Resources
WEB ADVERTISING GLOSSARY
Above The Fold - Any area of a web page that is viewable without the viewer having to use the vertical scroll bar. Ad space in this area is usually more expensive since it is more likely to be viewed by the visitor.
Ad Flight - The duration of time for which an advertising campaign is live.
Administrator - The administrators (short form: “admin”) manage the technical details required for running the site. As such, they may promote (and demote) members to moderators, manage the rules, create sections and sub-sections, as well as perform any database operations (database backup etc). Administrators often also act as moderators. Administrators may also make forum-wide announcements, or change the appearance (known as the skin) of a forum.
Ad Network - An advertising company that usually serves as a broker between web site publishers and advertisers. Larger ad networks aggregate sites into general categories so that they can offer advertisers targeted buys. The majority of banner advertisements on the Internet are sold and served by ad networks.
Ad Server - A computer, normally operated by a third party, that delivers and tracks advertisements independent of the web site where the ad is being displayed. Use of an ad server helps establish trust between an advertiser and publisher since the statistics are maintained by an objective third party.
Banner - A graphic that appears on a web page that is usually hyperlinked to an advertisers web site. May be in a variety of formats including GIF, JPEG, Flash, HTML, Java, JavaScript & more. Horizontal, rectangular ads typically displayed at the top or bottom of a Web page. Banner ads can be static or animated. The most popular graphic format for banner ads is GIF format. Most banner ads are sold on a CPM basis or on a CPC basis.
Button - A type of advertising unit that is smaller than a banner and usually placed in parts of a web page where space is limited such as in narrow columns on the left or right side of a page.
Click Through - The action of clicking on a banner and having ones browser automatically redirected to the web page a banner is hyperlinked to.
Click Through Rate - This is a measure of the effectiveness of an advertisement and is expressed as a percentage. The click-through rate refers to the percentage of people who “click through” an advertisement to visit the page it is linked to.
Contextual Advertising - Contextual Advertising is also known as content-targeted advertising, which means that an advertisement is shown on a web site that is “in context” to a company’s specific product or service.
COOKIE - An anonymous number that is stored on a computers browser, generally used to aid the effectiveness and measurement of online advertising.
CPM - “CPM” is an abbreviation for “Cost per Thousand”. Remember that M is the Roman numeral for “thousand”. The CPM rate is perhaps the most important concept in web advertising, since so many banner ads are sold on a per-CPM basis. CPM usually refers to the cost per thousand impressions; that is the cost per thousand times your banner/text/audio/whatever ad is shown or circulated.
Example: if a site has a CPM rate of $10, that means for $10 your advert will be shown 1,000 times. It may be shown to 1,000 different people, or it may be shown many times to a much smaller audience. A CPM rate does not imply “unique visitors”.
In essence, the amount of money an advertiser pays for every 1,000 times an ad is seen on a Web page.
Creative - The technology used to create a banner or other type of advertising material. Common creative types include GIF, JPEG, Java, HTML, Flash or streaming audio/video.
Demographics - Information regarding the size and characteristics of a particular population of people of interest to advertisers, such as their age, sex, income, education, size of household, ownership of home, etc. This does not include psychographics such as classification by subjective attitudes or opinions of consumers.
Emoticon - or smiley is a symbol or combination of symbols used to convey emotional content in written or message form.
Flash - A software plugin that enables browsers to play multimedia animations. Some rich media advertisements require users to have this plugin. Used for creating high class animated and rich media ads.
GIF - The graphical interchange format (GIF) is a graphical file extension. Most banner advertisements are created in the GIF format. More popular than the JPEG format, GIF89a or animated GIFs are a sequences of standard GIF images combined to create animated banners. These animated banners tend to generate higher click through rates than non-animated banners.
House Ads - A type of banner advertisement that a web site publisher runs in an ad space when no paying advertisement is available to fill the space. Typically filled with an advertisement promoting one of the web sites services, products or features.
HTML - Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) is a computer programming language that helps control the format of a documents content and design on the World Wide Web. An HTML editor is a software program that enables one to easily create HTML pages.
Hyperlink - A text link that links to another page or web site.
Impressions - An impression corresponds to one “showing” of a given advertisement. This is a very common measurement.
IP address - The numerical internet address assigned to each computer on a network so that it can be distinguished from other computers. Expressed as four groups of numbers separated by dots.
JPEG - Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG), pronounced “jaypeg”, is a graphics format which displays photographs and graphic images with millions of colors. Great for photos, but graphics in the GIF format are still the preferred standard for web sites.
Landing Page - The page on a web site where one is taken after clicking on an advertisement. While this can be any page, it is often a page designed to expand on the service or product mentioned in the initial advertisement.
Media Kit - Information offered to potential advertisers by publishers to help advertisers understand the publishers’ rates, visitor demographics, terms, etc.
MI - Monthly impressions (MI) is a term used to describe the number of impressions in one month.
Moderator - The moderators (short singular form: “mod”) are users of the forum which are granted access to the posts and threads of all members for the purpose of moderating discussion (similar to arbitration) and also keeping the forum clean (neutralizing spam and spambots etc). Because they have access to all posts and threads in their area of responsibility, it is common for a knowledgeable and trustworthy member to be promoted to moderator for such a task. Moderators also answer users’ concerns about the forum, general questions, as well as responding to specific complaints.[17] Moderators themselves may have ranks: some may be given mod privilege over only a particular topic or section, while others (called ‘global’ or ’super’) may be allowed access anywhere. Common privileges of moderators include: deleting, merging, moving, and splitting of posts and threads; closing, renaming, stickying of threads; banning, unbanning, warning the members; or adding, editing, removing the polls of threads.
Page Views - A page view corresponds to one “showing” of a complete page. Each page-view can generate one or more impressions, depending on how many ads are on the page.
Pixel - Short for picture element (Pixel), a pixel is a measurement representing a single point in a graphic. Most ad units are measured in pixels such as the common 468 pixel x 60 pixel sized banner.
Post – A post is a user submitted message enclosed into a block containing the user’s details and the date and time it was submitted. Members are usually allowed to edit or delete their own posts. Posts are contained in threads, where they appear as boxes one after another. The first post starts the thread; this may be called the original post, or OP. Posts that follow in the thread are meant to continue discussion about that post, or respond to other replies; it is not unknown for discussions to be derailed.
Rate Card - The published rates and ad space availability for a particular media such as a web site. Usually subject to change and often negotiable; may also include technical details regarding the banner specifications.
Reach - The number of unique visitors that visited a site over a specific time period.
Remnant Space - Advertising space that remains unsold
Rich Media Ads - Rich media ads make use of multimedia elements such as sound, animation (often using plugins such as Shockwave or Flash) and Java/Javascript to drive the message home.
Rotation - A banner that is in rotation on a page or group of pages, will not be the only banner shown when any of the pages are reloaded. Sometimes an advertiser will request a banner not be shown in rotation in which case it would appear every time the page is loaded also know as exclusivity.
SEO - Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of promoting a web site through a search engine’s organic listings.
Skyscraper - A type of ad unit that is much taller than it is wide. Often used in columns of web pages where there is allot of unused vertical space but limited horizontal space.
Sponsorships - A form of advertising in which an advertiser pays to sponsor a section of a web site. It may take the form of the typical banner and/or text that mentions “this section sponsored by:” They are most effective when the content of the sponsored web page is directly related to but not competitive with the advertisers products or services. Sponsorships, when done well, can be both discreet and effective.
Static ad - Ads that have a defined place on a Web site. They can link either to an advertiser’s Web site, or launch a video ad from that sponsor.
Statistics - The records that an ad serving software keeps each time it serves an ad and the ad is clicked on. The statistics recorded may be as simple as total impressions and click throughs or more detailed info such as browser types, geographical location, operating system, and more.
Sticky - A term used to describe a web site on which visitors stay on for longer than normal. This is often due to the variety of content and features offered to the visitor which prevents them from needing to go elsewhere for more information. For example, online game sites are sticky as users tend to stay and play for awhile where as link directories are not as visitors tend to leave as soon as they find what they were looking for.
Text Links - Text that is hyperlinked to another web page. Can be found on web sites or in newsletters and email. Often identified by appearing in blue with a line under it. When clicked on, the visitor will be taken to the page the text was hyperlinked to.
Text Ads - Popular in newsletters and RSS feeds, and on many sites, text ads are probably the dominant form of online advertising today. After all, for some products, a few well-chosen words are worth a thousand pictures! A text ad consists of a few lines of copy together with a link or an email address for action. Text ads can be priced like banner ads on a CPM or CPC basis. Probably the most well-known example of text ads is Google’s Adsense program, which delivers contextually relevant text ads (ads targeted based on the content of a page) and is in use by hundreds of thousands of sites worldwide.
Text ads in newsletters are usually specified as a number of lines, with a maximum number of characters per line. For instance, a site might offer ad space in its newsletter by specifying a maximum of ten lines of text and 65 characters per line.
Thread - A collection of posts, usually displayed – by default – from oldest to latest. A thread is defined by a title, an additional description that may summarize the intended discussion, and an opening or original post (common abbreviation ‘OP’, which can also mean original poster) which opens whatever dialogue or makes whatever announcement the poster wished. A thread can contain any number of posts, including multiple posts from the same members, even if they are one after the other.
Threads are contained in a forum, and displayed in chronological order from newest to oldest; where the date is taken as the date of the last post (options to order threads by other criteria are generally available). When a member posts in a thread it will jump to the top since it is the latest updated thread. Similarly, other threads will jump in front of it when they receive posts. When a member posts in a thread for no reason but to have it go to the top, it is referred to as a bump or bumping. Threads which are important but rarely receive posts are stickied (or, in some software, ‘pinned’). A sticky thread will always appear in front of normal threads, often in its own section.
Troll - a user that repeatedly and intentionally breaches netiquette, often posting derogatory or otherwise inflammatory messages about sensitive topics in an established online community to bait users into responding, often starting flame wars. They may also link to shock sites or plant images on networks that others may find disturbing in order to cause confrontation. Trolls known as gravediggers (or necromancers) purposefully post in old and irrelevant threads simply to bring that thread to light again.
Unique Visitors - A term used to describe the total number of visitors to a site over a certain time period.
User generated content - Online content created by website users rather than media owners or publishers - either through reviews, blogging, podcasting or posting comments, pictures or video clips. Sites that encourage user generated content include MySpace, YouTube, Wikipedia and Flickr.
Visitors, and Unique Visitors - A visitor represents one person coming to your site. “Unique visitors” measures the number of distinct people who come to your site in a given time-frame. For example, your site could have 100,000 visitors per month but only 20,000 unique visitors per month (each person comes back 5 times on average). Many sites measure unique visitors on a 24-hour basis: any return visit within 24 hours does not count as a unique visitor, but if the same visitor comes back after 24 hours has elapsed they count as a second unique. Each visitor is likely to generate several page views (and therefore several impressions).
Viral Marketing - The term “viral advertising” refers to the idea that people will pass on and share striking and entertaining content; this is often sponsored by a brand, which is looking to build awareness of a product or service. These viral commercials often take the form of funny video clips, or interactive Flash games, images, and even text.
Resources for this glossary:
http://www.utalkmarketing.com/
http://www.adglossary.com/
http://www.longtail.co.za/
http://www.pr2.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_forum#Post