Advertising Glossary
Written by Benji Weiser
Updated at November 14th, 2022
| Ad Exchange | A service that connects numerous sellers with numerous buyers, meaning sales don't have to be conducted between the advertiser and the publisher. Instead, the publisher offers up its inventory to the network which finds the highest-paying suitable ad. |
| Ad Exchange Mediation | A sort of exchange of exchanges. These services offer inventory to a number of exchanges, compare what gets returned, choose the best option and passes it on to the ad server. |
| Ad Server | The software determining what ad gets served in what ad spot, this is where campaigns are managed from and backfill options plugged-ina. |
| Ad tag | The code specifying what ad to request from the server for a specific unit. If the publisher wanted to call different ads for different sections, for example, the ad tag might include the section name in the query. |
| Ad unit | The piece of code that tells an ad to appear somewhere. These generally specify what format of ad to show and what to do when no ad is served. |
| Delivery | The act of ensuring a sold ad gets served. Includes managing the pacing of direct sold campaigns. |
| Direct sold | A relationship between a buyer, or agency on behalf of the buyer, wherein the advertiser is actively and intentionally purchasing inventory on a particular property. Generally in decline, but there's a still market for high-impact takeovers or rich media campaigns |
| DSP | Demand Side Platform. The other side of the coin, DSPs are what advertisers use to buy advertising. These are largely ad exchanges. DSPs provide info on ad performance, such as CPC and enable advanced tools like retargeting. |
| Interstitial | An ad that interrupts the normal user flow, i.e. when swiping between articles or moving from screen to screen. Can be unpleasant for users, but pays a ton of money to pubishers, especially on mobile. |
| Mobile ad serving | Ad units that provide the means to actually instantiate an ad creative on a web page in an app and track what happens to it. |
| MPU | Mid Page Unit: A 300x250 ad unit that intersperses the content |
| Programmatic | Any advertising that is sold through an exchange rather through a relationship between the buyer and seller. |
| Retargeting | See a user doing something on your site, they leave, your ads follow them around the web encouraging them to come back and convert. This is usually managed on the DSP and thus isn't of a huge amount of concern to us. The only issues that would affect us would be if aren't passing the correct information back to the ad server to enable tracking. |
| Rich Media | Ads that aren't images or text. Video ads, interactive ads, ads that expand and take over the screen etc. These are more expensive as they're supposedly more effective. |
| Serving | The act of presenting the ad to the user |
| SSP | Supply Side Platform. This encompasses anything that helps publishers manage and sell their inventory. DFP, AppNexus, OpenX are all SSP's, as are things like Mozoo and AppMonet. |
| Viewability | An increasingly important measurement which basically seeks to answer the question of "Yes, this ad was served, but did anybody actually look at it?" This is generally predicated on the ad being on the screen for a certain period of time. |
| Web ad serving | Ad units that provide the means to actually instantiate an ad creative on a web page in a browser and track what happens to it. |