A Jargon Busting Guide to B2B Programmatic Advertising

Programmatic Glossary

Do you know your DCO from your DMP? We’ve pulled together key terms, concepts and AdTech acronyms into this easy-to-digest glossary of programmatic advertising agency terms.

As B2B entry into Programmatic advertising continues to evolve and gather momentum, we’ll be keeping pace by regularly updating this glossary.

But for now, let’s kick off with these essential terms every digital marketer should know…

Ad Exchange – are auction based, automated digital-marketplaces that enable multiple parties including advertisers, publishers, ad networks, Demand Side Platforms (DSP) and Supply Side Platforms (SSP) to buy and sell display, video and mobile inventory.

Ad Fraud – occurs when an advertiser is charged for ad placements that have never been seen by human eyes.

Ad Impression – is a digital ad being called from its source and counted once (this is often as an ad being served on a web page).

Ad Inventory – advertising space that a publisher has available. This can also include email and inclusions on sign-up pages.

Ad Network – aggregators of Ad Inventory that package it together to sell at an increased margin.

Ad Server – a platform that delivers advertising to a user’s browser or app, to drive an action.

Ad Tag – a snippet of HTML that will contact an Ad Server and ask for an ad.

Agency Trading Desk – a Programmatic team / department within a Media Agency, responsible for all Programmatic buying. A centralized, service-based organization that serves as a managed service layer, typically on top of a Demand Side Platform (DSP) and other audience buying technologies; managing bid-based (biddable) media and audience buying.

Audience Extension – allows publishers to follow site visitors to other websites, allowing them to offer advertising media buys that include reaching an audience outside of their own properties.

Blacklist – a list of IP addresses that are suspected to be sources of spam, be fraudulent, or have inappropriate / untrustworthy content.

Brand Safety – measures that ensure that a brand’s ads do not appear alongside inappropriate content. Most brands use Digital Content Labels, Sensitive Category Exclusion, as well as Whitelists, Blacklists, and URL Blacklists.

Click-Through Rate (CTR) – the % of users who were delivered an ad, and then clicked on that ad.

Completion Rate – the % of Video Ad Impressions that are played to completion, meaning the viewer did not Skip or leave the video.

Cookie – a piece of data sent from a website and stored in a user’s browser that tracks browsing behaviour and stores information, such User preference of vertical (Marketing, IT, HR etc). This is how publishers collect information on visitors to sell advertising.

Cost Per Action (CPA) – CPA can be referenced in a few different ways. Generally it should be classified as the cost of user completing a desired action which can be summarised for digital as one of these actions (click, view, download, sign up, purchase) and is worked out using this simple sum (Action/cost) = CPA.

Cost Per Click (CPC) – average cost of user click-through (when user clicks ad).

Cost Per Thousand (CPM) – taken from the Latin word for Thousand; Mille. Refers to the price of 1,000 ad impressions on a web page.

Data Management Platform (DMP) – a system for managing data, such as Cookie ID’s. This centralized management platform will help brands manage 1st party data and integrate it with 3rd party data to tie user information and activity together to maximise the effectiveness of media buys. This helps marketers understand what content a User has downloaded, what emails they have opened, and how many display ads they have clicked on, to understand their interests.

Demand Side Platform (DSP) – a system that allows buyers to automate the purchase of display, video, mobile and search ads.

Digital Content Labels – Google classifications of content in alignment with brand safety. There are 4 main labels: DL-G (Content suitable for general audiences), DL-T (Content suitable for teen and older audiences), DL-MA (Content suitable only for mature audiences), Not yet labeled (Content that has not been labeled).

Effective Cost Per Click (eCPC) – if media has been bought on different metrics, you may use eCPC to compare different channels. This is done by working out the effective cost per action (for example,  if you bought clicks instead of impressions).

Floor Pricing – minimum price you can pay for inventory, set by the publisher.

Private Marketplace/Exchange – an auction model that uses Real Time Bidding and Floor Pricing to offer access to ad space on a specific website, on a direct (via DSP) and invitation-only basis.

Open Exchange Buy – an auction model with a variable CPM across all the sites available within the Ad Exchange space.

DoubleClick – a Google marketing platform that combines advertising and analytics.

Dynamic Creative Optimisation (DCO) – allows marketers to create multiple versions of the same ad from a single Ad Tag, facilitating sophisticated targeting and optimisation. Ad creative is broken down into individual elements, which are pieced together in real-time to deliver the most relevant ad to specific users based on specific behaviours / traits.

Frequency Capping – restricting the number of times a specific user is shown advertising. A ‘Universal frequency cap’ refers to the ability of a DSP to offer a comprehensive frequency cap number for its entire range of inventory, rather than on a per-publisher or per-network basis.

1st Party Data – this includes sign-up, social, and CRM data. 1st Party is the most valuable type of data because of the quality and accuracy.

2nd Party Data – data sets that Google have modelled with the DoubleClick environment based on an advertiser’s 1st party data.

3rd Party Data – aggregated data from external platforms and websites. This data can be imprecise as companies have different collection methods for information of users.

HTML 5 – core technology mark-up language of the internet used for structuring and presenting content for the World Wide Web. Unlike Flash, which requires the installation of Adobe’s proprietary browser plugin, HTML5 is the one open, industry standard, universal format for building dynamic online creative.

Key Performance Indicator (KPI) – metric used to quantify objectives that reflect the strategic performance of online marketing campaigns.

Opt-in – a user’s indication that they are willing to participate in a given exchange.

Opt-out – a user’s indication that they would not like to participate, for example when a user opts-out of receiving emails or receiving personalized advertising from an entity.

Programmatic – digital advertising that is automatically triggered by any type of event and deployed according to a set of rules applied by software, algorithms, and human skills. Machine learning is increasingly used in programmatic marketing to provide automated optimisation to pre-defines KPI’s (see above). Programmatic advertising includes but is not limited to advertising purchased via real-time bidding.

Real-Time Bidding (RTB) – the Buying and Selling of ad impressions through ad exchanges and platforms. Price is determined by immediate demand. RTB works in milliseconds – a person visits a website and their information is given to an ad exchange where the auction for that impression occurs.

Retargeting – advertising to a group based on previous actions or ads viewed.

Return on Ad spend (ROAS) – is the measurement of how many pounds you receive for every pound that you spend on advertising. It is calculated by taking (Revenue-Cost)/Cost.

Second Price Auction – the winner of an ad impression in an auction pays one pence above the next highest bidder.

Sensitive Category Exclusion – content exclusion options preventing your display ads showing alongside inappropriate content.

Supply-Side Platform (SSP) – software platform that allows publishers to connect their Ad Inventory to Ad Exchanges, networks and DSP’s at the same time, to maximise profit (Yield).

Whitelist – a directory of websites where an advertiser is willing to serve its ads. The opposite of a Blacklist.

Viewability – an advertising metric that tracks impressions that can be seen by users.

Viewable Impression – a metric that determines how much of an ad needs to be viewable or how the user needs to view the ad for it to be counted as an impression.

XML (Extensible Mark-up Language) – a data delivery language that is often used to deliver product feeds for online shops.

Yield – a publisher’s income / return of investment.

Yield Optimisation – technique used by ad servers to determine the value of ad impressions and maximise revenue from potential advertisers.

To find out how you can implement some of these concepts into your own campaigns, check out InboxNEXUS.

Jennifer Brennand

Jennifer, a highly respected figure in B2B Tech media, offers strategic leadership through data driven and insight led recommendations that deliver better business outcomes. With expertise in both digital and traditional B2B media, she excels at building integrated demand campaigns and driving client growth.
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