Browse Definitions:

Advertising terminology on the internet

Above the fold: As it applies to Web design, above the fold refers to the portion of a Web page that is visible in a browser window when the page first loads. The portion of the page that requires scrolling in order to see content is called "below the fold." Placement above the fold is desirable because areas below the fold are frequently not seen.

Ad: In online advertising, an ad may take many different forms. It could be a banner, a graphic image or an animated GIF of a designated pixel size and byte size. An ad or set of ads for a campaign is often referred to as "the creative." Video ads, banners and other special advertising that include an interactive or visual element beyond the usual are known as rich media.

Ad blocker: An ad blocker is a software product that prevents advertisements from appearing with the content the user is intentionally viewing. People block ads for a variety of reasons. For example, many of them find interrupt marketing ads annoying and even stressful. Interrupt marketing is intrusive by design, like an interstitial ad that comes between users and the content they are attempting to view or an autoplay or rollover ad that starts up without any intentional act on the part of the user. 

Ad exchange: An ad exchange is a software-based automated marketplace that allows publishers to sell their ad inventory and advertisers to bid on and purchase the inventory in real time. 

Ad fraud: Ad fraud is a type of scam in which the perpetrator fools advertisers into paying for something that is worthless to them, such as fake traffic (See click fraud), fake leads or misrepresented and ineffective ad placement.

Ad fraud botnet: An ad fraud botnet is a distributed network of computers controlled by a botmaster to defraud advertisers. A botnet is made up of computers that are infected with malware and co-opted without the knowledge of the owners.

Ad network: An ad network  is an intermediary company that acts as a broker between advertisers who want to purchase inventory and publishers who want to host ads.

Ad rotation: Ads are often rotated into ad spaces from a list. This is usually done automatically by software onlinesite or at a central site administered by an ad broker or server facility for a network of websites.

Ad server: An ad server is software that stores data about advertising content and delivers ads to websites and applications. Ad servers are specialized web servers.

Ad space: An ad space is a space on a web page that is reserved for ads. An ad space group is a group of spaces within a website that share the same characteristics so that an ad purchase can be made for the group of spaces.

Ad view: An ad view, synonymous with ad impression, is a single ad that appears on a web page when the page arrives at the viewer's browser display. Ad views are what most websites sell or prefer to sell. A web page may offer space for a number of ad views. In general, the term impression is more commonly used.

Affiliate marketing: Affiliate marketing is the use by a website that sells products of other websites, called affiliates, to help market the products. Amazon created the first large-scale affiliate program and hundreds of other companies have followed since.

Auto-play video: Autoplay video is audiovisual content, usually containing advertisements or promoted content, that starts automatically when a user goes to the host web page. The purpose of autoplay is to get the user's attention, which it is bound to do so long as the user has sound turned on. Autoplay video is much more popular with advertisers than it is with potential customers.

Banner: A banner is an advertisement in the form of a graphic image that typically runs across a web page or is positioned in a margin or other space reserved for ads. Banner ads are usually Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) images. In addition to adhering to size, many websites limit the size of the file to a certain number of bytes so that the file will display quickly. The most common larger banner ad is 468 pixels wide by 60 pixels high. Smaller sizes include 125 by 125 and 120 by 90 pixels. These and other banner sizes have been established as standard sizes by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB).

Beyond the banner: This is the idea that, in addition to banner ads, there are other ways to use the Internet to communicate a marketing message. These include sponsoring a website or a particular feature on it; advertising in e-mail newsletters; co-branding with another company and its website; contest promotion; and, in general, finding new ways to engage and interact with the desired audience. "Beyond the banner" approaches can also include the interstitial and streaming video, as well as infomercial content. The banner itself can be transformed into a small rich media event.

Bid for placement: Bid for placement is a paid inclusion search engine marketing model in which advertisers select keywords and bid per click for first link placement in search results using those terms. The top bidder on a specific keyword will get the top ad spot associated with search results for that term, the second-highest bidder the second spot, and so on; each will pay per click to their ads.



Brand recognition: Brand recognition is the extent to which a consumer can correctly identify a particular product or service just by viewing the product or service's logo, tag line, packaging or advertising campaign.

Caching: In internet advertising, the caching of pages in a cache server or the user's computer means that some ad views won't be known by the ad counting programs, which is a source of concern. There are several techniques for telling the browser not to cache particular pages. On the other hand, specifying no caching for all pages may mean that users will find your site to be slower than you would like.


Click fraud: Also known as pay-per-click fraud, click fraud is the practice of artificially inflating traffic statistics for online advertisements, through automated clicking programs known as hitbots or low-paid humans.


Clickstream analysis: Clickstream analysis (also called clickstream analytics) is the process of collecting, analyzing and reporting aggregate data about which pages a website visitor visits -- and in what order. 









Cost-per-like: Cost-per-like (CPL) is a metric that's used by marketers who want to evaluate the effectiveness of a social media campaign on Facebook. The goal of CPL is to quantify how many advertising dollars must be spent to get a Facebook member to “Like” a particular Facebook page


CPA: See cost-per-action.

CPC: See cost-per-click.

CPM: CPM is "cost per thousand" ad impressions, an industry standard measure for selling ads on websites. This measure is taken from print advertising. The "M" has nothing to do with "mega" or million. It's taken from the Roman numeral for "thousand."

CPS: See cost-per-sale.



CTR: See clickthrough rate.

Customer acquisition cost: Customer acquisition cost is the investment required  to convince a consumer to buy your product or service, including research, marketing, and advertising costs. An important business metric, customer acquisition cost should be considered along with other data, especially the value of the customer to the company and the resulting return on investment (ROI) of acquisition. 


Demand-side platform (DSP): A demand-side platform is software that allows an advertiser to buy inventory from ad exchanges and manage advertising campaigns. A DSP accesses data from multiple sources and performs real-time analytics to evaluate impressions as they are offered and place bids accordingly. 



Filtering: Filtering is the immediate analysis by a program of a user web page request in order to determine which ad or ads to return in the requested page. A web page request can tell a website or its ad server whether it fits a certain characteristic such as coming from a particular company's address or that the user is using a particular level of browser. The ad server can respond accordingly.

Fold: The fold is the dividing line between the part of a web page that is immediately visible when the page loads and the lower sections. You don't have to scroll down (or sideways) to see the portion above the fold. Since screen resolution can affect what is immediately viewable, it's good to know what the website's audience tends to set as their resolution.



Hit: A hit is the sending of a single file whether an HTML file, an image, an audio file, or other file type. Since a single web page request can bring with it a number of individual files, the number of hits from a site is a not a good indication of its actual use (number of visitors). It does have meaning for the website space provider, however, as an indicator of traffic flow.

Impact-based advertising: Impact-based advertising is a marketing approach designed to have a lasting psychological effect on viewers so they will remember the product or vendor. This approach can help advertising produce the greatest results for a given expenditure.


Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB): The IAB is an organization that fosters the growth of advertising on the Internet. Membership is available to corporations engaged in selling, measuring, monitoring or producing advertising on the Internet. 

Interrupt marketing: Interrupt marketing, sometimes referred to as interruption marketing, is the traditional model of product promotion, in which people have to stop what they're doing to pay attention  to the marketing message or deal with it in some other way. 

IO: See insertion order.



Inventory: Inventory is the total number of ad views or impressions that a website has available for sale over a given period of time (usually, inventory is figured by the month).

Malvertisement: A malvertisement (malicious advertisement) is an online ad that is capable of infecting the viewer's computer with malware. Compromised computers can be used to create powerful botnets that can be used to carry out identity theft, corporate espionage, ad fraud or other illegal activity.

Media broker: Since it's often not efficient for an advertiser to select every website it wants to put ads on, media brokers aggregate sites for advertisers and their media planners and buyers, based on demographics and other factors.

Media buyer: A media buyer, usually at an advertising agency, works with a media planner to allocate the money provided for an advertising campaign among specific print or online media (magazines, TV, websites, and so forth), and then calls and places the advertising orders. online, placing the order often includes requesting proposals and negotiating the final cost.



Opt-in e-mail: Opt-in e-mail is e-mail containing information or advertising that users explicitly request (opt )to receive. Typically, a website invites its visitors to fill out forms identifying subject or product categories that interest them and about which they are willing to receive e-mail from anyone who might send it. The website sells the names (with explicit or implicit permission from their visitors) to a company that specializes in collecting mailing lists that represent different interests. Whenever the mailing list company sells its lists to advertisers, the website is paid a small amount for each name that it generated for the list. You can sometimes identify opt-in e-mail because it starts with a statement that tells you that you have previously agreed to receive such messages.


Pay-per-click: In pay-per-click advertising, the advertiser pays a certain amount for each clickthrough to the advertiser's website. The amount paid per clickthrough is arranged at the time of the insertion order and varies considerably. Higher pay-per-click rates recognize that there may be some "no-click" branding value as well as clickthrough value provided.


Pay-per-sale: Pay-per-sale is not customarily used for ad buys. It is, however, the customary way to pay websites that participate in affiliate programs, such as those of and

Pay-per-view: Since this is the prevalent type of ad buying arrangement at larger websites, this term tends to be used only when comparing this most prevalent method with pay-per-click and other methods.

Pre-roll ad: A pre-roll ad is a promotional video message that plays before the content the user has selected. The video advertisements are often repurposed television ads, sometimes shortened to 10 or 15 seconds because the 30-second standard for ads on television is not suitable for videos, which are themselves frequently only a few minutes long.  


Programmatic advertising: Programmatic advertising is a system that automates the processes and transactions involved with purchasing and dynamically placing ads on websites or apps. Programmatic advertising makes it possible to purchase and place ads, including targeted advertising content, in less than a second. Ads are placed through an auction system known as real-time bidding (RTB). 

Proof of performance: Some advertisers may want proof that the ads they've bought have actually run and that clickthrough figures are accurate. In print media, tearsheets taken from a publication prove that an ad was run. Online, there is no industry-wide practice for proof of performance. Some buyers rely on the integrity of the media broker and the website. The ad buyer usually checks the website to determine the ads are actually running. Most buyers require weekly figures during a campaign. A few want to look directly at the figures, viewing the ad server or website reporting tool.


Push advertising: Push advertising is the traditional marketing approach, in which promotional material is presented to large groups of people through channels including flyers, magazines, television, radio and billboards. Online examples of push advertising include email campaigns, interstitialspre-roll video ads and banner ads

Real-time bidding (RTB): RTB is an automated auction process for the purchase of individual ad impressions on websites and other online venues such as apps and games. RTB is an integral component of programmatic advertising, which automates the processes and transactions involved in buying and placing ads.


Retargeting: Also known as remarketing, retargeting is digital advertising that features specific products or services and targets an individual who has viewed them online. Customers and leads already in an advertiser's database may also be subjects for retargeting. Retargeting is the technology behind ads that follow people from one site to another.

Revenue attribution: Revenue attribution is the process of matching customer sales to specific advertisements in order to understand where revenue is coming from and optimize how advertising budgets are spent in the future.


ROI: In the context of advertising, ROI (return on investment) is "the bottom line" on how successful an ad or campaign was in terms of what the returns (generally sales revenue)were for the money expended (invested).

Rollover ad: A rollover ad (sometimes called a mouse-over ad) is an online advertisement that appears to be a static image until the cursor touches the image and activates it. Movement of the cursor over the image is known as a rollover. In the case of a rollover ad, activation usually causes an expansion of the ad.

RON: See run-of-network.

ROS: See run-of-site.



Search engine marketing (SEM): Search engine marketing is a method of promotion and advertising to help companies’ content rank higher among search engine traffic. Like search engine optimization, search engine marketing helps companies improve the way content is ranked by search engines


Social media marketing (SMM): Social media marketing (SMM) is a form of internet marketing that uses social networking websites as a marketing tool. The goal of SMM is to produce content that users will share with their social network to help a company increase brand exposure and broaden customer reach. 

Splash page: A splash page (known as an interstitial in an advertising context) is a preliminary page that precedes the regular home page of a website and usually promotes a particular site feature or provides advertising. A splash page is timed to move on to the home page after a short period of time.

Sponsor: Depending on the context, a sponsor simply means an advertiser who has sponsored an ad and, by doing so, has also helped sponsor or sustain the website itself. It can also mean an advertiser that has a special relationship with the website and supports a special feature of a website, such as a writer's column, a Flower-of-the-Day or a collection of articles on a particular subject.

Sponsorship: Sponsorship is an association with a website in some way that gives an advertiser some particular visibility and advantage above that of run-of-site advertising. When associated with specific content, sponsorship can provide a more targeted audience than run-of-site ad buys. Sponsorship also implies a "synergy and resonance" between the website and the advertiser. Some sponsorships are available as value-added opportunities for advertisers who buy a certain minimum amount of advertising.

Supply-side platform (SSP): A supply-side platform is a software system that allows publishers to offer their available inventory  to ad exchanges and demand-side platforms (DSP). In this context, supply side refers to the supply of advertising space, which is what the publisher is offering.

Targeted advertising: Targeting is purchasing ad space on websites that match audience and campaign objective requirements. A targeted ad is an advertisement that is served to a specific audience, which could be a particular demographic, a group or an individual.

Transition ad:A transition ad is a Web page containing a commercial message that appears temporarily between two other Web pages. This kind of interstitial advertisement either fills the current browser window or opens in a new window (in the latter case it's called a pop-up transition ad).

TrueView: TrueView is a YouTube video ad format that gives the viewer options, the most common of which is the ability to skip the advertisement after five seconds. 





This was last updated in March 2017

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Very informative and useful.
great info, thanks!


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