Media Platforms & Technology Glossary
Media Platforms & Technology
Cookies
Markers placed on an ad that identify information about a user, such as geography, language, device used, and time of day, and contain non-PII information.
Media Platforms & Technology
Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)
The average advertising cost of one driven conversion. Calculated as the total cost (or budget) / conversions.
Media Platforms & Technology
Cost Per Click (CPC)
Cost Per Click on an advertisement. Price paid for each click generated. Also known as “pay-per-click.” Calculated as the total cost (or budget) / clicks.
Media Platforms & Technology
Cost Per Mille (CPM)
Cost Per Thousand, using the Latin “Mille” instead of thousand. The amount an advertiser pays a website for every thousand times a brand’s ad is shown. Calculated as 1000 x total cost (or budget) / impressions.
Media Platforms & Technology
Creative
The type of digital media shown to internet users to communicate a message and draw attention, intended to ultimately drive users to take a specific action.
Media Platforms & Technology
Creative Optimization
Experimenting with different ad assets to find the highest-performing creative and utilizing that creative more often in the campaign.
Media Platforms & Technology
Cross-Platform Advertising
Advertising across different media platforms, including radio, television, paid search, social media, display, mobile, video, connected TV, etc.
Media Platforms & Technology
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Data
Data from an advertiser’s customer database, which can include their name, email address, mailing address, and phone number, accompanied by their past purchase of your product. This is considered first-party data and can be very valuable, as it reflects the advertiser’s actual customer base.
Media Platforms & Technology
Dark Viewability
Impressions that are unable to be tracked for viewability. If an ad is displayed within a nested iFrame (“cross-domain iFrames”), its position on the page cannot be determined. Viewability vendors use different workarounds for this challenge, often with varying degrees of success, resulting in a certain percentage of “unmeasurable” impressions in a viewability report. See […]
Media Platforms & Technology
Data (First-Party, Second-Party, Third-Party)
First-party data is information directly collected from a company’s own source on consumers’ behaviors, actions, or interests, so it’s “owned” by a single source. This can include a brand’s customer database, information about website visits or actions on their website, and other points of engagement collected about that business’s customers or visitors. This data is […]
Media Platforms & Technology
Data Management Platform (DMP)
A data warehouse used to aggregate and target relevant audience segments. Once aggregated, this data is easily accessible to marketers for planning, activation/modeling, and validation / measurement.
Media Platforms & Technology
Data Warehouse
Central Repository for integrated data from multiple sources (Salesforce, AD Reporting, AdTrain, and many more).
Media Platforms & Technology
Demand-Side Platform (DSP)
A technology platform that provides inventory buying opportunities from multiple sources. Utilizes real-time bidding capabilities of these sources to access and win inventory auctions.
Media Platforms & Technology
Deterministic
Known information on a user, determined from the source. The most common deterministic data is login information, or more specifically, email addresses. This term can be applied to data, targeting, and measurement. Its opposite in ad tech is probabilistic.
Media Platforms & Technology
Direct Data
Data that is gathered firsthand rather than through a third party. Direct data is usually more current, a better indication of behavioral insights and good for creating more granular or niche audiences. Evaluation of direct data providers focuses on sound and lawful methodology for data collection and the ability to scale data up accurately. For […]
Media Platforms & Technology
Direct Response Advertising
Its primary aim is to evoke an immediate response and compel prospects to take a specific action such as click, site visit, download, or purchase. This can employ different tactics including prospecting and retargeting. Also known as performance targeting. Shorthand abbreviations include DR.
Media Platforms & Technology
Dynamic CPM (dCPM)
A transparent pricing model in which every impression is a unique price that changes based on the value of the impression.
Media Platforms & Technology
Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO)
Ad creatives that are dynamically served to make each ad more relevant, but on a massive scale. The most common approach is Dynamic Retargeting, where ads can display products a user browsed or added to their shopping cart. Dynamic ads can also recommend similar products or best-selling items based on user browsing or similar offers […]
Media Platforms & Technology
First-Party Cookies
Information generated by a website and stored by your browser, to help understand users’ online behaviors. First-party cookies are markers placed on a website by the website itself.
Media Platforms & Technology
First-Party Data
Information directly collected from a company’s own source on consumers’ behaviors, actions, or interests, so it’s “owned” by a single source. This can include a brand’s customer database, website visits or actions on their website, and other points of engagement collected on customers. This data is considered the most valuable.
Media Platforms & Technology
Foot Traffic Attribution
Connects online ad exposure to offline in‐store visits. This is an increasingly popular measurement option for brick-and-mortar retailers and quick-serve-restaurants (QSRs) whose ultimate goal is to drive consumers into their storefronts. Foot traffic attribution measures incremental sales lift by comparing the number of individuals who were both exposed to a digital ad and entered a […]