Here is our list of key terms to know in digital advertising. We expect you may have encountered several of them prior to reading this article, but also find a few new terms and/or terms you didn’t know the meaning of. Here is our list of 50 advertising terms to help build your vocabulary.
A/B Testing
A/B Testing, or Split Testing as it is sometimes known as, is comparing two variations of a single variable against each other to determine which is the better performing. This is common with landing pages, particularly when creating unique pages specific for PPC traffic. Examples of tests carried out on these pages are the call-to-action, amount of content and the keywords. Running these tests takes out the guesswork by enabling you to make data-based decisions.
Analytics
Collection of data or statistics to allow the advertiser to create meaningful decisions for their campaigns. Google provide a popular, free tool to users to help advertisers in a data-driven world. Analytics are particularly important in advertising to track which campaigns, keywords and ads are providing the best return on investment.
Audience
A Google Ads Audience is the process of segmenting or targeting your Display campaigns, allowing you to adjust bids for specific types. Audiences can also be used for specific targeting or excluding.
Banner Ads
A common form of display advertising. Banner Ads are displayed on web pages often by an ad network or server. They provide a link back to the advertisers’ business, used to drive traffic to a specific website or landing page. They are available in a wide range of shapes and sizes.
Click-Through Rate (CTR)
The percentage of users who visited your website via an ad. A basic maths equation of the total number of number of clicks divided by the number of times your ad appeared, otherwise known as impressions.
Competitor Research
The process of evaluating your competitors’ advertising strategies, particularly looking at their strengths and weaknesses to help create or optimise your own campaigns.
Conversion Rate
The percentage of visitors from your ad who complete a desired goal, from the total number of visitors via that ad.
Cookies
A web cookie or browser cookie is a string of text sent via a web server to a user’s browser to send back to the web server in interactions. These last in the user’s browser for a certain period of time. These are important in telling the advertiser for frequency capping and remarketing.
Costper Acquisition (CPA)
The average price you are paying for a desired goal. Often a key performance indicator, the CPA tells the advertiser and client how much their campaigns are costing them to get results. This could be per keyword, ad group, product or service, or the overall campaign.
Cost per Click (CPC)
The average price an advertiser is paying for each visitor their ad is sending to the website or landing page.
Cost per Lead (CPL)
The average price the advertiser is paying for a lead. Often a key performance indicator, the CPL tells the client how much their campaign is costing them to get leads.
Cost per View (CPV)
A bidding method whereby the advertiser pays for each time their video is played.
Cost per Thousand (CPM)
A bidding method where you pay for a thousand impressions on your ads regardless of the number of interactions.
Demographics
Segmenting audiences by a number of factors, which could include age, gender, income or several other factors. These can be beneficial to advertisers depending on the product or service they are promoting.
Display Advertising
Promoting banner ads on web pages and websites, often via an ad server or ad network. These banners provide a link back to the clients’ website whereby the advertiser pays either for the number of impressions or referral traffic from them.
Dynamic Ad Insertion
An ad technology that enables the advertiser to serve video ads in on demand content, allowing for alterations of specific ads on specific pages based on the available data. This allows for multiple ads to be rotated through one or more spaces.
Dynamic Search Ads
The use of Google’s web crawling technology to automatically serve relevant ads based on a retailer’s website content. They can be used for filling in the gaps in keyword campaigns in Google Ads or for creating an easy campaign creation workflow to target several queries.
Ecommerce
The buying and selling of products or services via the internet, and the transaction of money and data to execute these transactions. Types of common ecommerce models include Business to Consumer (B2C), Business to Business (B2B), Consumer to Consumer (C2C) and Consumer to Business (C2B).
Email Campaigns
Advertising campaigns distributed via e-mail, often to prospects or customers.
Facebook Ads
The tool to place advertisements on the most popular social network. Available to both individuals and businesses, users can target audiences through segmenting by age, gender, geographic location, work, interests, and relationship status, among others.
Forecasting
Expected traffic and sales through trends that are predicted to occur in the future. This is often based on historical, quantitative, and qualitative data.
Frequency Capping
The limit of how many times a specific ad will be shown to a user during a cookie session or period of time.
Geo Targeting
The practice of delivering ads to consumers based on their geographic location.
Goals
The desired action of a consumer sent to your website or web page. Examples can include a product purchase, signup or form completion.
Google Ads
A paid advertisement tool from Google that allows you to appear at the top of their search results, above the Organic and Local listings. These are the sponsored ads with the green ‘Ad’ label to the left of the text. Users can bid on specific keywords or broad matches of their target keywords for their text ads to appear in users’ searches.
Google Ads also offers Display Ads which are banner ads that appear on websites within their Google Display Network. This is a collection of third-party websites that have partnered with Google to serve these ads and can be displayed as text, image, video, or rich media formats.
Impressions
This is the number of times your ads has been shown on a search result.
Interstitial
An ad that loads between two content pages.One of the more common examples of an interstitial is a pop-up ad, forcing exposure to the banner before a visitor can continue on their content path.
Key Performance Indicator (KPI)
A measurable value to indicate the progress towards a desired result. These provide the focus for strategic and operational improvement. These includes setting targets, tracking and analysing against that target. Examples of a KPI could be the number of leads or sales.
Keyword
Words or phrases you choose to bid on within pay-per-click for an advertisement for your product or service to appear.
Landing Page Optimisation
The process of formatting your web pages strategically to turn your visitors into prospects or consumers. It is common in pay-per-click campaigns to create landing pages specifically for this traffic with the desire of them having a high conversion rate, compared to sending paid traffic to pages that are optimised for SEO results.
Margin
This is the profit gained from a service or product after all expenses for advertising the offering are covered.
Market Research
The process of evaluating an industry to help make better business decisions.
Microsoft Advertising
A paid advertisement tool from Microsoft that allows you to appear at the top of their search results, above the Organic and Local listings. Users can bid on keywords or broad matches of their target keywords for their text ads to appear in users’ searches.
Negative Keywords
A type of keyword to prevent your ad appearing for irrelevant or certain keywords or phrases.
Pay-per-Click (PPC)
An internet advertising model to drive traffic to a specific landing page or website. These include the text ads at the top of many search engines, banner ads and social media ads. The advertiser pays for every click on their ad, or by the number of impressions.
Pixel
A web beacon, a 1×1 GIF, otherwise known as a tracking pixel, is a tiny image referenced by a line of HTML or block of JavaScript code embedded into a website to track activity.
Pop-Under
An ad that appears in a separate window beneath an open window,usually concealed until the top window is closed, moved, or minimised.
Pop-Up
An ad that appears as a secondary browser window directly above the initial window.
Programmatic Advertising
Technology to automate and optimise the ad buying process. Serving targeted and relevant experiences to consumers.
Remarketing/Retargeting
The process of delivering personalised ad campaigns for users who have previously interacted with your website or other content. The concept is to reach out to users who know your brand or specific products that have a much higher chance of being turned into consumers.
Return on Investment (ROI)
Performance metric used to evaluate the profit or loss from advertising spend. This is directly measuring the amount of return in relation to the cost of investment. The calculation is the investment divided by the cost of the investment and is usually expressed as a percentage or ratio.
Return on ad spend (ROAS)
Metric to measure how much revenue has been garnered in relation to the expensive of an ad campaign.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Marketing a business or product via paid advertisements that appear on search engine results pages. Advertisers bid on keywords to appear at the top of the search engine to show ads of interest to potential customers.
Segment
A set of users who share one or more similar attributes.
Session
A sequence of online activity made by a single user on one site.
Sponsored Post
An article published on a website that has been paid for by the advertiser. This is generally for link building purposes to help a specific website or web page appear higher in search engines for specific search terms.
Twitter Ads
The tool to place advertisements on one of the most popular social networks. Available to both individuals and businesses, users can target audiences through segmenting by age, gender, geographic location, interests, andother demographics.
View-Through Conversion
When a consumer converts after going back to a website having previously seen a brand’s ad without clicking on it.
YouTube Advertising
Promoting your product or service on the world’s second largest search engine either via text ads, image ads or video ads. YouTube is now operated by Google.