Glossary

501 terms used in buying, measuring, and running digital advertising. Each opens to a full entry with related terms. Filter as you type, or pick a category.

Buying and pricing Measurement Targeting and data Creative and formats Infrastructure and standards Search Practice and industry Privacy and regulation All

A

A/B Test (Split test, Creative test): A controlled comparison of two or more variants (creative, landing page, audience, bid strategy) shown to randomly assigned groups, with the difference in outcome measured.
Accessibility (WCAG, ADA compliance): Making ads and landing pages usable by people with disabilities: captions on video, alt text on images, sufficient contrast, keyboard-navigable forms.
Account-Based Marketing (ABM): B2B advertising aimed at a named list of target companies rather than a demographic or interest, with success measured by engagement and pipeline from those accounts.
ACoS (Advertising cost of sales): Ad spend divided by attributed sales, the standard efficiency metric in Amazon Ads and other retail media.
Ad Assets (Ad extensions): Additional elements attached to a search ad beyond the headline and description: sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets, call buttons, location, price, promotion, image, and lead form assets.
Ad Blocker Recovery (Acceptable Ads): Publisher techniques for showing ads to visitors running ad blockers: serving through first-party domains, asking users to allow the site, or participating in the Acceptable Ads program that whitelists non-intrusive formats in exchange for a fee.
Ad Blocking: Browser extensions, network filters, and built-in browser features that prevent ads and tracking calls from loading.
Ad Concept (Big idea, Creative platform): The central idea a campaign's executions express, which can be adapted across formats, lengths, and channels.
Ad Copy: The written text of an ad: headlines, descriptions, primary text, and calls to action.
Ad Exchange: A marketplace that connects buyers and sellers of programmatic inventory and runs the auction between them.
Ad Exchange Fee (Exchange take rate): The percentage of the clearing price an exchange or SSP retains, historically 10 to 20 percent and now lower under buyer pressure and SPO.
Ad Fraud Regulation (Fraud liability): The legal exposure around invalid traffic.
Ad Group: The unit inside a campaign that holds a set of keywords (or audiences) and the ads that serve against them.
Ad Library (Ad transparency center): A public, searchable archive of the ads running on a platform.
Ad Load: The amount of advertising relative to content: ads per page, ad minutes per hour of video, ad slots per feed session.
Ad Monetization (App monetization): A publisher's or developer's revenue from selling advertising, managed through ad servers, SSPs, mediation, and direct sales.
Ad Network: A company that aggregates inventory from many publishers, packages it, and resells it to advertisers, taking a margin.
Ad Operations (Ad ops): The function that traffics campaigns, monitors delivery, troubleshoots discrepancies, manages tags and pixels, and reconciles billing.
Ad Position (Top of page rate, Absolute top): Where an ad appears on a results page.
Ad Quality (Creative quality control, Malvertising): Publisher-side screening of creatives for malware, deceptive content, heavy files, auto-play audio, and policy violations.
Ad Rank: The value Google computes for each ad in a search auction to determine whether it shows and in what position: bid, ad quality, Ad Assets, context, and thresholds.
Ad Recall: The share of people exposed to a campaign who remember seeing it when asked, typically within two days.
Ad Refresh (Auto-refresh): Reloading an ad slot with a new ad after a set interval or on user action while the page stays open.
Ad Request: A call from a page or app to an ad server asking for an ad to fill a slot.
Ad Server: The system that stores creative, decides which ad to show for a given request, serves it, and records the impression and click.
Ad Server Log (Log-level data, Raw logs): Impression-, click-, and conversion-level records exported from an ad server or DSP, one row per event, with timestamps, placements, prices, and identifiers where permitted.
Ad Set (Ad group (social)): Meta's unit for audience, placement, budget, schedule, and optimization, sitting between campaign and ad.
Ad Specs Compliance (Spec check): Verifying creative against platform specifications before trafficking: dimensions, file weight, duration, text limits, safe zones.
Ad Strength: Google's rating (poor to excellent) of a responsive search ad's asset diversity and relevance.
Ad Tag: A snippet of HTML or JavaScript that calls an ad server to fill a slot, or a URL (a VAST tag, a tracking tag) that represents a creative or a measurement call.
Ad Tech (Advertising technology): The software and companies that automate the buying, selling, serving, targeting, and measuring of advertising: DSPs, SSPs, exchanges, ad servers, DMPs, CDPs, verification, identity, and the rest of the directory.
Ad Transparency (Why am I seeing this ad): Disclosure to users of who paid for an ad and why they were shown it, required by the EU's Digital Services Act for all ads on platforms and implemented as a control on most platforms.
Ad Verification (Verification, Measurement vendor): Third-party measurement of whether ads were viewable, brand safe, free of invalid traffic, and served in the intended geography.
Add to Cart Rate: Add-to-cart events divided by sessions or product views.
Added Value (Bonus impressions, Value-add): Additional impressions, placements, or services a publisher includes in a buy at no charge to win or retain the business.
Addressable TV: Television advertising delivered to specific households rather than to everyone watching a program, through set-top boxes, smart TVs, and streaming.
ads.txt (Authorized Digital Sellers, app-ads.txt): An IAB Tech Lab standard in which a publisher lists, in a plain text file at its domain root, every company authorized to sell its inventory.
Adstock (Carryover, Decay): The lagged effect of advertising, where exposure this week still influences sales in later weeks with diminishing force.
Advanced TV (Advanced advertising): An umbrella term for any television advertising beyond the traditional age-and-gender demographic buy: addressable, connected TV, data-driven linear, and programmatic TV.
Advantage+: Meta's family of automated campaign features: Advantage+ shopping campaigns (automated ecommerce campaigns), Advantage+ audiences (automated targeting with optional signals), Advantage+ creative (automated creative variations), and Advantage+ placements.
Affiliate Marketing (Performance partnerships): Paying publishers, creators, and comparison sites a commission on the sales or leads they refer, tracked through links and cookies and managed through networks such as Impact, CJ, Rakuten, and Awin.
Affinity Audience: A platform segment based on durable interests and lifestyle rather than active shopping: cooking enthusiasts, sports fans, luxury shoppers.
Age-Appropriate Design (Children's code): Regulatory codes, beginning with the UK Age Appropriate Design Code in 2021, that require services likely to be used by children to default to high privacy, limit profiling, and avoid nudging.
Agency Fee (Agency commission, Management fee): What an agency charges to plan and buy media: historically a 15 percent commission on media, now more often a percentage of spend (commonly 8 to 15 percent for digital), a fixed retainer, a fee based on staffing, or a performance component.
Agency of Record (AOR): The agency designated to handle all of an advertiser's business in a discipline, such as media, creative, or digital, as opposed to project-based assignments.
Agency Partner Program (Google Partners, Meta Business Partners): Platform programs that certify agencies meeting spend and training thresholds, offering support, early features, and credits.
Aggregated Measurement (Aggregated event measurement): Reporting conversions in totals rather than per user, with delays and noise added, so that individuals cannot be identified.
AI Overviews (AI Mode, Generative search): AI-generated answers shown at the top of Google search results and in Google's AI Mode, and the equivalents in Bing Copilot and Perplexity.
Alcohol Advertising Rules: Self-regulatory codes (DISCUS, Beer Institute, Wine Institute in the US) and platform policies requiring that alcohol ads reach audiences at least 71.6 percent of legal drinking age, use age gating, and avoid appeal to minors.
Always-On: Continuous advertising at a base level rather than in flights, typically for search, retargeting, and brand defense, where demand exists every day.
Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC): Amazon's clean room, which lets advertisers run SQL queries over event-level Amazon Ads signals (sponsored ads, DSP, streaming TV) and their own uploaded data, returning aggregated results.
ANA (Association of National Advertisers): The US trade association for advertisers.
App Campaigns (Universal App Campaigns, UAC): Google's automated campaign type for app installs and in-app actions across Search, Play, YouTube, Display, and Discover, built from supplied text, images, and video with no keyword or placement control.
App Store Optimization (ASO): Improving an app's organic visibility and conversion in the App Store and Google Play: title, keywords, screenshots, ratings, and metadata.
App Tracking Transparency (ATT): Apple's iOS framework, effective April 2021, that requires apps to ask permission before tracking users across other companies' apps and websites or accessing the IDFA.
Aspect Ratio: The proportion of width to height of an image or video.
Attention Metrics: Measures that go beyond Viewability to estimate whether a person actually looked at an ad: eye-tracking panels, modeled attention scores, time in view, and interaction signals.
Attention Time (Time in view, Dwell time): How long an ad was on screen, measured by verification vendors as an extension of viewability.
Attribution: The set of rules that assigns credit for a conversion to the ads, clicks, and impressions that preceded it.
Attribution Window (Lookback window, Conversion window): The period after an ad exposure during which a conversion can be credited to it.
Auction Insights: A Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising report showing which competitors appeared in the same auctions, with their impression share, overlap rate, outranking share, and top-of-page rate.
Audience Overlap: The share of one audience that also belongs to another.
Audience Segment (Segment): A defined group of users available for targeting, described by demographics, interests, behaviors, or purchase signals, and supplied by a platform, a data provider, or the advertiser.
Audio Advertising (Streaming audio, Podcast advertising): Ads in streaming music, radio, and podcasts.
Automatic Content Recognition (ACR): Technology in smart TVs that identifies what is on screen by matching audio or video fingerprints, producing viewing data across broadcast, streaming, and connected devices.
Average Order Value (AOV): Revenue divided by orders.
AVOD (Ad-supported video on demand): Streaming video that is free or discounted because it carries advertising: the ad tiers of Netflix, Disney+, Max, Peacock, and Paramount+, and free services such as Tubi and Pluto.

B

Bayesian MMM: Marketing mix modeling that uses Bayesian inference to incorporate prior knowledge (from lift tests, past models, or reasonable ranges) and to express uncertainty in its results.
Behavioral Targeting (Interest targeting, Audience targeting): Selecting users based on their past actions: sites visited, content consumed, purchases, app usage.
Benchmarks (Industry benchmarks): Typical values for a metric by channel, industry, and objective, drawn from platform data, agency reports, and published studies.
Bid Adjustment (Bid modifier): A percentage increase or decrease applied to bids for a device, location, time, audience, or demographic.
Bid Cap: A hard maximum on the bid in any single auction.
Bid Filtering (Traffic shaping, Pre-bid filtering): Sellers and DSPs discarding bid requests before the auction to save cost: requests unlikely to be bid on, from blocked sites, or failing quality checks.
Bid Landscape (Bid density): The distribution of winning prices for a type of inventory, which tells a buyer how much to bid to win a given share of auctions.
Bid Request: The message a seller sends to buyers describing an available impression: site or app, placement, format, size, user signals where permitted, price floor, and deal IDs.
Bid Response: A buyer's reply to a bid request: the price offered, the creative to serve, and tracking URLs.
Bid Shading: An algorithm inside a DSP that lowers each bid below the buyer's maximum in a First-Price Auction, estimating the minimum price likely to still win.
Billing (Media billing, Reconciliation): Invoicing for media, based on delivered impressions reconciled between the publisher's and advertiser's counts, plus fees.
Boosted Post: Paying to extend the reach of an existing organic post through the simplified promotion button rather than the full ads manager.
Bot Traffic: Non-human visits and interactions generated by automated software, from benign crawlers to fraud bots that fake impressions, clicks, and installs.
Bounce Rate: The share of sessions that end without a second interaction.
Brand Awareness: The share of a target audience that knows a brand exists.
Brand Guidelines: The rules governing how a brand appears in advertising: logo use, color, typography, tone, and mandatory elements.
Brand Lift: A study that measures the change in awareness, ad recall, consideration, or purchase intent between people exposed to a campaign and a control group, using surveys served on the platform or by a panel vendor.
Brand Safety: Keeping ads away from content that could damage the advertiser: violence, hate, adult material, illegal activity, and the other categories defined in the GARM brand safety floor.
Brand Search (Branded search, Brand terms): Paid search on queries containing the advertiser's own name.
Brand Suitability: The advertiser-specific layer above Brand Safety: content that is safe in general but wrong for a particular brand, such as a family brand near alcohol reviews or an airline near air travel accident coverage.
Breakeven ROAS: The return on ad spend at which a sale produces zero contribution margin: one divided by the contribution margin rate before marketing.
Broad Match: The match type that lets a keyword trigger ads on any query Google judges related, including synonyms, implied intent, and different word orders.
Budget (Media budget, Working media): The amount available to spend on media.
Bumper Ad: A 6-second non-skippable video ad, introduced by YouTube in 2016 and adopted as a format on other platforms.
Buyer's Agent (Agent model): The traditional agency arrangement in which the agency buys media in the client's name and passes through the cost at the price paid, earning a disclosed fee.

C

C3 and C7 (Commercial ratings): Nielsen ratings of the commercial minutes in a program, averaged across live viewing plus three (C3) or seven (C7) days of playback.
CAC (Customer acquisition cost): Total sales and marketing cost divided by new customers acquired in the period.
Call to Action (CTA): The instruction that tells the audience what to do next: shop now, learn more, sign up, download.
Call Tracking: Assigning dynamic phone numbers to visitors so calls can be attributed to the campaign, keyword, or channel that brought them.
Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO, Advantage+ campaign budget): Setting the budget at the campaign level and letting the platform distribute it across ad sets by performance, rather than fixing a budget per ad set.
Campaign Structure: How an account is divided into campaigns, ad groups or ad sets, and ads.
Cannes Lions (Awards): The largest advertising awards festival, held each June, and the shorthand for creative awards generally.
Cannibalization: Conversions credited to advertising that would have happened through another channel anyway, most often paid search taking credit for organic search or brand search taking credit for direct visits.
Caption (Subtitles, Burned-in captions): On-screen text of a video's spoken words.
Carousel Ad: An in-feed unit with several images or videos a user can swipe through, each with its own link.
Cart Abandonment: The share of started checkouts that do not complete, roughly 70 percent across ecommerce.
Certification (Platform certification): Platform exams (Google Ads certifications, Meta Blueprint, Amazon Ads certification, The Trade Desk Edge) that verify product knowledge.
Children's Advertising (CARU, Kids advertising rules): The rules for advertising to and around children: COPPA for data, CARU's self-regulatory guidelines for content in the US, the UK's HFSS restrictions on food advertising, and platform bans on targeting minors by interest.
Click Fraud (Click spam, Click injection): Generating fake clicks to drain a competitor's budget or to claim attribution for installs and conversions the clicker did not cause.
Click ID (gclid, fbclid, ttclid): A unique identifier a platform appends to an ad's landing URL when a user clicks (gclid for Google, fbclid for Meta, ttclid for TikTok, msclkid for Microsoft, li_fat_id for LinkedIn).
Client Services (Account management): The agency function that owns the client relationship: briefs, approvals, reporting, budgets, and escalation.
Close Variants: Queries Google treats as matching an exact or phrase keyword despite differences: misspellings, plurals, abbreviations, reordered words, and, since 2018, same-meaning queries.
Closed-Loop Measurement: Attribution in which the same party sees the ad exposure and the sale, so the two can be matched deterministically: retail media networks, Amazon, and any platform with its own checkout.
Cohort Analysis: Grouping customers by the period they were acquired and tracking each group's behavior over time: retention, repeat purchase, revenue.
Collection Ad: A mobile in-feed format that opens a full-screen, fast-loading catalog experience (Meta's Instant Experience) from a cover image or video, showing products from a Product Feed.
Community Management: Responding to comments, messages, and mentions on a brand's social accounts and ads.
Companion Banner: A display ad shown alongside a video or audio ad, on the same page or in the player, carrying the click-through the audio or video cannot.
Comparative Advertising: Advertising that names or clearly identifies a competitor.
Competitive Separation: A guarantee that a competitor's ad will not run in the same break or on the same page.
Confidence Interval: The range within which a measured value, such as incremental lift, probably lies, at a stated confidence level.
Connected TV (CTV, OTT): Television content streamed over the internet to a TV screen, through a smart TV, a streaming stick, a game console, or a set-top app, and the advertising sold within it.
Consent Management Platform (CMP): Software that presents privacy notices and choices to site or app users, records their decisions, and communicates them to advertising and analytics tags, typically through the IAB Europe Transparency and Consent Framework in Europe and the Global Privacy Platform in the United States.
Consent Mode: Google's mechanism for adjusting how its tags behave based on user consent: with consent denied, tags send cookieless pings that Google uses to model conversions rather than setting identifiers.
Consent Rate (Opt-in rate): The share of visitors who accept cookies or tracking when asked.
Consideration: The share of a target audience that would consider buying a brand, measured by survey.
Consultancy (Media consultancy): A firm that advises on media strategy, measurement, agency selection, and in-housing without buying media itself, or a boutique that does both at small scale.
Contextual Category (IAB category): A content classification from the IAB Content Taxonomy (or a vendor's own) attached to a page or video: automotive, personal finance, news and politics.
Contextual Targeting: Placing ads based on the content of the page, video, or app rather than on who the user is.
Contribution Margin: Revenue minus variable costs, including cost of goods, shipping, payment processing, and the media that drove the sale.
Conversion Action: A defined conversion in Google Ads or Microsoft Advertising: source, category, value, counting method (one or every), attribution model, and whether it is primary (used for bidding) or secondary (observed only).
Conversion Funnel (Checkout funnel): The sequence of steps from landing to purchase, with the drop-off at each: product view, add to cart, checkout start, payment, confirmation.
Conversion Lag (Time to conversion): The delay between an ad interaction and the conversion it eventually produces.
Conversion Lift (Lift study): A platform-administered incrementality study in which the platform randomly holds out a share of the target audience and reports the difference in conversions.
Conversion Rate (CVR, CR): Conversions divided by clicks, sessions, or impressions, depending on the denominator in use.
Conversions API (CAPI, Server-side tracking): A server-to-server connection that sends conversion events from the advertiser's systems directly to an ad platform, bypassing the browser and its cookie limits, ad blockers, and consent-dependent tags.
Cookie Banner (Consent banner): The notice presented on first visit asking for consent to cookies and tracking, required in practice under the ePrivacy Directive and GDPR and, in a lighter form, under some US state laws.
Cookie Consent Enforcement (CNIL fines, DPA enforcement): Regulatory action over consent practices, led by France's CNIL, which has fined Google, Meta, Amazon, TikTok, and others tens or hundreds of millions of euros for banners that made refusal harder than acceptance.
Cookie Sync (Cookie matching, User sync): The process by which two ad tech companies exchange their respective cookie IDs for the same browser so they can recognize the user in each other's bid requests.
COPPA (Children's Online Privacy Protection Act): The US federal law, enforced by the FTC, restricting collection of personal data from children under 13 without verifiable parental consent.
Cost Cap (Cost per result goal): A bid strategy that asks the platform to keep the average cost per result at or below a figure while spending as much as it can.
Cost Per Engagement (CPE): Price paid per engagement, where an engagement is a like, comment, share, save, follow, or expand, as defined by the platform.
Cost Per Incremental Conversion (iCPA, Incremental CPA): Media cost divided by the conversions a campaign caused, as measured by a lift test, rather than the conversions it was credited with.
Cost Per Session (Cost per visit): Media cost divided by analytics sessions rather than platform clicks.
Cost Per Thousand Reached (CPP, Cost per point, Reach CPM): Media cost divided by unique people reached, per thousand, rather than per thousand impressions.
CPA (Cost per acquisition, Cost per action): Total media cost divided by the number of conversions, where a conversion is whatever the advertiser defined: a purchase, a lead, an install, a booked call.
CPC (Cost per click): The amount paid each time a user clicks an ad.
CPCL (Cost per completed lead, Cost per qualified lead, CPQL): Cost per lead that passed a qualification step: a sales-accepted lead, a booked meeting, a verified phone number.
CPCV (Cost per completed view): Cost per video view that ran to the end.
CPD (Cost per day): A flat daily rate for a placement, used for takeovers, mastheads, and sponsorships where delivery is tied to time rather than impressions.
CPI (Cost per install): Cost per app install, the standard buying and reporting unit for mobile app user acquisition.
CPL (Cost per lead): Cost per acquisition where the acquisition is a lead: a form fill, a phone call, a lead-form submission inside a social platform.
CPM (Cost per mille, Cost per thousand): The price of one thousand ad impressions.
CPP (Cost per point, Cost per rating point): The cost of one gross rating point against a defined audience, the pricing unit of television.
CPS (Cost per sale, Cost per order): Cost per completed purchase, the ecommerce form of CPA, and the pricing unit of affiliate marketing where it is usually a percentage of order value rather than a fixed fee..
CPSV (Cost per store visit): Media cost divided by measured store visits, reported by Google (store visits conversions), Meta, and location data vendors from device location signals.
CPV (Cost per view): The price of one video view.
Creative Approval (Ad review, Disapproval): A platform's review of an ad against its policies before it can run, usually automated with human escalation.
Creative Brief: The document that tells a creative team what to make: objective, audience, single-minded proposition, support, tone, mandatories, formats, and deadline.
Creative Fatigue (Ad fatigue): The decline in an ad's performance as the same audience sees it repeatedly, visible as falling CTR and rising CPA at rising frequency.
Creative Management Platform (CMP (creative)): Software for producing, versioning, and trafficking large volumes of display and social creative from templates, with built-in resizing, localization, and feed connections.
Creative Rotation (Ad rotation): How an ad server or platform divides impressions among several creatives in a placement: evenly, weighted, sequentially, or optimized to a metric.
Creative Specs (Ad specs): A platform's technical requirements for an ad: dimensions, aspect ratio, file type, file size, duration, frame rate, bit rate, text limits, and safe zones.
Creative Testing (Creative iteration): Structured comparison of ad variants to learn what works: hooks, formats, messages, offers, talent, length.
Creative Volume (Creative velocity): The number of distinct ad variants an account produces per period.
Creator Advertising (Influencer marketing, Branded content): Paying individuals with audiences to feature a brand in their content, and often amplifying that content as paid media through Spark Ads, Meta partnership ads, or YouTube.
Cross-Border Transfer (International data transfer, Data Privacy Framework): Moving personal data from the EU or UK to a country without an adequacy decision, which requires a mechanism such as the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, standard contractual clauses, or binding corporate rules.
Cross-Media Measurement: Measuring reach and frequency across television, streaming, and digital platforms in one deduplicated view, the industry goal pursued through the WFA's Halo framework, the ANA's Aquila initiative in the US, and Origin in the UK, with the cooperation of the walled gardens as the sticking point..
CTR (Click-through rate): Clicks divided by impressions, expressed as a percentage.
Curation (Curated marketplace): A sell-side service in which a curator (an SSP, a data company, or an agency) packages inventory from many publishers, applies data and quality filters, and offers it to buyers as a single deal ID.
Currency (Measurement currency, Alternative currency): The audience measurement both buyer and seller accept as the basis for a transaction.
Custom Audience: Meta's term for an audience built from the advertiser's own data: uploaded customer lists, website visitors from the Pixel, app users, engagement with the advertiser's content on Meta.
Customer Data Platform (CDP): A system that unifies a company's first-party customer data from every source into persistent profiles keyed to known individuals, then makes those profiles available to marketing, advertising, and analytics tools.
Customer Match: Google's feature for targeting or excluding known customers by uploading hashed email addresses, phone numbers, or postal data, which Google matches against signed-in users.

D

Dark Patterns (Deceptive design): Interface designs that manipulate people into choices they would not otherwise make: a prominent accept button and a hidden decline, pre-ticked boxes, confusing double negatives.
Dark Posting (Dark ads, Unpublished posts): Running social ads that do not appear on the advertiser's organic page or profile, so that many variants can be tested without cluttering the feed.
Dashboard: A live report combining data from several platforms, built in Looker Studio, Tableau, Power BI, or a reporting tool such as Funnel or Supermetrics.
Data Broker: A company that collects and sells personal data about people with whom it has no direct relationship.
Data Clean Room: A secure environment in which two or more parties match and analyze their data without either party seeing the other's raw records.
Data Layer: A JavaScript object on a web page that holds structured information about the page and user actions (product IDs, prices, transaction totals, user status) for tags to read.
Data Management Platform (DMP): A system that collects, organizes, and activates audience data, historically built on third-party cookies for segmenting anonymous users and syncing them to DSPs.
Data Minimization: The principle, written into the GDPR and most US state laws, that only the personal data necessary for a stated purpose should be collected and kept.
Data Onboarding: Matching offline customer records (names, addresses, emails) to online identifiers so they can be used for digital targeting and measurement.
Data Processing Agreement (DPA): The contract the GDPR requires between a data controller and each processor handling personal data on its behalf, specifying purposes, security, sub-processors, and audit rights.
Data Subject Rights (Access request, Right to delete): The rights individuals have over their personal data: access, correction, deletion, portability, objection, and, in the US, opt-out of sale and targeted advertising.
Data-Driven Attribution (DDA): An attribution model that uses the advertiser's own conversion paths to estimate how much each touchpoint contributed, comparing converting and non-converting paths.
Data-Driven Linear (DDL, Audience-based linear): Buying linear television against a defined audience segment rather than an age-and-gender demographic, using data to identify the programs and dayparts where the segment over-indexes.
Daypart: A block of the broadcast day priced and planned as a unit: early morning, daytime, early fringe, prime access, prime time, late night, overnight.
Dayparting (Ad scheduling): Restricting or weighting delivery by hour of day and day of week.
dCPM (Dynamic CPM): A CPM that varies impression by impression with the auction rather than being fixed for a placement.
Deal ID: A unique identifier a seller generates to represent a specific programmatic deal, private marketplace, preferred deal, or guaranteed buy.
Deduplication (Deduplicated reach, Event deduplication): Removing double counting: the same person reached on two platforms counted once for reach, or the same conversion sent by pixel and Conversions API counted once.
Deep Link (Deferred deep link, Universal link): A link that opens a specific screen inside an app rather than the app's home or a web page.
Demand Gen: Google's campaign type for visual ads across YouTube (in-feed, Shorts, in-stream), Discover, and Gmail, using audience targeting and lookalike segments.
Demand-Side Platform (DSP): Software through which advertisers and agencies buy programmatic inventory across many exchanges and publishers from one interface, with audience targeting, bidding, frequency management, and reporting.
Digital Out-of-Home (DOOH, Programmatic OOH): Advertising on digital screens in public places: billboards, transit, retail, gyms, airports, elevators.
Digital Services Act (DSA): The EU regulation, fully applicable since February 2024, that sets obligations for online intermediaries.
Digital Shelf: How a product appears on retail sites: search rank, content quality, images, reviews, price, and availability.
Disclaimer (Legal copy, Super): Required text in an ad: offer terms, pricing conditions, financial or pharmaceutical warnings, political paid-for-by lines.
Discrepancy: The difference between impression or click counts recorded by two systems measuring the same delivery, usually the publisher's ad server and the advertiser's.
Display Advertising (Banner advertising): Static or animated image ads served in fixed-size slots on websites and in apps.
Domain Spoofing: Fraud in which a low-quality site declares itself to be a premium publisher in the bid request so buyers pay premium prices for junk inventory.
Dynamic Ad Insertion (DAI): Inserting ads into audio or video at the moment of download or stream rather than at production, so different listeners hear different ads and old episodes carry current campaigns.
Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO, Dynamic creative): Assembling an ad at serve time from a template and a feed of components (products, prices, headlines, images, offers) chosen for the individual impression, and learning which combinations perform.
Dynamic Search Ads (DSA): Google and Microsoft search ads whose headline and landing page are generated from the advertiser's website content in response to queries the advertiser has not bid on.

E

Effective CPM (eCPM): Total cost divided by impressions, times one thousand, regardless of how the media was bought.
Email Advertising (Newsletter sponsorship, Dedicated send): Advertising inside email newsletters, as a sponsored placement within an issue or a dedicated send to a publisher's list.
End Card: The final frame of a video ad, holding the logo, offer, and call to action.
Engagement Rate: Engagements divided by impressions or reach, expressed as a percentage.
Enhanced Conversions: Google's method of improving conversion measurement by sending hashed first-party data (email, phone, address) with the conversion tag and matching it to signed-in Google users.
ePrivacy Directive (Cookie law): The 2002 EU directive, amended in 2009, that requires consent before storing or accessing information on a user's device, which is the legal source of European cookie banners.
Estimated Action Rate: Meta's prediction that a given user will take the optimization event if shown the ad, one of the three inputs to its auction alongside bid and ad quality.
Event Match Quality (EMQ): Meta's score (1 to 10) of how well the customer information sent with Conversions API events matches to Meta accounts.
Event Tracking (Custom events): Recording user actions beyond page views as named events with parameters: clicks, video plays, form starts, purchases.
Exclusion (Suppression, Negative targeting): Removing users, placements, or content from a campaign's eligible set: existing customers from an acquisition campaign, converters from a retargeting campaign, specific sites or apps, content categories.
Expected CTR: The Quality Score component predicting how likely an ad is to be clicked when shown for a keyword, based on the keyword's history and independent of position and assets.

F

FAST (Free ad-supported streaming TV): Streaming channels that are free to watch and funded by advertising, programmed as linear-style channels rather than on-demand libraries: Pluto TV, Tubi, The Roku Channel, Samsung TV Plus.
Fill Rate: The share of ad requests a publisher or app sends that return a paid ad.
Financial Advertising Rules: Rules for advertising financial products: FTC and CFPB oversight, SEC and FINRA rules for investment advertising, fair lending laws for credit that restrict targeting, and platform verification requirements for financial and crypto advertisers.
Fingerprinting (Probabilistic attribution): Identifying a device from its combination of characteristics (IP address, screen size, OS version, fonts, language) rather than a stored identifier.
First-Party Cookie: A cookie set by the domain the user is visiting, used for logins, preferences, analytics, and, since third-party cookies declined, for advertising measurement through first-party-domain tagging.
First-Party Data: Data an organization collects directly from its own customers and audiences: purchase history, CRM records, site and app behavior, email lists, loyalty data.
First-Price Auction: An auction in which the winning bidder pays exactly what it bid.
Flat Fee (Sponsorship, Fixed placement): A fixed price for a placement over a period, regardless of impressions delivered: a homepage takeover for a day, a newsletter sponsorship, a podcast host-read.
Flighting: Scheduling media in discrete bursts with gaps between them, as opposed to continuous delivery.
Floor Price (Price floor, Reserve price): The minimum bid a seller will accept for an impression.
Forecast (Media forecast, Delivery estimate): The expected impressions, reach, clicks, conversions, and cost for a plan before it runs, built from platform estimates, benchmarks, and past results.
Frequency: The average number of times each reached person was exposed to a campaign.
Frequency Cap: A limit on how many times one person is served an ad in a period, set at the campaign, line item, or creative level.
FTC Endorsement Guides (Disclosure rules, #ad): The Federal Trade Commission's guidance on endorsements and testimonials, updated in 2023, which requires clear and conspicuous disclosure of any material connection between an advertiser and an endorser, including paid creators, gifted products, and employees.
Funnel (Marketing funnel, Full-funnel): The model of a customer's path from unaware to purchased, usually drawn as awareness, consideration, and conversion, with channels and metrics assigned to each stage.

G

Gambling Advertising Rules: Advertising for sports betting and gaming is regulated state by state in the US since 2018, by the ASA and Gambling Commission in the UK, and by outright bans in some countries.
GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation): The European Union's data protection regulation, in force since May 2018, which governs any processing of personal data about people in the EU.
Generative AI Creative (AI-generated ads, Synthetic creative): Ad images, video, copy, and voice produced by generative models, from platform tools (Meta's generative features, Google's asset generation) and standalone tools.
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO, AEO, Answer engine optimization): The practice of making content likely to be retrieved, cited, and recommended by AI answer engines and assistants, as distinct from ranking in traditional search.
Geo Experiment (Geo lift test, Matched-market test): An incrementality test that turns advertising on or changes its weight in some geographic markets and not others, then compares outcomes.
Geofencing: Targeting mobile devices that enter a drawn boundary around a physical location, such as a store, a competitor's store, or a conference venue, using GPS or other location signals collected by apps with location permission.
Geotargeting (Location targeting): Restricting delivery to users in specified places: countries, regions, cities, postal codes, or radii around a point.
Global Privacy Control (GPC): A browser or extension signal that tells websites the user opts out of the sale or sharing of personal data.
Global Privacy Platform (GPP): IAB Tech Lab's framework for encoding and transmitting privacy signals across jurisdictions in a single string, covering the US national and state privacy laws, Canada, and, as a section, the European TCF.
Google Analytics 4 (GA4): Google's current web and app analytics product, replacing Universal Analytics in 2023 with an event-based data model, cross-platform user reporting, and built-in BigQuery export.
Google Tag Manager (GTM, Tag manager): A tag management system that lets marketers deploy and control pixels, tags, and triggers through a web interface instead of editing site code.
GRP (Gross rating point, TRP): One percent of a defined population reached once.

H

Halo Effect: Sales lift on products or channels that were not advertised, caused by advertising for related ones: a search campaign for one product lifting sales of the range, or retail media on Amazon lifting sales in stores.
Hashed Email (HEM): An email address run through a one-way hash function (SHA-256 by convention) so that it can be matched between parties without exposing the address itself.
Header Bidding (Pre-bid, Prebid): A publisher technique that offers each impression to many exchanges simultaneously before the page's ad server makes its decision, rather than sequentially in a Waterfall.
Holding Company: A group owning many agencies: WPP, Omnicom (which absorbed IPG in 2025), Publicis, Dentsu, and Havas.
Holdout (Control group, Ghost ads, PSA test): A randomly selected group of eligible users who are deliberately not shown the campaign so their behavior can be compared with the exposed group.
Hook: The opening one to three seconds of a video ad, which determine whether a viewer keeps watching on skippable and feed placements.
Host-Read Ad: A podcast ad read by the show's host in their own voice, usually from talking points rather than a script, and either baked into the episode permanently or inserted dynamically.
Household Targeting: Targeting and frequency capping at the level of the home rather than the individual, based on the IP address and device graph of a residence.
Housing, Employment, and Credit Ads (Special ad categories): Ads in categories covered by US civil rights law, where targeting by age, gender, ZIP code, and interests correlated with protected classes is prohibited.
HTML5 Ad: A display ad built as a small web page (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) rather than a static image or the retired Flash format.

I

IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau): The US trade association for digital advertising, with affiliates in many countries.
Identity Resolution (Identity graph): Connecting the identifiers that represent the same person or household across devices, browsers, and channels: cookies, mobile advertising IDs, hashed emails, IP addresses, CTV device IDs.
Impression: One instance of an ad being served.
Impression Share (Search impression share): The percentage of eligible search auctions in which an ad actually appeared.
In-App Bidding (Unified auction): The mobile equivalent of header bidding: all demand sources bid on an in-app impression simultaneously instead of in waterfall order.
In-Feed Ad (Sponsored post, Promoted post): An ad inserted into a scrolling feed of content on a social platform, appearing in the same visual form as organic posts and marked as sponsored.
In-Game Advertising: Ads inside video games: rewarded and interstitial units in mobile games, and intrinsic placements (billboards, jerseys) rendered inside console and PC games through vendors such as Anzu and Frameplay.
In-Housing: Moving media planning and buying from an agency to the advertiser's own staff, in whole or in part.
In-Market Audience: A platform segment of users whose recent behavior indicates they are actively researching or comparing a category of product: car shoppers, people looking at apartments.
In-Store Attribution (Offline sales lift, Footfall attribution): Connecting advertising exposure to physical store visits and purchases, through location data, loyalty cards, credit card panels, or retailer data.
Inclusion List (Allowlist, Whitelist): A list of sites, apps, or channels a campaign is permitted to run on, replacing the open web with a curated set.
Incrementality (Incremental lift, Causal measurement): The conversions, revenue, or brand outcomes that occurred because of advertising and would not have occurred without it.
Independent Agency: An agency not owned by a holding company.
Insertion Order (IO): The contract that authorizes a media buy: advertiser, publisher or vendor, placements, dates, impressions or units, rate, total cost, and terms.
Install Attribution (Last-click install attribution): Assigning an app install to the ad click or view that preceded it, within a lookback window, done by an MMP matching device identifiers or, on iOS, through SKAdNetwork postbacks.
Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP, Enhanced Tracking Protection): Safari's tracking countermeasures, introduced in 2017 and tightened repeatedly: blocking third-party cookies outright, capping first-party cookies set by script at seven days (one day when arriving from a tracking link), and stripping link decoration.
Interstitial: A full-screen ad shown at a natural transition point in an app or between pages, dismissible after a delay.
Invalid Traffic (IVT, Ad fraud, GIVT, SIVT): Impressions, clicks, or conversions that do not come from a real human with real interest.
IP Targeting: Targeting by the IP address of a network, used to reach a company's offices, a conference venue, or a household, and to determine geography.

K

Key Visual: The single image or composition that anchors a campaign and is adapted across every format.
Keyword Blocklist (Blocklist, Negative keyword list (display)): A list of words that prevent an ad from serving on a page containing them.
Keyword Contextual (Semantic targeting): Contextual targeting that selects pages by the words and topics they contain, from simple keyword lists to language-model classification of meaning.
Keyword Planner: Google Ads' research tool showing search volume ranges, competition, and bid estimates for keywords.
Keyword Research: Identifying the queries an advertiser should bid on, their volume, competition, and cost, using Google Keyword Planner, third-party tools, the search terms report, and site search data.
Keyword Targeting: Selecting search auctions by the queries users type, the core of paid search, and selecting content by the words it contains, an older form of contextual display targeting.
KPI (Key performance indicator): The metric a campaign is judged on, chosen before launch and tied to the objective: CPA for direct response, reach and lift for awareness, pipeline for B2B.

L

Landing Page: The page a user reaches after clicking an ad.
Landing Page Experience: The Quality Score component that rates whether the page is relevant, transparent, easy to use, and fast.
Landing Page Optimization (Conversion rate optimization, CRO): Systematic testing and improvement of the pages ads send traffic to: headlines, forms, offers, layout, speed.
Last-Click Attribution (Last-touch attribution): An attribution model that gives all credit for a conversion to the last click before it.
Lawful Basis (Legal basis, Legitimate interest): The justification the GDPR requires for any processing of personal data.
Lead Form Ad (Lead gen form, Instant form): An ad that opens a form inside the platform, prefilled from the user's profile, instead of sending the user to a landing page.
Learning Phase: The period after a campaign or ad set is created or significantly edited during which a platform's automated bidding gathers data and performance is unstable.
Life Event Targeting: Segments of people who recently or imminently married, moved, graduated, retired, or had a child, inferred from platform signals.
Line Item: The unit of a programmatic or ad server campaign that holds targeting, budget, bid, creative, and flight: an insertion order contains line items, a line item contains creatives.
Linear TV: Broadcast and cable television watched on a schedule, as opposed to streaming on demand.
Live Shopping: Selling during a live video stream with products pinned and purchasable in real time.
Local Services Ads: Google's pay-per-lead ads for local service businesses (plumbers, lawyers, cleaners), shown above search results with a Google Guaranteed or Google Screened badge after background checks.
Localization (Transcreation): Adapting creative for another language and market, beyond translation: idiom, imagery, offers, legal disclaimers, talent.
Log-Level Data (LLD): Event-level records from a DSP or SSP, one row per bid, impression, click, or conversion, with prices and identifiers.
Long-Tail Keywords: Specific, low-volume queries, often several words long, that individually attract little traffic and collectively make up most of search.
Lookalike Audience (Similar audience, Audience expansion): A platform-generated audience of users who resemble a seed audience the advertiser supplies, typically customers or converters.
LTV (Lifetime value, CLV, Customer lifetime value): The total profit or revenue a customer is expected to generate over the relationship.

M

Made-for-Advertising Site (MFA): A website created primarily to generate ad revenue from arbitraged traffic rather than to serve readers: dense ad loads, auto-refreshing slots, paid traffic in, programmatic revenue out.
Makegood: Free additional impressions or placements a publisher provides to compensate for under-delivery, a missed guarantee, or a serving error.
Marginal CPA (Marginal ROAS): The cost of the next conversion, as opposed to the average cost of all conversions to date.
Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM, Media mix modeling): A statistical model that explains sales or another outcome as a function of marketing spend by channel, price, seasonality, and external factors, using aggregate time-series data rather than user-level tracking.
Marketplace Advertising: Sponsored placements on third-party marketplaces beyond Amazon: eBay, Etsy, Walmart, Target, Wayfair, and vertical marketplaces.
Martech (Marketing technology): Software for owned and earned marketing: CRM, email, marketing automation, CDPs, analytics, content management, personalization.
Master Services Agreement (MSA): The overarching contract between an advertiser and an agency setting the terms that govern every subsequent scope of work: payment terms, liability, intellectual property, data handling, audit rights, and termination.
Masthead (Homepage takeover): The premium placement at the top of a platform's home surface for a day, sold on reservation at a fixed price: the YouTube masthead, the Spotify homepage takeover, a publisher's homepage roadblock.
Match Rate: The share of uploaded records a platform or identity partner can connect to a user it recognizes.
Match Type (Broad match, Phrase match, Exact match): The setting that controls how closely a search query must correspond to a keyword for the ad to be eligible.
Media Agency (Media buying agency): An agency that plans and buys media on behalf of advertisers, as distinct from a creative agency that makes the ads.
Media Audit: An independent review of an advertiser's media buying: prices paid against benchmarks, compliance with contract terms, fee and rebate transparency, and process quality.
Media Brief: The document that gives a planner what they need to build a plan: objective, audience, budget, timing, geography, mandatories, and how success will be measured.
Media Buyer: The person who executes a plan: negotiating with sellers, setting up campaigns in platforms, managing bids and budgets, and optimizing delivery.
Media Credit (Platform credits, Ad credits): Free advertising a platform grants: promotional credits for new accounts, agency partner incentives, or compensation for outages.
Media Mix (Channel mix): The allocation of budget across channels.
Media Plan: The document that specifies what will be bought: channels, platforms, placements, audiences, formats, dates, budgets by line, and expected delivery and performance.
Media Planner: The person who turns a brief into a plan: audience research, channel selection, budget allocation, flighting, and forecasting.
Media Transparency (ANA transparency report): Whether the advertiser can see what its money bought, at what price, and what its agency and vendors earned along the way.
Mediation (Ad mediation): An in-app layer that manages multiple ad networks and exchanges competing for an app's inventory, through waterfall ordering or in-app bidding.
MER (Marketing efficiency ratio, Blended ROAS): Total revenue divided by total marketing spend across all channels for a period, with no attribution at all.
Merchant Center: Google's system for uploading and managing product data that feeds Shopping ads, free listings, and Performance Max.
Messaging Ads (Click-to-message, Click-to-WhatsApp, Conversation ads): Ads whose click opens a conversation in Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram DM, or LinkedIn messaging rather than a website.
Mobile Advertising (In-app advertising): Advertising delivered on smartphones and tablets, in mobile web browsers and inside apps.
Mobile Advertising ID (MAID, IDFA, GAID, AAID): The resettable identifier a mobile operating system assigns to a device for advertising: IDFA on iOS, GAID (Google Advertising ID) on Android.
Mobile Measurement Partner (MMP): A third-party attribution provider for mobile apps that receives install and event data from the app SDK, matches it to ad clicks and impressions from many networks, and handles SKAdNetwork postbacks.
Mobile Web: Websites viewed in a phone browser, as distinct from apps.
Modeled Conversions: Conversions a platform estimates statistically to fill gaps where it cannot observe them: consent denied, browser restrictions, iOS.
Modular Creative (Creative system): Producing ads as interchangeable components (hooks, bodies, offers, end cards) that can be recombined into many variants from one shoot.
Motion Graphics: Animated text, shapes, and images, as opposed to filmed video.
MRC (Media Rating Council): The US industry body that audits and accredits measurement services and sets minimum standards for counting impressions, viewability, invalid traffic, and audience.
Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA): Any attribution model that spreads credit across several touchpoints on the path to conversion: linear, time-decay, position-based, or algorithmic.

N

NAD (National Advertising Division): The US advertising industry's self-regulatory body, part of BBB National Programs, which adjudicates challenges to advertising claims, usually brought by competitors.
Naming Convention (Taxonomy): A fixed structure for campaign, ad set, ad, and UTM names that encodes channel, objective, audience, creative, and date so reporting can be automated.
Native Advertising: Ads that take the visual form of the content around them: an in-feed post, a recommended article, a promoted listing.
Negative Keyword: A keyword that prevents an ad from showing on queries containing it.
Net Promoter Score (NPS): A loyalty measure derived from one question: how likely are you to recommend this to a friend, on a scale of 0 to 10.
New-to-Brand (NTB): A conversion from a customer who had not bought from the brand in a defined lookback period, usually twelve months.
News Avoidance (Defunding news): The advertiser practice of excluding news content by category or keyword to avoid controversy, which removes a large, attentive, and generally brand-safe audience from plans.
Nielsen Rating (Rating point, HUT, PUT): The percentage of a population watching a program, measured by Nielsen's panel and, increasingly, big data from set-top boxes and smart TVs.

O

Offline Conversion (Offline conversion import, OCI): A conversion that happens outside the web or app, such as a signed contract, a store purchase, or a qualified lead in a CRM, uploaded to the ad platform and matched to the originating click or user through a Click ID or Hashed Email.
Omnichannel: Planning and measuring advertising across online and offline channels as one system, with the customer rather than the channel as the unit.
On-Target Percentage (In-target rate, Demo accuracy): The share of impressions delivered to the intended demographic, measured by a panel or identity provider.
Online Video (OLV, Digital video): Video advertising delivered over the internet to any screen except television: pre-roll, mid-roll, and post-roll on publisher video players, in-feed video on social platforms, outstream units that play inside article content.
Open Auction (Open exchange, Open marketplace, RTB): Programmatic inventory that any buyer with access to the exchange can bid on in real time, with no prior agreement between buyer and seller.
Open Measurement (OMID, OM SDK): An IAB Tech Lab software development kit that lets third-party verification vendors measure viewability and invalid traffic inside apps and CTV environments without each vendor installing its own code.
OpenRTB: The IAB Tech Lab protocol that defines the structure of bid requests and bid responses between SSPs, exchanges, and DSPs: what an impression is, what the page or app is, what the user is (where permitted), what formats are accepted, and what the bid is.
Opt-Out (Do not sell, Do not share): The right under US state privacy laws to stop a business from selling personal data or using it for targeted advertising, exercised through a site link or a browser signal.
Optimization: Adjusting a running campaign to improve results: shifting budget, changing bids, pausing placements, refreshing creative, tightening targeting.
Optimization Event (Optimization goal): The action a platform's algorithm is told to chase: purchases, leads, link clicks, landing page views, ThruPlays, reach.
Organic Social: Unpaid content published on a brand's own social accounts.
Out-of-Home (OOH, Outdoor): Advertising in public spaces: billboards, transit, street furniture, place-based screens, airports.
Outstream Video: Video ads that play outside a video player, inside article text or between paragraphs, usually muted and autoplaying when scrolled into view.

P

Pacing: The rate at which a campaign spends its budget over its flight.
Page Speed (Core Web Vitals): How quickly a landing page loads and becomes usable.
Panel (Measurement panel): A recruited sample of people whose media consumption is recorded and projected to the population: Nielsen's TV panel, Comscore's digital panel, YouGov's brand tracking panel.
Partnership Ads (Branded content ads, Allowlisting): Meta's format for running ads from a creator's handle with the creator's permission, so the ad carries the creator's identity and the engagement stays on their post.
Payback Period: The time it takes for a customer's cumulative contribution margin to repay the cost of acquiring them.
Performance Fee (Performance-based compensation, PBR): Agency compensation tied to results: a bonus for hitting targets, a share of incremental revenue, or a reduced base with upside.
Performance Max (PMax): A Google Ads campaign type that serves across Search, Shopping, YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail, and Maps from one campaign, using automated bidding, automated targeting, and creative assembled from supplied assets.
Personal Data (Personally identifiable information, PII): Information relating to an identified or identifiable person.
Pharmaceutical Advertising Rules (DTC drug advertising): Direct-to-consumer prescription drug advertising is legal only in the United States and New Zealand and is regulated by the FDA, which requires fair balance and major statement of risks.
Pitch (Agency review): The competitive process in which agencies compete for an advertiser's business, usually run by a consultant, involving chemistry meetings, a strategic response, and a commercial proposal.
Pixel (Tracking pixel, Tag, Conversion tag): A snippet of JavaScript (or, originally, a 1x1 image) placed on a website that sends events to an advertising or analytics platform: page views, add-to-carts, purchases, form submissions.
Placement: Where within a platform an ad can appear: feeds, Stories, Reels, in-stream, search, Audience Network.
Playable Ad: An interactive ad that lets a user try a game or app for a few seconds before installing.
Pod (Ad pod, Commercial break): A group of ads shown together in a break.
Political Advertising Rules: The disclosure and targeting rules that apply to ads about candidates, elections, and, on most platforms, social issues.
Portfolio Bid Strategy: A bid strategy shared across several campaigns so the algorithm optimizes the group rather than each campaign alone, with optional bid caps and floors.
Post-Bid (Post-bid blocking): Verification applied after an impression is won, either by blocking the creative from rendering (showing a blank or fallback) or by measuring and reporting only.
Post-Campaign Report (Wrap report, Post-buy): The report delivered after a campaign ends: delivery against plan, performance against objectives, learnings, and recommendations.
Post-Install Event (In-app event): Actions after install that indicate value: registration, tutorial completion, first purchase, day-7 retention.
Pre-Bid (Pre-bid targeting, Pre-bid segments): Applying verification, contextual, or audience data inside the DSP before a bid is placed, so unsuitable impressions are never bought.
Pre-Roll (Mid-roll, Post-roll, In-stream): Video ads that run before (pre), during (mid), or after (post) the content a user chose to watch.
Predictive Audience (Propensity model): A segment built by a model that scores users on their predicted likelihood of an outcome: purchasing, churning, converting to a higher tier.
Preferred Deal (Unreserved fixed rate): A one-to-one programmatic arrangement in which the buyer gets a first look at a publisher's inventory at a fixed CPM before it goes to auction, without committing to buy any volume.
Premium Inventory: Placements on well-known publishers, above the fold, in editorial context, sold directly or through private deals at higher prices.
Prime Time: The evening block, 8 to 11 pm Eastern (7 to 10 Central), when television audiences peak and pricing is highest.
Principal-Based Buying (Inventory media, Proprietary media): An arrangement in which the agency buys media on its own account and resells it to the client at a price of its choosing, acting as principal rather than agent, so the margin is not disclosed.
Print Advertising: Advertising in newspapers and magazines, priced by page fraction and circulation and measured by readership surveys.
Privacy Policy: The public notice describing what personal data an organization collects, why, with whom it shares it, and what rights people have.
Privacy Sandbox: Google's set of proposed browser and Android technologies to support advertising without cross-site tracking: the Topics API for interest signals, Protected Audience (formerly FLEDGE) for on-device remarketing auctions, and Attribution Reporting for aggregated measurement.
Private Marketplace (PMP, Private auction): An invitation-only programmatic auction in which a publisher offers specific inventory to selected buyers, usually with a negotiated Floor Price.
Product Feed (Catalog, Merchant feed): A structured file or API connection listing an advertiser's products with attributes: ID, title, description, price, availability, image, category, and identifiers such as GTIN.
Product Placement (Brand integration): Placing a product inside content rather than in an ad break: a car in a film, a beverage on a talk show desk, a brand in a creator's video.
Program Guarantee (Audience guarantee): A seller's commitment that a schedule will deliver a stated number of impressions or rating points against a demographic, with makegoods owed for any shortfall.
Programmatic Advertising: Buying and selling ad inventory through automated systems and auctions rather than manual negotiation.
Programmatic Audio: Streaming audio and podcast inventory bought through DSPs in real time rather than through direct deals.
Programmatic Guaranteed (PG, Automated guaranteed): A reserved buy executed through programmatic pipes: fixed CPM, fixed impression volume, one buyer, one seller, with the DSP and ad server handling delivery and billing instead of a manual Insertion Order.
Publisher: Any owner of an audience that sells advertising against it: news sites, apps, streaming services, podcast networks, social platforms, retailers.
Publisher Advertiser Identity Reconciliation (PAIR): A Google-initiated, now IAB Tech Lab, protocol that lets an advertiser and a publisher match their respective first-party customer lists through encryption without either side seeing the other's data, then target the overlap in DV360 and other DSPs.
Publisher First-Party Data (Seller-defined audiences): Audience segments a publisher builds from its own registered users and on-site behavior and offers to buyers directly or through the IAB Tech Lab's Seller Defined Audiences specification.
Purchase Intent: The stated likelihood that a survey respondent will buy a brand in a defined period.
Purpose Limitation: The principle that personal data collected for one purpose may not be used for an incompatible one without a new legal basis.

Q

QPS (Queries per second): The rate of bid requests an exchange sends a DSP, a capacity cost the DSP manages by filtering traffic before bidding.
Quality Assurance (QA, Launch check): Checking a campaign before and just after launch: targeting, budgets, dates, creative, landing pages, tracking, and naming.
Quality Score: Google's 1 to 10 diagnostic rating of a keyword's expected click-through rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience.

R

Radio Advertising (Broadcast radio, AM/FM): Advertising on terrestrial radio, bought by station, daypart, and market against Nielsen Audio ratings, and increasingly sold alongside the stations' streams and podcasts.
Rate Card: A publisher's published list prices for its placements.
Re-Engagement (Retargeting (app), Re-attribution): Advertising to existing app users to bring them back or move them to an event, tracked by the MMP as a re-attribution or re-engagement.
Reach: The number of distinct people exposed to a campaign at least once.
Real-Time Bidding (RTB): The auction mechanism underlying programmatic advertising: when a page or app loads, the seller's ad server sends a bid request describing the impression, DSPs respond with bids within roughly 100 milliseconds, and the winner's creative is served.
Rebate (Volume bonus, AVB): A payment from a media vendor to an agency based on the volume of spend the agency places, sometimes passed to clients and sometimes not.
Reels Ads (Shorts ads, Short-form video ads): Vertical video ads in the short-form video feeds of Instagram and Facebook (Reels), YouTube (Shorts), and their equivalents.
Relevance Diagnostics (Quality ranking, Engagement rate ranking): Meta's three rankings of an ad against competitors for the same audience: quality, engagement rate, and conversion rate, each reported as above average, average, or below.
Remnant Inventory (Unsold inventory): Impressions a publisher could not sell directly, released to networks and open auction at whatever price they fetch.
Repeat Purchase Rate: The share of customers who buy again within a period.
Reporting Cadence: How often performance is reported and to whom: daily pacing checks, weekly optimization reviews, monthly client reports, quarterly business reviews.
Request for Proposal (RFP): A document an advertiser issues to agencies or media vendors describing its needs and asking for a proposal and price.
Responsive Search Ad (RSA): Google's standard search ad format since 2022: the advertiser supplies up to 15 headlines and 4 descriptions, and Google assembles combinations per auction, testing which perform.
Retail Media (Retail media network, Commerce media): Advertising sold by retailers on their own sites and apps and, increasingly, off-site using their shopper data: sponsored products, display, video, and in-store screens.
Retainer: A fixed monthly fee for an agreed scope of agency work, independent of media spend.
Retargeting (Remarketing): Showing ads to people who previously visited a site, used an app, or engaged with content, identified through a pixel, SDK, or platform engagement.
Retention Rate (Day-1, Day-7, Day-30 retention): The share of new app users still active after a number of days.
Rewarded Video: An opt-in video ad in a mobile game or app that gives the user something for watching: an extra life, in-app currency, content access.
Rich Media: Display ads with interactivity beyond a click: expansion, video, forms, games, carousels.
Roadblock: Buying every ad slot on a page or every ad break in a program at once so the advertiser is the only one present.
ROAS (Return on ad spend): Revenue attributed to advertising divided by the advertising cost.

S

Safe Zone: The area of a vertical video that is guaranteed to be visible and unobstructed by a platform's interface elements: captions, buttons, profile names, and progress bars.
Sales Lift: The increase in sales attributable to a campaign, measured by comparing exposed and unexposed groups or test and control markets against purchase data from retailers, credit card panels, or the advertiser's own records.
Saturation (Diminishing returns, Response curve): The point at which additional spend in a channel returns less than it costs.
Scatter Market: Television inventory bought after the upfront, quarter by quarter, at prevailing prices.
Scope of Work (SOW): The contract document specifying what an agency will deliver, for which fee, over what period: channels, deliverables, staffing, reporting, and exclusions.
Screenshot (Proof of placement, Tearsheet): Evidence that an ad ran where it was supposed to, captured by the buyer or supplied by the seller.
Scroll Depth: How far down a page a visitor scrolled, tracked by analytics as an engagement signal for content and landing pages.
SDK (Software development kit): Code a developer embeds in an app to add a vendor's functionality: showing ads, measuring installs, collecting analytics, managing consent.
Search Advertising (Paid search, SEM, PPC): Text ads shown in response to a search query, bought by keyword and priced per click in an auction.
Search Partners (Syndicated search): Sites and apps outside the search engine's own results that show its ads: for Google, sites using Google search and some Google properties; for Microsoft, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, and AOL.
Search Query (Query): The words a person actually types or speaks into a search engine, as distinct from the keyword an advertiser bids on.
Search Terms Report (Search query report): The report showing the actual queries that triggered ads, as opposed to the keywords bid on.
Seasonality: Predictable variation in demand and media cost across the year.
Seat (DSP seat, Buyer seat): An account on a DSP or exchange through which a buyer transacts.
Second-Party Data: Another organization's first-party data, shared directly under a bilateral agreement rather than through a data marketplace.
Second-Price Auction (Vickrey auction): An auction in which the winner pays one increment above the second-highest bid rather than its own bid.
sellers.json: An IAB Tech Lab standard requiring SSPs and exchanges to publish a file identifying every seller they represent, so buyers can trace the path from a bid request back to the publisher and see whether each intermediary is a publisher, an intermediary, or both.
Sensitive Data (Special category data): Categories of personal data that laws protect more strictly: health, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, precise geolocation, biometrics, and, in some jurisdictions, financial data and data about children.
SEO (Search engine optimization, Organic search): Earning unpaid search visibility through content, technical quality, and authority.
Sequential Liability: A contract term under which an agency is liable to a publisher for media payments only to the extent it has been paid by the client.
Sequential Messaging (Sequential retargeting): Showing a person a series of ads in a planned order, with each step conditioned on exposure to or engagement with the previous one.
Server-Side Ad Insertion (SSAI, Ad stitching): Inserting ads into a video stream on the server before it reaches the player, so the ad and the content arrive as one continuous stream.
Server-Side Tagging: Running tag management on a server the advertiser controls, so that the browser sends one request to the advertiser's own domain and the server forwards events to each vendor.
Share of Search: A brand's share of search volume within its category, proposed as a leading indicator of market share.
Share of Voice (SOV): An advertiser's share of total advertising in its category, measured in spend, impressions, or GRPs.
Share of Wallet: A brand's share of a customer's spending in its category.
Shopping Ads (Product listing ads, PLA): Product ads generated from a Product Feed and shown with an image, price, and merchant name on search results and shopping surfaces.
Shopping Campaign Priority: A setting in Standard Shopping campaigns that determines which campaign bids when several contain the same product, used to route branded versus non-branded queries or to protect margin on specific products.
Shopping Feed Optimization (Feed optimization): Improving the titles, descriptions, attributes, images, and categorization in a product feed so products are eligible for more queries and perform better in Shopping and Performance Max.
Sitelinks: Additional links beneath a search ad to specific pages: pricing, locations, categories.
SKAdNetwork (SKAN, AdAttributionKit): Apple's privacy-preserving attribution framework for iOS app installs and post-install events: the device reports the winning ad network to Apple, which sends the advertiser a delayed, aggregated, and partly randomized postback with limited conversion detail.
Smart Bidding (Automated bidding): Google's collective name for its machine-learned bid strategies: Target CPA, Target ROAS, Maximize Conversions, Maximize Conversion Value.
Social Commerce (Shoppable posts): Buying inside a social platform without leaving it: TikTok Shop, Instagram Shopping (checkout since scaled back), Pinterest product Pins, YouTube Shopping.
Social Listening: Monitoring public social conversation about a brand, category, or topic for volume, sentiment, and themes, using tools such as Brandwatch, Sprinklr, and Talkwalker.
Spark Ads: TikTok's format for promoting an existing organic post, from the advertiser's own account or a creator's account with permission, so that engagement accrues to the original post and the ad carries the creator's handle.
Sponsored Content (Advertorial, Branded content): Editorial-style content produced by or for an advertiser and published on a media property's own pages, labeled as sponsored.
Sponsored Products: The core retail media unit: a product listing promoted within search results and product pages on a retailer's site, bought on cost per click and keyed to the retailer's catalog.
Sponsorship (Program sponsorship, Presented by): Attaching a brand to a program, event, segment, or piece of content beyond a standard spot: billboards, integrations, presenting credits, branded segments.
Standard Events (Pixel events): The predefined event names a platform's pixel recognizes and can optimize toward: ViewContent, AddToCart, InitiateCheckout, Purchase, Lead, CompleteRegistration on Meta, and similar sets on TikTok, Pinterest, and Snap.
State Privacy Laws (CCPA, CPRA, US state privacy laws): The patchwork of comprehensive consumer privacy statutes enacted by US states beginning with California's CCPA (2018, amended by the CPRA in 2020), now numbering around twenty.
Static Ad (Static image ad): A single non-moving image with or without text overlay.
Statistical Significance: The probability that an observed difference between test groups would not have arisen by chance, conventionally requiring a p-value below 0.05.
Stories Ads: Full-screen vertical ads inserted between users' Stories on Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and similar.
Storyboard: A shot-by-shot sketch of a video ad prepared before production, used to align client, agency, and crew and to estimate cost.
Streaming Impression: One ad served in a streaming environment, counted by the ad server or SSAI system.
Subscription Metrics (Churn, MRR, ARPU): The measures subscription businesses plan advertising against: monthly recurring revenue, average revenue per user, churn rate, and trial-to-paid conversion.
Substantiation (Claims substantiation): The FTC requirement that an advertiser hold a reasonable basis for any objective claim before making it, with health, safety, and performance claims requiring competent and reliable scientific evidence.
Supply Path Optimization (SPO): A buyer's practice of reducing the number of routes through which it buys the same inventory, favoring the most direct, transparent, and cheapest path and cutting resellers.
Supply-Side Platform (SSP, Sell-side platform): Software publishers use to sell inventory programmatically: connecting to exchanges and DSPs, running auctions, setting floors, managing deals, and reporting yield.
Suppression List: A list of people to exclude from a campaign: existing customers, recent purchasers, employees, people who opted out.
Sustainability (Carbon emissions, Green media): Measuring and reducing the carbon emissions of ad delivery, which are dominated by the volume of bid requests and the weight of creative.
SVOD (Subscription video on demand): Streaming video paid for by subscription without advertising.
Sweepstakes and Contests (Promotions law): Prize promotions, which are regulated by state law in the United States and by national law elsewhere.
Synthetic Control: A statistical method that builds a weighted combination of untreated markets to mimic what a treated market would have done without the campaign, used in geo experiments where a single matched control market is not available.

T

Tag Audit: A review of every tag and pixel on a site: what fires, when, with what data, under what consent state, and whether it is still needed.
Take Rate (Ad tech tax): The share of advertiser spend retained by intermediaries between advertiser and publisher: DSP, SSP, data, verification, and agency fees.
Target CPA (tCPA): Automated bidding that sets bids to achieve an average cost per conversion the advertiser specifies.
Test-and-Learn (Test budget): Reserving a share of budget, commonly 10 to 20 percent, for structured experiments in new channels, formats, and audiences, with the results feeding the next plan.
Third-Party Cookie: A cookie set by a domain other than the one the user is visiting, which lets an ad tech company recognize the same browser across sites.
Third-Party Data: Audience data collected by a company with no direct relationship to the user and sold to many buyers, typically through DSP data marketplaces at a CPM surcharge.
ThruPlay: Meta's video metric and optimization goal counting views to completion or to 15 seconds, whichever comes first.
Timeout (Auction timeout, Latency): The time an exchange or header bidding wrapper waits for bids before closing the auction, typically 100 to 300 milliseconds for web and longer for CTV.
Topics API: A Privacy Sandbox API in Chrome that infers a small set of interest topics from a user's recent browsing, kept on the device, and shares a few of them with sites and ad tech callers as a coarse targeting signal in place of third-party-cookie profiling.
Trade Press: The publications that cover the advertising business: Ad Age, Adweek, Digiday, AdExchanger, Campaign, The Drum, Marketing Brew, and specialist newsletters.
Trademark Bidding (Competitor bidding): Bidding on a competitor's brand name as a keyword.
Trading Desk (Agency trading desk, ATD): A centralized programmatic buying unit inside an agency or holding company, operating DSP seats on behalf of client teams.
Trafficking: Setting up a campaign in the ad server and platforms: uploading creative, assigning it to placements, attaching tracking, entering dates and budgets, and confirming delivery.
Transparency and Consent Framework (TCF, IAB TCF): IAB Europe's standard for collecting user consent under the GDPR and ePrivacy Directive and transmitting it through the programmatic supply chain as a TC String.

U

UGC (User-generated content, Creator content): Ad creative made in the style of ordinary user posts, filmed on phones by creators, customers, or hired UGC producers rather than by a production company.
Unified ID 2.0 (UID2): An open-source identity framework initiated by The Trade Desk that converts a consented email address or phone number into an encrypted, rotating token usable across participating publishers, DSPs, and data partners.
Unique Reach: Reach deduplicated across placements, devices, and ideally platforms, so a person seen on YouTube and Display counts once.
Upfront (Upfronts, NewFronts): The annual market in which television networks and, since the NewFronts began in 2012, digital video publishers sell the coming season's inventory in advance at negotiated rates.
Usage Rights (Licensing, Talent rights): The permission to use talent, music, stock, and creator content in advertising, defined by territory, medium, and duration.
UTM Parameters (UTM tags, Campaign tagging): Query-string parameters appended to landing page URLs (utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, utm_content, utm_term) that tell web analytics which campaign sent the visit.

V

Value-Based Bidding (Target ROAS, Maximize conversion value): Automated bidding that optimizes toward conversion value rather than conversion count, so a $500 sale is worth more than a $20 one.
Vanity Metric: A number that looks good and changes no decision: impressions without reach, clicks without conversions, followers, likes.
VAST (Video Ad Serving Template): The IAB standard XML format for delivering video ads from an ad server to a video player, including the media files, tracking events, and click-through.
vCPM (Viewable CPM): Cost per thousand viewable impressions.
Vertical Video: Video in 9:16 portrait orientation, filling a phone screen.
Video Completion Rate (VCR, VTR, Completion rate): Completed video views divided by video starts.
View-Through Conversion (Post-view conversion, VTC): A conversion credited to an ad the user saw but did not click, within the view attribution window.
Viewability: Whether an ad had the opportunity to be seen.
vMVPD (Virtual MVPD, Skinny bundle): A streaming service that carries live linear channels over the internet: YouTube TV, Hulu + Live TV, Sling, Fubo, DirecTV Stream.
Voice Search: Queries spoken to assistants and smart speakers.
Voiceover (VO, Announcer): Narration over video or audio creative.

W

Walled Garden: A platform that sells advertising on its own inventory with its own tools, data, and measurement, and does not let advertisers take user-level data out or bring independent measurement fully in: Google, Meta, Amazon, TikTok, and the other large platforms.
Waterfall (Daisy chain): The pre-header-bidding method of selling unsold inventory: the ad server offers the impression to demand sources one at a time in priority order, each at a fixed price, until one accepts.
Weather Targeting: Adjusting bids, budgets, or creative based on current or forecast weather in the user's location, through DSP integrations with weather data providers.
WFA (World Federation of Advertisers): The global association of national advertiser bodies and multinational advertisers.
Win Rate: The share of bid requests a DSP bids on that it wins.

Glossary

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

K

L

M

N

O

P

Q

R

S

T

U

V

W

Reference

Sections

Free tools and registers

Machine access