Field Guide

100advertising terms, defined plainly. If a vendor uses a word to make something sound better than it is, it's probably in here.

Pricing & Cost

Bid: The price a buyer offers for a single impression in an auction.
Blended CPM: The weighted average CPM across all channels in a plan: total spend divided by total impressions, multiplied by 1,000.
CPA: Cost per acquisition: spend divided by completed acquisitions.
CPC: Cost per click: spend divided by clicks.
CPCV: Cost per completed view: spend divided by the number of videos watched to the end.
CPI: Cost per install: spend divided by app installs.
CPL: Cost per lead: spend divided by leads captured, such as sign-ups or contact-form submissions.
CPM: Cost per thousand impressions: spend divided by impressions, multiplied by 1,000.
CPV: Cost per view: spend divided by video views, counted when a video starts or reaches a qualifying watch point.
eCPM: Effective cost per thousand impressions: spend under any pricing model divided by impressions, multiplied by 1,000, so different pricing models can be compared.
First-price auction: An auction in which the winning bidder pays exactly what they bid.
Floor price: The minimum price a seller will accept for an impression in an auction.
Media commission: A fee an agency charges as a percentage of the media spend it manages.
Rate card: A publisher's list of standard ad prices before any negotiation or discounts.
Second-price auction: An auction in which the winning bidder pays just above the second-highest bid rather than their own bid.
Working media: The share of a budget that pays for actual ad delivery, after agency fees, production, and data costs are taken out.

Reach & Delivery

Ad load: The volume of ads relative to content in a given experience, such as minutes of ads per hour of video.
Audience duplication: The overlap created when the same people are counted by more than one channel or placement.
Dayparting: Scheduling ads to run only during chosen hours or segments of the day.
Effective reach: The number of people reached at or above the frequency needed for the message to register.
Fill rate: The percentage of ad requests that actually returned a paid ad.
Flight: The scheduled period, with set start and end dates, during which a campaign runs.
Frequency: The average number of times each reached person saw an ad.
Frequency cap: A limit on how many times one person can be shown an ad within a set period.
GRP: Gross rating points: the percentage of an audience reached multiplied by average frequency; the traditional TV currency, which counts duplicated exposures.
Impression: A single display of an ad, counted each time it is served, even to the same person.
Make-good: Free replacement inventory a seller owes an advertiser after delivering less than the contract promised.
Pacing: The rate at which a budget is spent across the flight.
Reach: The estimated number of distinct people exposed to an ad.
Share of voice: A brand's portion of all advertising in its category, such as its share of the market's total impressions or spend.
TRP: Target rating points: gross rating points (reach percentage times average frequency) counted only against the defined target audience rather than the total population.
Under-delivery: Serving fewer impressions than the contract promised by the end of a campaign.

Targeting & Data

Audience segment: A defined group of people who share traits an advertiser can target, such as age, interests, or past behavior.
Behavioral targeting: Targeting people based on observed past actions, such as pages visited, searches made, or purchases completed.
Contextual targeting: Placing ads next to relevant content, based on what a page or video is about rather than who is viewing it.
Cookie: A small file a website stores in the browser to recognize it on later visits, used for measurement and targeting.
Customer data platform (CDP): Software that unifies a company's own customer data from many systems into persistent profiles for marketing use.
Data clean room: A privacy-safe environment where companies match datasets against each other without either side seeing the other's raw user data.
Data management platform (DMP): Software that organizes audience data, mostly third-party, into segments for ad targeting.
Device graph: A map connecting the phones, computers, and other devices that belong to the same person or household.
First-party data: Data a company collects directly from its own customers and visitors, such as purchases, site activity, or email sign-ups.
Geotargeting: Targeting ads by location, from countries and regions down to cities or a radius around a point.
Identity resolution: Linking identifiers such as email addresses and device IDs across devices and channels to a single person or household.
Lookalike audience: A platform-modeled audience of new people whose traits resemble a seed list of existing customers.
Retargeting: Serving ads to people who previously interacted with a brand, such as visiting its site or abandoning a cart.
Second-party data: Another company's first-party data, shared directly with a partner rather than bought from an open marketplace.
Seed audience: The source list of known customers or converters a lookalike model learns from.
Suppression list: A list of people deliberately excluded from ad delivery, such as recent purchasers or existing customers.
Third-party data: Data aggregated from many sources and sold by companies with no direct relationship to the people it describes.

Buying & Programmatic

Ad exchange: A marketplace where ad impressions are auctioned in real time, matching many buyers and sellers impression by impression.
Ad fraud: Deliberately faked traffic, impressions, or clicks designed to steal ad spend without reaching real people.
Ad network: An intermediary that packages ad inventory from many publishers and resells it to buyers, often grouped by audience or topic.
Ad server: The system that stores creatives, decides which ad to show for each request, and counts delivery.
Ad verification: Independent measurement that confirms ads actually ran where, how, and to whom the seller claimed.
Brand safety: The practice of keeping ads away from content broadly considered harmful, such as hate speech, violence, or illegal material.
Brand suitability: Brand-specific standards for acceptable content that go beyond baseline safety, since content safe for one brand may not fit another.
Demand-side platform (DSP): Software that advertisers use to buy ad inventory, bidding on impressions across many exchanges from a single interface.
Direct buy: Ad inventory purchased through direct negotiation with a publisher rather than through an auction or intermediary.
Header bidding: A technique in which a publisher offers each impression to multiple exchanges at the same time before its ad server picks the winning ad.
Invalid traffic (IVT): Impressions or clicks generated by bots or errors rather than real people, covering both deliberate fraud and benign automation such as search crawlers.
Open auction: A real-time programmatic auction that any buyer can enter, with each impression sold to the highest bidder.
Private marketplace (PMP): An invitation-only programmatic auction in which a publisher offers inventory to a selected group of buyers.
Programmatic: The automated buying and selling of ad inventory through software, typically in real-time auctions, rather than through manual negotiation.
Programmatic guaranteed: A deal with a fixed price and a reserved volume of impressions, delivered through programmatic systems rather than a manual insertion order.
Supply-path optimization: Choosing the most direct, lowest-fee route to buy the same ad inventory when multiple intermediaries offer it.
Supply-side platform (SSP): Software that publishers use to sell their ad inventory, offering impressions to many buyers and exchanges at once.

Measurement & Attribution

Attribution: A method for assigning credit for an outcome across marketing touchpoints.
Attribution window: The period after an ad click or view during which a conversion can still be credited to that ad.
Brand lift: The change in awareness, consideration, or other brand measures between people exposed to a campaign and a comparable unexposed group, typically measured by survey.
Conversion rate: The percentage of visits or clicks that produce the desired action.
CTR: Click-through rate: clicks divided by impressions.
Customer lifetime value (LTV): The total value a customer is expected to generate across the entire relationship, not just the first purchase.
Geo test: An experiment that runs ads in some geographic markets but not in comparable others, using the difference in outcomes to measure lift.
Holdout test: An experiment that withholds ads from a randomly selected group, so the difference in outcomes against the exposed group shows what the advertising caused.
Incrementality: The outcomes caused by advertising beyond what would have happened anyway.
Last-click attribution: An attribution rule that gives all credit for a conversion to the last click before it, ignoring every earlier interaction.
Media mix modeling (MMM): A statistical model that estimates each channel's contribution to results from aggregate historical data, with no tracking of individual users.
Multi-touch attribution: An attribution approach that divides credit for a conversion across several touchpoints according to a set rule, such as equal or position-based weighting.
ROAS: Return on ad spend: attributed revenue divided by advertising spend.
Search lift: The increase in branded search volume attributable to a campaign, beyond the searches that would have occurred anyway.
Share of search: A brand's portion of all search volume in its category, a measure that tends to move before market share does.
View-through conversion: A conversion that happens after someone sees an ad but does not click it, credited within the attribution window.
Viewability: The percentage of measured impressions that met the standard for an opportunity to be seen.

Channels & Creative

A/B test: A controlled comparison of two variants that differ in one element, used to measure which performs better.
Call to action (CTA): The element of an ad that tells the viewer what to do next, such as a button or line of copy.
Connected TV (CTV): Streaming video watched on a television screen via an internet connection, whether through a smart TV or a plug-in streaming device.
Creative fatigue: The decline in response that sets in when an audience sees the same creative too often.
Digital out-of-home (DOOH): Advertising served to digital screens in public places, such as billboards, transit displays, and screens in stores or elevators.
Display advertising: Visual ads — banners, images, or graphics — placed on websites and apps.
Dynamic creative optimization (DCO): The automated assembly of ad variants from components such as images, copy, and offers, tailored to each impression.
Interstitial: A full-screen ad shown at a natural transition point, such as between levels of a game or screens of an app.
Linear TV: Traditional broadcast or cable television watched on a fixed schedule set by the network.
Mid-roll: A video ad that plays during the content, inserted at a break within it.
Native advertising: Paid ads that match the form and feel of the surrounding content, marked with a sponsored or ad label.
OTT: Streaming content delivered over the internet to any screen, bypassing traditional distributors such as cable or satellite.
Paid search: Ads bought against search queries and shown alongside results, priced mostly per click.
Paid social: Advertising bought within social media platforms, shown in feeds, stories, and other placements.
Pre-roll: A video ad that plays before the content the viewer chose to watch.
Programmatic audio: The automated buying of ad slots in streaming music, digital radio, and podcasts.
Rich media: Display ads that go beyond a static image with interaction, video, expansion, or other motion.