Glossary¶
- Ad Group¶
A a set of targeting rules and QPS limit settings. By choosing a certain ad group buyer defines which traffic they want to receive.
- ads.txt¶
A plain text file publishers put into their web site’s root. It enlists all authorized sellers (both direct and resellers) of inventory to avoid domain spoofing and unauthorized inventory reselling. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) introduced ads.txt in May 2017, to increase transparency in programmatic advertising.
- Application bundle¶
A unique application identifier which looks like a reversed URL string, for example,
com.company.appname.- Bid request¶
An HTTP call from an SSP or advertising server, which provides information about the inventory - site, domain, size, format, visibility, ad position, floor price, deal id, etc.
- Bid response¶
An HTTP request sent in response to the bid request and containing information about bid decision (Yes/No bid), bid amount, and the link to the creative markup or file.
- Buying strategy¶
A set of goals and restrictions that are defined to spend the advertiser budget efficiently and meet business targets.
- Campaign¶
A group of creatives organized around one theme, product, or brand. It has a flight time and budget cap. Campaigns lie under Advertisers.
- Click-Through Rate (or CTR)¶
A rate between a number of clicks and impressions showing how frequent an ad was clicked in comparison with the amount of views.
- Context categories¶
Categories associated with a particular web site according to its content. Contextual categories are provided to The MediaGrid by Grapeshot.
- Conversion¶
Target action that user should take after engagement with an advertising. This could be a purchase, a sigh up, completing a form, or download, it depends on campaign goals.
- Conversion rate¶
A percent of users who completed a desired action out of all who have seen an advertising. Calculated as a number of conversions divided by the number of impresssions.
- Cookie¶
A piece of code placed in a user’s web browser to store information about a user. Cookies don’t store personally identifiable infoemation (PII) about a user, like full name, address, social security number.
- Cost per action (or CPA)¶
The price advertiser pays for one target action (or acquisition).
- Cost per click (or CPC)¶
The price advertiser pays for one click event after advertising impression.
- Cost per mille (or CPM)¶
The price advertiser pays for one thousand of served advertising impressions (mille means a thousand in Latin). One of the most commonly used pricing models in the AdTech industry.
- Creative¶
An advertising material developed by the advertising agency or design team. It can come as an image, video, or HTML. Creatives have sizes defined in width and height.
- Data augmentation¶
If the client doesn’t want upload first-party data to The MediaGrid node for some reasons we provide an ability to route bid requests on the client side, where they make decisions based on this data and forward the decision back to us.
- Deal ID¶
A unique identifier of a contract between the buyer and the seller. It is passed in a bid request.
- First-party data¶
User data collected by the website or application owner (company or brand). For example, an internet store collects the data about user’s purchases and visited pages. They then can upload this data as audience segments and use for targeting.
- Flight¶
A period of advertising delivery from the start date to the end date.
- Fraud¶
A non-human or anomalously generated traffic (impressions, clicks), which makes no profit for the advertiser. There are a few types of it: non-user generated clicks (by botnets, search or antivirus crawlers), client-side traffic (generated by a client while testing the campaigns), advertiser-competitors generated clicks, etc.
- Frequency capping¶
A way to limit number of advertising messages shown to a given user within a given timeframe. For instance, “Only deliver X ads within Y days”.
- Header Bidding¶
Technology allowing to sell the inventory to multiple programmatic partners in a unified auction in contrast to a waterfall system. It is implemented by inserting a Javascript code snippet into a page header.
- Impression¶
A situation when advertising was served to a web page and an impression event handler was called.
- Inventory¶
An advertising space that publisher offers for sale. It is divided on ad slots and has size, location on the page and format parameters.
- Line item¶
A set of cretives grouped by some parameters (e.g., several creatives with different size or type are promoting one product).
- Media cost¶
An actual cost of all impressions, clicks, conversions during a speficic time period.
- Native¶
A type of advertising which matches with the web site content design, for example, it can look like a news article or like a post in a social media. IAB defines a few types of native advertising: in-feed, search and promoted listings, content recommendation, and custom content units.
- Node¶
Bidding partners integrated with The MediaGrid and ready to receive and process bid requests from it. We connect nodes based on a RMS protocol.
- Optimization¶
A process of campaign performance improvement to meet advertiser’s business goals.
- Optimization engine¶
A solution that is responsible for optimization logic. It keeps historical data about money spent by each campaign and calculates bidding rules for each campaign in the system.
- Pixel¶
1x1 transparent image that is loaded then user visits a web page. Under the hood, it is an HTML or Javascript code snippet with the link to a pixel server. When a user visits a page, the browser executes the code and follow the link so that we register conversion or another event.
- Post-view conversions¶
When a user is served a display ad and doesn’t click on it, but returns to the site and converts within a set period (known as a lookback window), then the ad will be awarded a post view conversion.
- Prediction engine¶
A machine learning solution we use to predict the probabilities of events, like clicks, conversions, installs, etc.
- Programmatic guaranteed¶
A type of programmatic deals based on a guaranteed volume of impressions sold at a fixed price.
- Publisher¶
A web site owner or a mobile app developer, who wants to sell their advertising inventory.
- Queries per second (or QPS)¶
A common measure for the amount of requests demand partner will receive during one second. Setting up the QPS limit serves as a protection mechanism to avoid overloading servers and optimize usage of the available capacity.
- Retargeting¶
Retargeting means using user browsing history in the future ad decisioning to re-engage a user who is already in the decision process and drive how to the conversion action.
- RMS protocol¶
The MediaGrid integration protocol.
- Segment¶
A group of users with the same characteristics (age, gender, marital status, interests, income, language, behavior, etc) that can be targeted as an audience.
- Segment recency¶
Shows how recently the user received segment pixel, it is calculated from the user segment cookie timestamp.
- SFTP¶
A secure file transfer protocol that provides file access, file transfer, and file management. We use it to upload user segment files.
- Third-party data¶
User data that was collected by another company and that one can purchase from this company (called data provider or data-management platform). They it can be uploaded as audience segments and used for targeting.
A seller that have not been authorized (listed in ads.txt file in publisher web site) to sell publisher’s inventory.
- VAST¶
VAST or Video AdServing Template is a specification developed by the IAB. It defines the standards for communication between video player on the web page and an ad server. All video players understand this format.
- Viewability¶
Measure of how likely an impression was seen by a user.
- Win Rate¶
A ratio between submitted bids and won impressions.