iSOCRATES Glossary of MADTech Terms

On a permissioned basis, customers and prospects provide their identity and other data to another company, which in turn shares or uses it in partnership.

A cross-industry initiative started by three advertising trade associations (IAB, ANA, and 4A’s) to create standards for how digital media is measured, planned and transacted as well as provide guidance to make digital measurement comparable to traditional measurement.

Audience, contextual, demographic, behavioral or other data directly collected and shared by other than the publisher, marketer or a 2nd party. 1st party data can be enriched by 2nd party and/or 3rd party data, which in turn can be even more enriched by data aggregators or data management platforms.

This is the part of the web page or email that is viewable when a page renders in the browser, without scrolling down. Any placements below this are considered ‘Below-the-Fold’. Above-the-Fold placements are generally considered to have a better performance, but publishers can now actually track the performance of all ads.

When a user signs up, makes a purchase, or performs some other desired action in response to an ad displayed on the Internet. Also called a conversion or action.

The execution of the marketing mix as part of the marketing process. The activation phase typically comes after the strategy and planning phases during which managers plan their marketing activities and is followed by feedback and optimization phases in which results are evaluated with media and marketing analytics.

An ad blocker is a software product that prevents advertisements from appearing with the content the user is intentionally viewing. People block ads for a variety of reasons. For example, many of them find interrupt marketing ads annoying and even stressful. Interrupt marketing is intrusive by design, like an interstitial ad that comes between users and the content they are attempting to view or an autoplay or rollover ad that starts up without any intentional act on the part of the user.

When an open slot of ad space is available on the Internet, a user’s browser sends requests to ad exchanges or ad servers to send an ad. This request is known as an ad call. Ad calls include information from browser cookies and ad tag information such as publisher ID, size, location, referring URL, and other specifications and data needed for the ad to serve.

How well advertising accomplishes what the marketer intends. Companies use many different statistics or metrics to measure their advertising effectiveness. A company’s advertising effectiveness usually increases over time with repeated exposures of sequenced, relevant messages, but ad effectiveness in any one media channel typically declines over time. Certain advertising objectives can be realized using measurable techniques including: reach, frequency, brand awareness, consideration, intent, purchases, and loyalty.

An auction-based intermediary in the process of digital media trading that connects buyers and sellers of ad inventory. The ad exchange provides a technology platform that functions in real-time – as the user loads the web page, the publishers’ unsold inventory becomes available for purchase to advertisers on a single impression basis. When a bidder wins the impression, the advertiser’s creative is displayed on the web page to a single user/viewer.

Ad fraud is defined as the deliberate practice of attempting to serve ads that have no potential to be viewed by a human user. There are numerous types and sources of ad fraud. Ad Fraud Detection has become a critical tool for the buy-side of the market. Relatedly, there are numerous viewability methods and resources.

Ads are inserted on a page by software on the user’s computer, such as a toolbar ad-on. The ad units were not placed by the publisher, and the publisher is not compensated for them. Ad injection software either replaces the authorized units on the page with unauthorized ones, or adds new placements to the page, possibly in poor positions (i.e. below the fold).

An intermediary in the process of digital media trading that sells publisher inventory to advertisers or agencies. Ad Networks repackage publishers’ inventory, which may or may not be remnant rather than premium, selling it to advertisers at a price determined by the network and/or negotiated between the buyer and seller at a price higher than what the network paid the publisher.

The various technical and workflow tasks needed for running digital advertising campaigns. Ad operations ensure more efficient and effective delivery for ad insertion orders and ad inventory management.

Ad retargeting is simply increasing the frequency of ads being sent to someone who has been selected as part of your audience. It could be an increased delivery of the same ad, a similar message or a sequential message. It’s not exactly the same as retargeting because the consumer isn’t being qualified in the same way.

The technology and service that places advertisements on websites and mobile properties. Ad serving technology companies provide software to publishers and advertisers to serve ads, count them, help choose the ads that will make the website or advertiser the most money, and monitor the progress of different advertising campaigns.

The network or entity from which advertising content is consumed by a given inventory unit. Multiple sources may compete for display in a single unit (for example, AdSense and AdX as backfill challengers).

These are markers that categorize a file, image or video so that it can be found by being linked to other content. Tags are usually attached during an item’s creation and items usually have more than one tag.

The digital advertising types that brands utilize, including social media ads, search ads, display ads, native ads, and programmatic ads. Each ad type has its own benefits and requires its own strategy.

A single unit of ad space.

Services that offer to validate that the advertiser’s ad was delivered to the agreed upon specification in the advertising insertion order. There can be additional criteria such as above the fold placement, geographic targeting.

The AdChoices program was created by the ‘Digital Advertising Alliance’ (DAA) and is supported by 4As, AAF, ANA, BBB, DMA, IAB and NAI, which are all industry trade association. The program allows users to click on an icon on the upper or lower right corner and see information about the companies that are providing the internet-based ads as well as click to opt-out and not be behaviorally targeted.

Ads.txt stands for Authorised Digital Sellers and allows publishers to add a text file to their servers, which are then integrated into Programmatic platforms. This helps publishers clearly communicate who is authorised to sell their inventory, adding additional layers of transparency for Programmatic buyers.

A Google service that can help you display Google ads on your website’s content pages and earn money.

Amount of money an organization has set aside for promotional activities, materials, and campaigns. The advertising budget should be allocated prior to building a strategy.

The number of clicks your Amazon Ads receive, compared to the amount of money the campaign earned for your organization. The result is expressed as a percentage. To find the ACoS of a campaign, simply divide ad spend by ad revenue and then convert it to a percentage by multiplying it by 100.

The location where a digital ad is shown. The placement of the ad is strategic, primarily wherever a business’s target audience is most likely to engage. The cost of an ad is typically dependent on its placement, and different brands tend to prefer specific placements based on KPIs, context, budget, platform, and campaign.

A tool used for serving paid digital advertisements to target audiences. Different platforms allow marketers to place ads on different websites with varying measures of control.

The technology that gets ads in front of target audiences. These can be first-party (run by the same company whose site the ads will be displayed on) or third-party (run by an independent company to manage ad placements across numerous platforms).

Tools and software that marketers employ to target audiences, deliver messaging, and measure online advertising campaigns. Technology solutions designed to help advertisers create, place, manage, and analyze the performance of their digital advertisements.

A company or entity that applies its expertise and technology to help marketers buy advertising inventory from media sellers and marketplaces such as publishers, ad exchanges, ad networks, sales houses, etc.

A centralized, service-based organization within an ad agency that manages the Demand-Side Platform (DSP), other audience buying technologies, as well as manages Programmatic and RTB audience buying. All major agency holding companies have trading desks.

Data combined from many individual users that does not identify any single user.

Systematic trading rules or a computational procedure to activate delivery and to derive results from data.

Allows retail media companies to serve targeted ads to their customers on one of the largest ecommerce marketplaces in the world and is based on the pay-per-click (PPC) model.

A dynamic form of pricing where the price is determined by the market. Buyers are able to bid from a floor price with the bid going to the highest bidder. Programmatic media uses a second price auction model. This means that the highest bidder has to pay $0.01 more than the second highest bid.

The auction component of the buying algorithm that places bids on ad impressions.

Computer programs designed to simulate human web browsing activity and generate fraudulent ad impressions.

A set of practices and technical tools that ensure the advertiser’s brand is not damaged as a result of the improper or inappropriate placement of ads.

Campaign optimization saves time and money while helping marketers achieve and improve upon media and marketing objectives by efficiently collecting the necessary data to analyze marketing campaigns and make informed data-driven business decisions. Campaign analysis helps marketers to reduce waste but can also provide the marketer with insight into maximizing the lifetime value of a customer over time. The campaign analysis and optimization process can be divided into two major categories: a) Harvesting Low Hanging Fruit: areas in need of improvement that are relatively easy to identify and provide quick and effective results; and, b) Long Term Optimization: the process of continual optimization over time and includes improving the customer’s overall lifetime value.

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

Using multiple advertising channels to reach target customers wherever they are and customizing those efforts to fit each channel appropriately.

Structured or unstructured, data is made up of values of qualitative or quantitative variables belonging to a set of items.

A data clean room is a technology service that helps content platforms keep first person user data private when interacting with advertising providers.

A storage repository that holds a vast amount of raw data in its native format until it is needed. While a hierarchical data warehouse stores data in files or folders, a data lake uses a flat architecture to store data. Each data element in a lake is assigned a unique identifier and tagged with a set of extended metadata tags.

Technology that provides a publisher, marketer, agency, or trading desk with a single integrated view of enterprise, campaign and audience data, helping with targeting, overall management, and analysis of data.

Data on-boarding, also known as ‘data on-ramping’ facilitates the transfer of data gathered offline to an online database. It is used to connect offline customer records with online users through matching technology. Data on-boarding enables an individual to leverage accurate customer data as a result of their marketing campaign. By identifying information from offline datasets we are able to gather those same customers online.

Data providers source various types of data including audience descriptions and identity, market intelligence, audience intention, and publisher performance data. This data is then collated and packaged to sell to companies such as demand-side platforms and trading desks. Brought together in a DMP, the 3rd party data compliments 1st party data, which is owned and generated by a marketer, agency, or trading desk. Data allows for smarter targeting and analysis, including bidding in ad auctions.

Data science incorporates and builds on techniques and theories from many fields, including math, statistics, data engineering, pattern recognition and learning, advanced computing, visualization, uncertainty modeling, data warehousing, and high-performance computing with the goal of extracting meaning from data and creating data products.

Serving ads at different times of the day and days of the week, or even changing bids or copy / creative at different times. For example, you may not want your ads to show from 11AM-2PM on Tuesdays. This can be done manually in most online platforms, or automatically in some such as Google AdWords. Automated day parting is not currently available directly through many social media advertising platforms such as Facebook ads and LinkedIn direct ads.

A deal ID is a piece of code that is used as the unique ID number to identify a pre-negotiated deal between a buyer and a seller in an automated buy. The deal ID is typically generated by the platform through which the deal will be executed. The ID itself doesn’t include any details of the deal (content, data packages or price floors.) The details of the deals are stored in the platform where the ID was generated.

A creative that runs as a backup in an open Internet ad space, in the case that no other creatives are available. A default creative can be a literal creative, say an in-house ad, or it can be a redirect in the form of a third-party ad tag to a third-party ad server. A default creative may also be called a “reserve creative”.

Publishers optimizing the path from supply-side platforms (SSPs), exchanges and ad networks to trade desks, demand-side platforms (DSPs) and brands that have taken their buying in-house.

Demographics is data about the size and characteristics of a population or audience (for example, gender, age group, income group, purchasing history, personal preferences, and so forth).

Data that can accurately identify a consumer for targeting ads, such as a visitor’s login information for a website. Other deterministic data points are credit cards, phone numbers and addresses. (See “Probabilistic”)

How companies attract and retain clients through search marketing. The six stages of the digital marketing funnel are: Exposure- Done through SEO and Ads; Discovery- When a potential customer clicks through your site to learn more about you, your product, and service; Consideration- Potential customer considers purchasing your product; Conversion- Potential customer buys something, or completes an actionable item on your site, turning them into an actual customer; Customer Relationship- Maintain a good relationship with your client base through engagement, communication, and customer service; Retention- Creating value for customers that they do not receive from competitors is crucial. By creating value, maintaining excellent service and user experience, customers often return or stay.

A traditional insertion order-based ad campaign delivered programmatically, but bought and sold between humans with very specific advertiser goals, such as a product purchase, level of brand awareness, store foot traffic, the creation of a new customer account, etc.

A type of display ad campaign with very specific advertiser goals, such as the creation of a new account.

Interactive banner ads or rich media typically containing color, graphics, and pictures created by the advertiser, publisher or by others on their behalf.

Designated Market Area. DMAs cover a metropolitan area, in some cases grouping together multiple smaller cities.

Many advertisers wish to show different ads to different customers; for example, an advertiser might wish to show rain gear to people who live in rainy climates and sunblock to those who live in sunny climates. Dynamic creative refers to having a few different creatives and choosing the most appropriate one for the user through some automated means such as audience segmentation or based on frequency and recency. Many platforms have rules about how much creatives can vary within the same placement – for example, there may be limitations on rotating brands.

The price at which inventory during a real time bid instead of a fixed, negotiated price between an advertiser and publisher.

A method of creating top-of-funnel awareness of an online store and products. The goal is to generate website traffic and new customer acquisition through paid placements on third-party platforms, either by targeting new prospects or retargeting those who have expressed interest.

A company that offers bulk email deliverability and services. An ESP makes it possible to send out mass amounts of emails at once without the possibility of getting blocked.

A measure of how consumers interact with ads with regard to their involvement.

The act of creating and serving an ad. It can refer to the ad itself or the campaign as a whole.

The concept of showing a user an ad.

FAST is a coalition of the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB), the ANA, and the ARF that has recommended or is working on guidelines for consumer privacy, ad models and creative formats, audience and ad impression measurement, and a standard reporting template together with a standard insertion order. FAST originated with Proctor and Gamble’s Future of Advertising Stakeholders Summit in August 1998. FAST’s first guideline, available in March 1999, was a guideline on “Basic Advertising Measures.” Our definitions in this list include the FAST definitions for impression and click.

An attribution model in which gives credit for the first impression a user saw. This may be used as an alternative to the last view/last click model, which gives credit for the last viewed or clicked ad.

The lifetime of a campaign, from its start date to its end date. A campaign can also have no flight dates and continue indefinitely. A campaign that is active is said to be “in flight”.

The number of times individuals, devices or households in the target audience is exposed to a specific advertising message/ad unit. Usually it takes three or more exposures to an advertising message before impact can be measured. Frequency of exposure per audience identity should be capped to avoid wasteful spending.

The practice of targeting users based on their geographic location.

A program in which enterprises can display Google advertisements on Web sites and earn revenue from hits that generate traffic for the Google search engines.

Google’s paid search marketing program, the largest such program in the world and in most countries with notable exceptions such as China (Baidu) and Russia (Yandex). Introduced in 2001, AdWords was the first pay per click provider offering the concept of Quality Score, factoring search relevancy (via click-through rate) in along with bid to determine ad position.

A Programmatic transaction in which the publisher promises to deliver a specific audience (e.g., in-market Ford truck buyers, cricket enthusiasts) or outcome (e.g., engagement, leads).

A visual representation of user activity such as clicks and eye focus on a website.

An area of an ad unit, which when rolled-over/rolled-on by the user’s cursor, such rollover triggers and event (i.e. expand ad).

Display ads promoting a product or service sold or provided by the publisher of the website on which it appears.

An acronym for Hypertext Markup language, version 5. HTML5 extends earlier versions to include tags for processing video, audio, canvas, and other embedded audio and video items without requiring proprietary plugins and APIs. HTML5 has been used as an alternative to developing and executing interactions similar to those using Adobe Flash but with very different technology.

A blend of two consumer types, in-person and digital, that prefers a physical shopping experience some of the time but is also comfortable shopping online. They often move seamlessly between the two throughout a single purchase journey.

The term used to describe a very specific area and/or demographic. Targeting a hyper-local area is another way to narrow down your target market.

Interest-based advertising – which is also sometimes called ‘online behavioral advertising’ – uses information gathered about a site user’s visits over time and across different websites or applications in order to help predict preferences and show ads that are more likely to be of interest to you.

A value assigned to a particular user or device and is used to assist in ad serving functionality. The identifier contains no personally identifiable information, can be reset by the user at any time, and respects user options to limit or opt out of ad tracking. Identifiers are used for audience list targeting, frequency capping, and sequential creative rotation. Examples of identifiers are cookies (used on web and mobile web), mobile advertising IDs (used within mobile apps) and publisher provided identifiers (PPID, used for cross screen serving).

A database that houses all the known identifiers that correlate with individual customers.

An HTML iframe tag tells the browser to open a mini browser window of a specified size inside the current window. This way the ad content cannot expand beyond the size specified and “take over” the screen.

Clickable regions on images that make links more visually appealing and websites more interesting. Image maps enable spiders to “read” this material.

Distinguished from spoofing by using technical measures to make an impression appear to be something it is not. Most commonly, this involves creating a shell website such as “diychef.com”, which appears to be a cooking blog, hosting a simple web page on that domain containing nothing but an ad unit, and using an IFRAME to load that web page on an unrelated website (such as piracy site “primewire.ag”). Simple automated identification of the domain of the ad will read “diyched.com”, which is technically the domain the ad is serving on, but is misleading as it is actually loaded into another site.

Loading multiple ad units on top of each other. So, while only one has any possibility of being seen, multiple impressions are generated and charged.

This is the main way in which the success of an ad is measured. This is determined by the size, type, placement and context of the ad. It is also important to note that the number of ‘viewable’ impressions determines its performance.

A type of creative played in a standard banner rather than in a video player. Any banner placement may accommodate an in-banner video creative, if allowed by the publisher.

A measurement method where a marketer makes a specific change to a Test Group, as opposed to the Control Group, in order to determine the incremental value of a marketing strategy or tactic. The method is a popular alternative to using cookies and consumer data tracking.

Arms-length buyer and seller of advertising inventory offering execution services on behalf of publishers, marketers and/or agencies, and networks. The IMT may or may not offer additional services to buyers and sellers. The media trader may trade on its own behalf and may or may not bear risk as principal. Less common, the independent media trader may also trade continuously in specific market segments as a Market Maker. In its role as Market Maker, the IMT may or may not have special privileges and/or responsibilities granted to it by the publisher, ad exchange, and/or audience or contextual data supplier.

A contract, usually between the website or agency and advertiser that details the specifications of an ad campaign and includes terms of payment, etc.

Advertisement on the social media platform Instagram, which displays ads to users as posts from a brand page with a “sponsored” tag. Ads can be served to users as image posts, video posts, stories, IGTV ads, reels, explore ads, collection ads, carousel ads, and collection ads.

Video ads played before, during or after the video content the publisher is delivering to the consumer.

An organization that fosters the growth of advertising on the Internet. Membership is available to corporations engaged in selling, measuring, monitoring or producing advertising on the Internet.

An interstitial (something “in between”) is a page that is inserted in the normal flow of editorial content structure on a Web site for the purpose of advertising or promotion. It can be more or less intrusive and the reaction of viewers usually depends on how welcome or entertaining the message is.

A type of inventory that is unreserved, has auction-based pricing and incorporates a one seller-to-few buyers type of participation. Other terms used in the market to describe Invitation-Only Auction digital media inventory are: Private Marketplace, Private Auction, Closed Auction and Private Access. Prioritization in the ad server, the Deal ID, Data usage, Transparency to buyer and pricing floors are other things to consider as an impact to Invitation-Only Auction Digital Media Inventory.

The most popular programming language used for website development. It’s relatively easy to learn, and marketers often add tracking codes and for data collection to understand the performance of campaigns.

Just-in-Time is a production and workflow strategy that seeks to improve return on investment by reducing in-process inventory, financial capital and associated carrying costs.

A certain quantitative measurement of advertising performance, such as an impression number, click number, conversion number, CPM, eCPC, eCPA, CTR etc.

The first page a person sees when coming to your website from an advertisement. This page can be any page on your website including your home page. Almost anytime you direct someone to your website from an advertisement, you should send them to a specialized landing page with tailored information to increase your landing page conversion rate. Radio advertisements are a notable exception as spelling out specific URL‘s can be time consuming and difficult to remember. Direct Online Marketing™ has extensive experience in creating, testing, and modifying landing page conversion rates to give your business the highest quality, least expensive, most cost-effective leads possible.

A type of attribution model that pays out on the last impression that was clicked on by the user. This may be used as an alternative to the first touch model, which gives credit for the first impression a user saw.

A type of attribution model that pays out on the last impression that was viewed by the user. This may be used as an alternative to the first touch model, which gives credit for the first impression a user saw.

A web monetization strategy that involves collecting contact and demographic information about a site’s visitors and selling to lead aggregators or other companies.

One of the most common display ad units, usually seen in dimensions of 728 pixels wide by 90 pixels high.

A measure of the total income a business can expect to bring in from a typical customer for as long as that person or account remains a client.

In the context of yield management this is the percentage by which an ad was optimized. It is calculated by finding the percentage difference between the optimized group and the control group.

A paid digital marketing tactic that allows companies to reach and nurture target audiences by serving ads on the business-focused social media platform.

Advertising assets become liquid when they can be bought and sold (crossed) easily.

A method for targeting ads to customers based on their vicinity or location. Targeting techniques can encompass a variety of data including geolocation, contextual element of media, user preferences, and more.

Small publishers and blogs that are ad supported and go through ad networks and ad exchanges to monetize their sites.

Determines how closely your lookalike audience will resemble an original group of users. A lower percentage will result in a more homogeneous audience; a larger percentage leads to a broader audience.

When a target-audience is built using the attributes of a specific customer profile in order to find other users with the same interests.

Artificial intelligence (AI) technology that is programmed to adapt in a way that resembles human learning. Types include supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning.

The buying of inventory across any channel (web, mobile, social, email, etc.) and any format (banners, rich media, video, etc.).

These are ad placements that are integrated into content so that users have a more streamlined content experience. Social media platforms tend to have unique functionalities that allow for native ads.

Programmatic Direct is a way to automate direct ad buys for set campaigns. Programmatic Direct is the transactional methodology of automated direct sale of guaranteed advertising between advertiser and publisher.