavioral Targeting
Using previous online user activity (such as pages visited, content viewed, searches, clicks, and purchases) to generate a segment that is used to match advertising creative to users. Behavioral targeting uses anonymous, non-PII data.

Brand Awareness
The extent or level to which a potential customer can recall and identify a particular product or service. Increased brand awareness is one of the two customary important goals for a digital ad campaign (the other is conversion).

Call To Action (CTA)
A phrase included within an ad, or a graphic element such as a button, that invites the audience to take a certain action. Examples: Click to Read More, Download the Free e-book, Click Here.

Click
The action taken when a user interacts with an ad, either by clicking on it with their mouse or by pressing Enter on their keyboard. Use “click” only in documentation, to refer to the action a user takes. When referring to UI actions, use “select” instead.

Click-Through-Rate (CTR): (Products: Display, Pre Roll, Social, SEM)
A statistic that shows how often people who are served an ad end up clicking on it, expressed as a percentage of total impressions. The CTR of an ad is calculated by dividing the number of clicks an ad received by the number of times it was served. For example, if an ad received 5 clicks and was shown 1000 times, the CTR is 0.5%. The higher the CTR, the better an ad is performing.

Completions: (Products: Pre Roll, CTV, OTT, Streaming Audio, YouTube)
Completions tell us how many users watched 100% of the ad.

Completion Rate: (Products: Pre Roll, CTV, OTT, Streaming Audio, YouTube)
The completion rate is the percent of video ads that are played through their entire duration to completion. Completion rates can also be referenced by quartile directly to the video timestamp.

Connected TV (CTV) Devices
Connected TV devices include Smart TVs, IPTVs, and gaming consoles.

Contextual Targeting
Selecting audiences based on the type of content being displayed on a particular website. For example, placing ads for hair care products on the Vogue website.

Conversion
A specific action that advertisers want audiences to take in a campaign. Each time a member of the audience takes this action, it is counted as a conversion. For example, signing up for a newsletter or making a purchase on a website.

Conversion Action
The term for when a user performs the specific action that the advertiser has defined as the campaign goal. Conversions are often tracked through the conversion pixel.

Conversion Pixel
A 1×1 image pixel placed on a web page (such as a thank-you page) that is triggered whenever a conversion occurs. Usually transparent.

Conversion Tracking
Monitoring how many conversions have occurred during a specific time period, and analyzing which ads led to the conversions.

Copy / Ad Copy
Text in an ad or text written to be delivered audibly.

Cost Per Thousand (CPM)
A metric for the cost of serving 1,000 ad impressions. CPM is also used as a standard measure for buying display ads, because inventory is generally sold on a CPM basis.

Display Advertising
A digital advertising format in which graphic ads are shown on a web page.

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

Engagements: (Products: Display)
The total engagement rate is the rate of users who engaged with your ad out of total impressions served.

Geofence / Geofencing
The use of GPS technology to target an audience with programmatic display ads in specific locations. Geographic Targeting / Geotarget – Selection of an audience for a campaign based on zip codes, designated marketing area (DMA), city, state, and country.

Geo Recency: (Products: Geofence)
Geo recency is used to retarget devices for up to 30 days after they leave the geofence location(s).

Household Reach & Frequency: (Products: CTV, OTT)
The amount of households reached for OTT/CTV campaigns and the frequency of impressions served per household.

Impression: (Products: Display, Geofence, Pre Roll, OTT, CTV, SEM, Social, Streaming Audio, YouTube)
An ad view, or the number of times an ad is served, regardless of whether the user has actually seen or interacted with the ad in any way. Impressions are often sold on a cost per thousand (CPM) basis.

In-Stream Video Ad
A video ad played before, during, or after the video content the publisher is delivering to the consumer.

Keyword
A specific word or phrase chosen by advertisers to trigger and include their ad within search engine results. In search advertising, the position of the ad within the results is determined by bidding, in which the highest bid gets the top position.

Keyword Targeting: (Products: Display, Pre Roll)
Targeting content that contains specific keywords.

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

Lift: (Products: Display, Pre Roll)
Lift measures the baseline rate of traffic visiting the advertiser’s website and compares it to the exposed rate, or the audience that visited the website after being exposed to our campaign. The lift metric is the difference between the two rates. Lift populates after 3 months for Display and Pre Roll campaigns with a verified pixel placed on the website.

Managed Social Media
Social Media Management is the ongoing process of creating and scheduling content designed to grow and nurture an audience across social media platforms. We use the tools within each platform to build and engage with an online following.

Native Advertising
Any paid advertising that is indistinguishable from the channel used to present it.

Offline Visits: (Products: Geofence)
The number of devices that were targeted in a Geofence campaign and later identified the customer’s business location (within 30 days).

Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO comprises all efforts made to influence your search engine ranking that extend beyond your website.

On-Page SEO
On-page SEO involves enhancing individual web pages to achieve higher rankings on search engine results pages.

Over-The-Top (OTT)
Premium video or media served over the internet. OTT allows targeted advertising to people who do not use cable via programmatic technology.

Paid Search
The placement of ads within search engine results.

Paid Social
Paid social refers to a form of online advertising where businesses or individuals pay to promote their content, products, or services on social media platforms. Paid social advertising allows marketers to reach a larger and more targeted audience than they might otherwise achieve through organic (non-paid) posts alone.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
A pricing model in which advertisers pay vendors or publishers based on the number of clicks received in a campaign.

Pre Roll
A programmatic in-stream video ad served to a customer before their video content plays.

Quartile: (Products: CTV, OTT, Pre Roll, Streaming Audio)
Completion rate quartiles are referenced by the video timestamp, which captures the percentage of the video or audio ad that was watched by a user: 25%, 50%, 75%, or 100% complete.

Reach
The total number of people who see your message. Once a 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: (Products: Display, Pre Roll)
Serving ads to people who have previously visited your website, while that person is visiting another website. For example: A person checks out a pair of shoes on Amazon.com and then sees an ad for the same shoes on Yahoo.com.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
A form of paid internet media that promotes websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results.

Search Engine Optimization
The primary goal of SEO is to increase organic (non-paid) traffic to a website by making it more attractive to search engines like Google and, in turn, more relevant to users searching for specific keywords or topics. On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO are the two essential components.

Streaming Audio
This service reaches an audio streaming audience and targets by demographic, music genre, or even podcast topic.

Target Audience
Users that might be exposed to your ad based on their location, demographics, and interests.

Top Impressions: (Products: SEM)
Any search result above organic results (second, third, and fourth positions).

Tracking Tag
A piece of code that is added to a website’s HTML to provide richer analytics about web traffic and user behavior. Also known as a pixel. We use tracking tags to collect data for retargeting, view-throughs, lift, and website attribution.

Viewable Impression
An ad that meets the following criteria: 50% of the ad’s pixels are visible in the browser window for a continuous 1 second.

View-Through: (Products: Display, Pre Roll)
When a user is exposed to the ad and does not click the ad, but later returns to the website. We can count this user as a view through for up to 30 days after seeing your ad.

Website Attribution: (Products: CTV, OTT)
This metric tracks the households that were delivered a CTV or digital ad that later visited the advertiser’s website (within 30 days). This provides an additional campaign attribution metric by tracking cross-device website traffic associated with households that received a CTV ad impression. To track this, the advertiser will need to add the tracking tag to their website. See Tracking Tags for more information. Website Attribution can be tracked if the device the impression was served on (such as a CTV) is connected to the same IP address as the device used to visit the website (such as a home computer or a phone using the household wireless).

YouTube View: (Products: YouTube)
A YouTube View is counted when someone watches a complete ad that is 11–30 seconds long, or someone interacts with the ad.

YouTube View Rate: (Products: YouTube)
The YouTube View Rate is the amount of views divided by total impressions served.

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