The Ultimate A-Z Glossary Of Digital Advertising!

We all know our ABCs, right? 

But when it comes to understanding the complicated advertising jargon used by digital marketers, it is mindboggling. They randomly throw words, assuming we know it all.

The question remains for those who are new to the field or whose specialized roles don’t span the entire spectrum?  That’s why we have compiled a digital advertising glossary of the most commonly used terms and definitions. 

Digital Advertising Glossary: Beginner’s Alphabetical Guide

Whether you are an amateur or an experienced marketer, this alphabetical digital advertising glossary – will upgrade your digital skills. It will help you to understand advertising terminology that flows so easily off the tongues of our subject matter experts.

AdTech

AdTech is an umbrella term for Advertising technology. It consists of software and tools used by advertisers, ad agencies, publishers, and other industry players to plan and manage their advertising or monetization.

Interesting Read: A One-stop Guide On All You Ever Need To Know About AdTech In 2020

Ad Exchange

An ‘ad exchange’ is a stock market for the online ad industry. Publishers and advertisers trade ad inventory. It is an auction-based, automated digital marketplace that allows publishers to offer their ad inventory for sale and advertisers to purchase ad inventory. 

Brand Safety

The technology that prevents ads from appearing in inappropriate contexts on publishers’ sites, which could damage the reputation or image of the brand.

Cross-Screen Advertising

Switching between multiple devices is the new way of content consumption. Campaigns that tie digital advertisements and consumers can view one campaign on multiple devices like smartphones, tablets, connected TV, and more.

Read more: Here, There, Everywhere, It Is Cross-Screen Advertising!

Contextual Targeting

The most common question asked, what value is used to determine whether your ad will show on a page and, if so, the ad’s position?

 

Contextual Targeting matches the ad to the page based on the content. Advertisers can target ads to the relevant groups of consumers based on their interests and has the most impact.

Demand-Side Platform

Demand- Side Platform is an essential platform for advertisers to buy, search, display video mobile ads. It enables advertisers to buy ad placements in real-time on the publisher websites made available by ad exchange and networks.  Some of the DSP players are Amazon DSP, AdRoll Trade Desk, Xandr, Google DV360, and more.

DOOH Advertising

An abbreviation for the advertising terminology Digital Out-of-Home Advertising. The concept combines the offline and the digital aspects of OOH advertising. It delivers content via digital screens like billboards, elevator screens, and more.

Read more: All You Need To Know About The Rise Of DOOH Advertising

Effective Cost Per Mille (eCPM)

It means an effective cost per thousand impressions. (Mille refers to thousands). In online advertising, the term “impression” refers to the chance to show an advertisement to a consumer on a digital device.

eCPM is a key publisher’s metric to predict revenue for every one thousand impressions. It can be calculated not just for CPM campaigns, but for Cost Per Click(CPC) and Cost Per Lead (CPL) too. On the other hand, CPM is an advertiser metric to estimate the cost of their campaign and reach as per their budget.

eCPM = (Total ad Revenue / Total Impressions) * 1000

First-Party Data

It is an advertising terminology that means information about customers that a company collects from its own sources. Sources for first-party data can be both- online or offline like the company’s website, social media, or surveys. 

Interesting Read: Digital Advertising Industry Plans To Replace Cookies With First-Party Data

Full-Funnel Marketing

An ad lingo that has to be a part of the digital advertising glossary. An integrated strategy that addresses the entire consumer journey and incorporates objectives for each step of the funnel: awareness, consideration, and conversion.

Guaranteed Deals  

A type of programmatic deal where a buyer directly buys inventory from the seller for a guaranteed impression and volume. The publisher agrees to deliver at a guaranteed budget price.

Header Bidding 

As defined by Digiday, Header bidding is an advanced programmatic technique wherein publishers offer inventory to multiple ad exchanges simultaneously before making calls to their ad servers. The idea is to let multiple demand sources bid on the same inventory, creating a competitive ecosystem that optimizes a publisher’s revenue. The act is also known as advance bidding or pre-bidding,

For header bidding to work, the header in the publisher’s page used for advertising to its users must contain Javascript.

A study states that in Q2 2021, 66.7% of publishers are using header bidding to monetize their inventories. Furthermore, it reveals that the adoption of this method has generated results.  31% of total publishers witnessed an increase in their yield.

Identity Data & Resolution

The advertising jargon refers to the process of connecting different identifiers like email address, mobile number, customer ID, account username, or more from multiple platforms and devices to a single identity. It helps brands to get a cohesive and omnichannel view of a consumer.  It enables brands to deliver people-based targeting, personalization, and measurement.

Last Click Attribution

This method identifies the last touchpoint a customer engaged with or clicked before making a purchase, and gives that touchpoint all credit for the conversion.

Long-Tail Ad Inventory

Ad inventory obtained from less popular or lesser-known publishers. It focuses on niche audiences.

Martech

The advertising jargon is also known as Marketing Technology. It is a software or tech tool used to perform marketing activities. Marketers plan and execute the campaigns, analyze the results, and measure the performance of the campaign.

“Every piece of technology a marketer uses to reach a potential customer is martech.”

~ John Koetsier, Journalist (Source)

Image Credit: MarTech Advisor

Mobile Advertising Identifiers(MAIDs)

Unique identifiers provided by mobile device operating system. It is used by marketers to track user activities for advertising purposes. Apple has changed the usage of mobile identifiers (IDFA) on Apple devices where users are asked for permission for ad targeting. Recently, in the new IOS update, users will receive prompts from the Apple App Store asking permission to serve ‘Personalized Ads’ which was earlier enabled by default.

This is Part 1 of the Digital Advertising glossary series. Wait there! There are ample buzzwords and interesting advertising terminologies that will be decoded in the next part.

You can read part 2 – here!