Jenn Mears Web Design

Since a few clients have gone green and made the switch to email newsletters and marketing materials, I thought this article on Freelance Switch may come in handy for the new year.

Advertiser: Someone who wants to place their ads on a site.

API: A little bit of code that acts as a go-between for your site and another web site that is providing some sort of service on the page i.e. Google’s Adsense.

Browser Cache: Your browser program, Internet Explorer for example, will keep a record of your internet wanderings for a short while. Sometimes there is so much behind the scenes site traffic, that your browser starts to behave like an overloaded airport control tower and a lot of flights (pages) are left circling, waiting to land. Clearing your cache on a regular basis, keeps your web browser running faster.

Channels: A method Google has for organizing your advertising. It allows you to become your own Marketing Department and track which ads are the most effective for your site.

Click: A term used by advertisers and publishers meaning when an ad is clicked on with the user’s mouse. If you are deciding on a publisher for your ads, it’s important to define how a click is counted. Is it determined by each time the click happens (no matter if it’s from the same user), or does each click have to be from a different user?

Click-Through-Rate: A percentage that is determined by the number of clicks on an ad, divided by the number of impressions. For example, your banner ad for an upcoming sale is delivered 100 times on a web page, and one person clicks it, then the CTR would be 1%. This is a good measure for determining the effectiveness of a particular ad campaign.

Contextual Advertising: When the API that generates ads for your page does it by scanning your content for keywords.

Cost-Per-Action (CPA): The amount an advertiser must pay when a user completes an action once they have clicked onto their ad. For example, a user might click on an ad for a supermarket, but in order for that click to be counted, they have to enter a contest via a form on the page that ad took them to.

Cost-Per-Click (CPC): The amount an advertiser must pay when a user clicks on their ad.

Cost-Per-Thousand-Impressions (CPM): The amount an advertiser must pay for every thousand impressions of their ad viewed by a the site’s users. What exactly counts as an impression? That is a term that is definitely up for grabs in the online marketplace. What it boils down to is a question of you and your advertiser service agreeing on what an impression should be. (Geekery: the M stands for Mille or, a thousand in French)

(Wikipedia has a pretty good breakdown of the click/cost thing here)

Destination URL: When your page’s ads contain links, this is the URL of what they are linking to. This is important for blocking competitors’ ads from appearing on your site.

Display URL: This is the URL displayed on an ad to identify the advertiser’s site to the viewer.

Effective CPM: An effective Cost Per Thousand Impressions rate (eCPM for short) is determined by calculating the amount paid per thousand clicks. If your site has received 10,000 views of a page that you host ads on, and Service A pays you $50 then your eCPM rate for Service A is $5. If you are the publisher of the ads,you can use this to compare with other services you host and you can gauge which services can gain you more revenue. If you are the advertiser, you can use this as a measure of which ad campaigns are the most effective.

Link Clicks: A term for when a user clicks on a link unit.

Link Click Through Rate (CTR): The number of link clicks, divided by the number of link impressions.

Link eCPM: Similar to the standard eCPM (see above), the cost of a thousand impressions for a particular link. This helps to a publisher calculate the amount they will earn per every thousand links that are shown to their users.

Link Impressions: The number of times a link unit is viewed.

Link Unit: An advertising term for an ad format where a link is displayed that is relevant to the content of that page. Each link takes the user to a page that contains ads related to that link.

Page Impression: Defined as every time a user views a page displaying ads. This is a separate calculation than the number of times a particular ad is viewed.

Publisher: Someone who is hosting ads on their site.

Didn’t see a term you were looking for? Need a second opinion? Adglossary has a complete list for your enjoyment.