In the ever-changing world of all things MarTech, it can be confusing to keep up with all of the current terms. To help cut through the jargon, Lotame has created an Adtech Glossary for an easy-to-use guide to understanding all of the current advertising and programmatic abbreviations that exist within today’s digital ecosystem.
Account Executive (AE): An account executive has an important role as a link between an advertising agency and its clients. They’re responsible for servicing the client by managing the day-to-day relationship, understanding client goals, coordinating ad campaigns, and ensuring the success of effective campaigns.
Ad Exchange: Technology platform that facilitates the buying and selling of media advertising inventory from multiple ad networks. Ad Network Company that connects advertisers to web sites that want to host advertisements.
Ad Server: Web server used to decide which advertisement is shown to the user. It holds data surrounding advertisements, scheduling, viewability, and number of impressions served for a specific campaign. Affinity People who have demonstrated an interest in a certain activity, group, brand, etc. Marketers can identify and target people with these affinities in order to reach more engaged audiences.
Audience Profile Reports (APR): A feature of the Lotame’s platform, Spherical that provides demographic and behavioral affinity insights on our clients’ most important audiences. Clients can use these reports to understand the breakout of their audience in terms of gender, age, education, country, etc. They can also use APRs to understand how their particular audience compares to their overall total uniques and to the rest of the internet.
Audience Targeting: Serving ads to a specific predefined audience based on behavioral attributes (see “behavioral targeting”) demographics, interests, or any other category
Behavior Collection Point: The BCP, or Behavior Collection Point, is the snippet of JavaScript that, when placed on a web page, initiates data capture for a Lotame client. Data Capture in Lotame occurs both client side and server side, but in all cases it only occurs for web pages that host a BCP.
BCP Script or BCP Tag: BCP Tags are the javascript or image placed in a site’s code that allows behaviors to be recorded. Placing this tag is another way of saying “pixeling a website”. It is an invisible infinitesimal part of a web page. Behavior Specific data points collected from a website based on a user’s interactions with the site.
Behavioral Targeting: Using a consumer’s behavior or online interactions, demographics, and history to determine that consumer’s needs or interests, with the purpose of matching appropriate advertisements to that user. This will cause a better response for advertisements.
Buy-side / Marketer Sell-side/ Publisher: The “buy-side” refers to marketers or brands who “buy” advertising space to promote their products and services. The other side of this equation is the “sell-side” which refers to publishers or media companies who sell advertising space to advertisers on their websites or other properties.
Cache: Memory used to temporarily store the most frequently requested content/files/pages in order to speed its delivery to the user. Caches can be local or on a network. In the case of local cache, most computers have both memory (RAM), and disk (hard drive) cache.
Campaign Wrap-Up Report: A campaign wrap-up report is a report detailing campaign performance metrics, including total impressions served and clicks.
Click-Through Rate (CTR): Metric for measuring how many users clicked on an ad. The CTR is obtained by dividing the number of users who clicked on an advertisement by the number of times the advertisement was delivered (impressions). For example, if your advertisement was delivered 100 times and 1 person clicked on it, the CTR would be: (1 click) ÷ (100 impressions) = 0.01 = 1% CTR. Client Success Manager (CSM) A member of the Lotame team who can ensure clients have all they need to effectively utilize the Spherical platform.
CMS: Content Management Systems (CMS) are the technology that a publisher uses to manage the content of their media properties and websites. A CMS can be integrated with a data collaboration platform to customize the content that is shown to specific groups of readers, or audiences.
Content Personalization / Content Customization: Refers to the process of showing a specific set of content to a certain audience. Publishers can achieve this by integrating a CMS with a DMP, and is used as a technique to decrease bounce rates and increase time spent on site, thereby increasing the advertising opportunities for a publishers.
Contextual Targeting: Placing ads on a web page based on the relationship of the ad content and/or keywords of that specific web page.
Conversion: Prospect completing an action and/or becoming a customer. Leads become customers through the process of conversion. Conversion Rate Measure of success of an online ad when compared to the click-though rate. What defines a “conversion” depends on the marketing objective, which can be defined as a sale or request to receive more information.
Cookie: A portion of text that a website stores on a user’s browser which is used for authentication, identification, targeting, and preferences.
Cost Per Acquisition (CPA): An online advertising model where the advertiser pays for each specified action (such as a purchase, form submission, etc).
Cost Per Click (CPC): An online advertising model where the advertiser pays each time an ad is clicked. Cost Per Thousand (CPM) An online advertising model where the advertiser pays for each 1000 views an ad gets.
Cross-Device: Refers to technology which enables tracking of users across multiple devices, such as smartphones, television sets, smart TVs, and personal computers so that a consumer can be targeted across multiple screens. This concept is especially useful for advertisers and publishers.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Data: A customers’ history with a company which may include information from multiple communication channels like a company’s website, telephone, email, live chat, marketing materials, and social media. CRM data is primarily used to foster customer care, loyalty, and/or customer support. Data Exchange Marketplace allowing publishers to sell aggregated anonymized audience data to advertisers, agencies, and networks. Similar to an Ad Exchange, a Data Exchange can allow access to the open market or to defined partners.
Data Collaboration Platform (DCP): Data collaboration platforms allow for internal data collection and connection and also enable the enrichment, analysis, and activation of data with external partners. Data collaboration platforms, like Lotame’s Spherical, support data onboarding, unification, modeling, enrichment, collaboration, and activation, catering to both the data-rich and those in need of data acquisition.
Data Management Platform (DMP): A platform for collecting, organizing, and managing data, which enables the creation of custom audiences based on first- and third party data. DMPs are used to target campaigns to these audiences, deliver reporting, and gain insight about the audiences of specific websites/ creative/email/media.
Demand-Side Platform (DSP): A platform that allows digital advertisers to buy display impressions across multiple ad exchanges through one interface using RTB.
Demographics: The statistical characteristics of a population including age, gender, and residence. Encryption Secure digital information that is unreadable without the use of digital keys.
Executive Business Review (EBR, QBR): A thorough strategic review of the business, focusing on financial results, improvements in production yields and improvements in non-monetary measurables, such as absenteeism, etc.
First-Party Cookies: These are cookies created by the website on which they appear.
First-Party Data (1PD): Data collected from web publishers and marketers via their own websites and other digital assets. Forecasting The ability to look at the previous trends in behavior consumption and available impressions, in order to project the number of impressions that a publisher can sell.
GeoTargeting: The process of showing specific content to an audience based on their physical location. Global Client Success (GCS) Refers to Lotame’s team of data specialists who offer daily support to our clients around the globe.
Hierarchies: Data hierarchy refers to the systematic organization of data, often in a hierarchical form. Data organization involves characters, fields, records, files and so on. A data field holds a single fact or attribute of an entity.
iFrame: An HTML document embedded inside another HTML document on a website.
Implementation: The process of putting a decision or plan (DCP Plan) into effect.
Impression: Each time an ad is shown and viewed on a web page.
Key Performance Indicator (KPI): Benchmarks for strategy success or failure. Best practice here is to choose a single, primary KPI to guide your optimization efforts, and to make sure it is both quantifiable and actionable.
Latency: A measure of time delay in a system, often used in reference to pageload times.
Look-alike: Potential customers modeled after an advertiser’s 1st Party Data (usually data from their customers who visit and make purchases from their websites). Attributes of the advertisers’ customers are matched against a larger audience, creating a pool of highly targetable and ‘prequalified’ users. Some companies refer to this also as ‘pre-targeting’.
Lotame Data Exchange: (LDX) The Lotame Data Exchange sources data from North America, South America, Europe, and Asia. It consists of self-declared and demonstrated behavioral data, which are bundled into over 6,000 audience segments in all the major verticals.
M (Thousand): The Roman numeral M is often used to indicate one thousand, and MM is used to indicate one million. MM (Million) The Roman numeral M is often used to indicate one thousand, and MM is used to indicate one million.
Mobile IDs: Refers to a user’s digital identity, and the technology used to manage it, in the hyper-connected world of smartphones, tablets, wearable technology and the Internet of Things.
Native Advertising: Material in an online publication which resembles the publication’s editorial content but is paid for by an advertiser and intended to promote the advertiser’s product. “In-feed” non-disruptive content, also known as sponsored content.
Offline Data: Originates from offline sources. This ranges from in-store purchases to loyalty card data and more, and can be pulled from Customer Relationship Management data files or bought from offline data vendors.
Onboarding: Bringing your offline data, online.
Online Data: Captures the behaviors, interests and interactions of consumers that are exhibited across the internet, as gathered by cookies.
Opt-Out / Do Not Track: An individual has stated that they do not want a company to use his/her data for marketing purposes.
Personally Identifiable Information (PII): Personally Identifiable Information, including names, email addresses, phone numbers, and home addresses.
Pixel or Pixeling: The act of placing a small amount of code, BCP script, on a website, that is invisible unless the source is viewed, specifically for analytics. Professional Services Team Team dedicated to helping clients with core Spherical platform usage strategies, Audience Insights and Campaign Optimization, 2nd-Party Data Management, and Data Strategy.
Programmatic Advertising: Use of software to automate the sale or purchase of digital advertising, as opposed to the traditional process that involves RFPs, human negotiations and manual insertion orders.
Real-Time Bidding (RTB): Allows buyers to decide in real-time whether to bid for a specific impression based on additional data they have. The buyer decides the bid price based on perceived value of the impression. RTB provides the opportunity for publishers to better monetize their inventory.
Recency: Measure of the time elapsed between when a profile last saw an ad as well as time between purchases.
Retargeting: A form of audience targeting where first- and third-party cookies are used to determine a consumer’s previous interest with a site’s offering. Retargeting allows advertisers to reposition ads in front of that consumer on sites other than their own, in an effort to get the consumer to return to their own site and continue the relationship. Retargeting is considered to be the most basic form of Behavioral Targeting available.
Return on Investment (ROI): Money you get back from your invested money. Revenue Per Thousand (RPM) Revenue per 1000 Units Sold.
Second-Party Data (2PD): Another company’s first-party data purchased or shared directly from the source, rather than through a data exchange. Two companies set the terms of sale or data collaboration to share specific data points.
Segment: Building block of an audience. How you define your segments depends on who your audience is, and can be based on demographics, behaviors, interests, or media consumption. Segments are mixed and matched to build audiences within a data collaboration platform for targeting.
Semantic Classification: Tools that can help identify the key concepts and context of a particular piece of content, by using machine learning and predictive analytics. Server-to-Server (S2S) Instead of the bidding happening in a publisher’s browser, it happens on the server of whoever the partner is.
Connected TV (CTV) Data: Real-time, anonymized data about what a household is watching gathered from CTVs including program, genre, time of day and network. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) Distribution model in which a third-party hosts applications/solutions and makes them available to customers over the Internet.
Supply-Side Platform (SSP): Advertising technology platform representing the suppliers of online ads. Similar to a DSP, SSPs, automate the selling of online media space by providing inventory.
Tag or Tagging: The act of placing code in a website. See also Pixeling.
Tags: Code placed in a website that has the ability to track virtual user interactions.
Targeting: Delivering advertising to users based on identified interests and behaviors.
Technical Account Manager (TAM): A member of the Lotame team who is the client’s go-to for technical user interface questions.
Third-Party Cookies: Cookies placed on a consumer’s browser by advertisers or other technology providers, and not by the website publishers.
Third-Party Data (3PD): Data obtained from an outside “third-party” source, which is not otherwise available on your own first-party media.
Transaction: In terms of DCP data interactions, a Transaction refers to any distinct HTTP call made on the web by and party that is received by the Lotame system. This can include, but is not limited to: tags and pixels, beacons, or API calls.
Uniques: A single tracked user, regardless of what different behavioral segments a user falls into, represents a single Unique. Another way of thinking of it is: one unique = one set of eyeballs. Usage Report Tracking the usage on a website.
User Interface (UI) / Platform: Means by which the user and a computer system interact, in particular the use of input devices and software.
Viewability: Online advertising metric that aims to track only impressions that can actually be seen by users. For example, if an ad is loaded at the bottom of a web page but a user doesn’t scroll down far enough to see it, that impression would not be deemed viewable.
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