Advertising Terms

It’s hard to keep up with today’s marketing innovations and the advertising terms that describe them. That’s why Genius Monkey is ready to step in and handle your ad campaign for you. Knowing all of the ins and outs of the ad industry is our business, and we are known for being the best and most up-to-date at what we do. For those who are somewhat new to today’s marketing world, here are a few definitions that may help:

Raw Ad Impressions

An Ad impression (otherwise known as a “view”) is one instance of one ad appearance. One visitor can actually view many ads. A raw (or gross) ad impression is counted each time the advertisement is displayed to a visitor. This includes duplications and repetitious viewings. In other words, if one web page has six ads, there will be six gross impressions recorded - one per ad. Impressions are what track the number of views on a webpage or a webpage element. It is a standard metric that’s incorporated into analytics software. By tracking the number of ad impressions, Genius Monkey can track the performance of each ad, making optimizing adjustments if necessary.

Unique Impressions

Unique Impressions are page views by different visitors. They help to measure the number of daily unique viewers that visit the website. These unique impressions are recorded by website analytic software by either saving the 24-hour cookie on a visitor’s browser or by doing a reset on the tracking of unique visitors at the beginning of each day. Both the total and the unique impressions help reveal the average number of pages viewed by visitors before they leave the website.

Click

The ad industry considers a “click” to be whenever a visitor interacts with an ad. It means actually clicking on the ad, aiming for the advertiser’s destination site. Even though the visitor may not wait for the site to load, to actually visit it, just the fact that he or she clicked on it makes it a “click.” If the visitor actually waits for the site to load, and goes into it, it’s referred to as a “clickthrough.”

CPM

Cost per thousand (CPM) ad impressions is a standard in the industry for selling ads on websites. The “M” doesn’t stand for millions, it stands for the Roman numeral (M) for “thousand.”

The Creative

Creative in the ad industry refers to ad banners or other forms of created advertising. This usually involves some sort of creative inspiration and skill that most likely comes from a third party, usually arriving later in the preparations for a new campaign launch.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

PPC advertising is where the advertiser pays a predetermined amount for each clickthrough by the visitor to the advertiser’s website.

Return on Investment

ROI simply means the “bottom line” of how successful an ad or an ad campaign was in terms of what the returns were, compared to the amount of advertising dollars spent.

Targeting

Targeting means buying ad space on websites that match audience and campaign criteria, so as to get the right message to the right crowd. This is especially relevant to programmatic advertising.

Programmatic Ad Buying

Programmatic ad buying refers to the use of advanced software to buy digital ads, rather than using the traditional process that involves requests for proposals (RFPs), face-to-face negotiations and manual insertion orders. In a nutshell, it’s using machines to purchase ad space. By automating this system, the purchasing of ad inventory is more efficient and less expensive, as the human element has been eliminated.