Online Advertising Glossary

Ad impression The number of times an ad has been displayed; exposure; opportunity to see.
Adserving Delivery of online adverts to an end users computer by an ad management system. The
system allows different online adverts to be served in order to target different audience groups and
can serve adverts across multiple sites. Ad Technology providers each have their own proprietary
models for this.
App A piece of software that is downloaded to run on a mobile phone, typically from an app store
or mobile internet site.
Augmented reality (AR) is a term for a live direct or indirect view of a physical, real-world
environment whose elements are augmented by computer-generated sensory input such as sound,
video, graphics or GPS data.
Click through rate (CTR) Is expressed as a percentage derived from dividing the number of clicks an
ad received by the number of impressions it generated.
Consumer Generated Content (CGC) Information that is published online by individuals. This refers
to videos, photos, blogs, audio and more. It is also referred to as social media.
Conversion A completion of a target action.
Cookies Code applied to users' browsers by a site so that the browser can be identified at a later
time. Commonly used by sites that require registration, as well as by adservers.
Cost per action (CPA) Or acquisition, is a pricing model involving an agreement between advertiser
and publisher as to the value of a specified action, and the buy is negotiated and tracked on that
basis.
Cost per click (CPC) Is expressed as a dollar amount, and derived by dividing total cost by number
of clicks received.Some online advertising is purchased on a CPC basis, most commonly via ad
networks, or as remnant inventory buys across large networks.
Cost Per thousand impressions (CPM) The CPM model refers to advertising bought on the basis of
a cost per thousand impressions. This is in contrast to the various types of pay-for-performance
advertising, whereby payment is only triggered by a mutually agreed upon activity (i.e. click-through,
registration, sale).
Crowdsourcing Harnessing the skills, talents and ideas of a broader community, usually through
social media.
Demand Side Platform (DSP) Is a system that allows buyers of digital advertising to manage
multiple ad and data exchange accounts through one interface. By using a DSP, marketers can
manage their bids for banners.
Hit When users access a Web site, their computer sends a request to the site's server to begin
downloading a page. Each element of a requested page (including graphics, text and interactive
items) is recorded by the site's Web server log file as a 'hit'.If a page containing two graphics is

Online Advertising Glossary

Page 1 of 2

accessed by a user, those hits will be recorded once for the page itself and once for each of the
graphics.
HTML5 Is a language for structuring and presenting content for the World Wide Web, and is a core
technology of the Internet originally proposed by Opera Soft- ware. It is the fifth revision of the HTML
standard (created in 1990 and standardised as HTML4 as of 1997)
Near field communication (NFC) Is a wireless communications protocol used in mobile commerce
exchanges through smartphones and applications such as Google Wallet.
Optimisation Is using insights from campaign tracking reports to ensure that a campaign ends up
performing better than it started on day one.
Over the page (OTP) Refers to a rich media ad which runs over the editorial content of a site for a
specified number of seconds, and then reverts to rest in a fixed ad unit on the page.
Page view A page view (or page impression) refers to the number of times a web page is
requested. If a page includes two ad units, every time that page is requested, it logs one page view,
and two ad impressions.
Pixel Short for picture element, a pixel is a single point in a graphic image. Online advertising
material specifications use pixels as the unit of measurement. A standard size banner is 468 pixels
wide by 60 pixels high.
Post-click Refers to activities that happen as a result of a user clicking on an ad.
Post-impression Refers to activities that happen as a result of a user being exposed to an ad
impression. Also referred to as view-through.
Quick Response Code (QRC) or QR Code A type of ma- trix barcode (or two-dimensional code).
Real Time Bidding (RTB) Is a technology introduced in 2009 to make it easier for ad networks to
buy only the inventory they want in a real-time trading environment.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Refers to pay for performance advertising on search engines
whereby advertisers bid on search terms/phrases in order to optimise their placement with- in paid
search results, often called sponsored links.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Refers to technical things that can be done to a website from
the design stage which help the site naturally rank higher in search results for particular terms and
phrases. Also referred to as a natural or organic search.
Social Media Social media is online content created by people using highly accessible and scalable
publishing technologies. At its most basic sense, social media is a shift in how people discover, read
and share news, information and content. It's a fusion of sociology and technology, transforming
monologues (one to many) into dialogues (many to many) and is the democratisation of information,
transforming people from content readers into publishers.
Tags Pieces of code that are embedded in the pages of a Web site so that activity on that page can
be logged.
Tap-through Mobile advertising metric used to determine engagement with a tablet-based
interaction; similar to a click-through as used to determine engagement with an online ad unit.

Online Advertising Glossary

Page 2 of 2