One of the hardest things to understand when starting an online business is all of the terminology. This post is a glossary of terms for online advertising to give you a point of reference. If there are any words you’d like defined that you don’t see here, please feel free to comment.
Online Advertising Terms:
Above the fold: “Above the fold” advertising generally means that the banner placement on a web page can be seen without the reader having to scroll horizontally or vertically. For an advertisement to be “above the fold”, it needs to be within the top 500 to 600 pixels of the page.
Banner ad: Banner ad is a generic term describing the most common forms of online advertising. The most common ad sizes are:
728×90 – leaderboard
468×60 – banner
120×600 – skyscraper
250×250 – square
300×250 – medium rectangle
336×280 – large rectangle or bog box
160×600 – wide skyscraper
These ad sizes can usually be in a multitude of file formats including GIF, JPEG, Flash and PNG.
Click Through Rate (CTR): is the percentage of times a banner gets clicked on compared to the amount of times it is viewed. For example, if an advertisement gets clicked on 4 times out of 100 views its click through rate would be 4%.
Cost per action (CPA): CPA is an ad payment model where the publisher gets paid from the advertiser when the click through on an advertisement leads to a sale, registration, download, etc. Usually only high traffic sites will use this model because it requires high traffic to generate enough acquisitions for profitability.
Cost-per-click (CPC): An advertising term used to describe the cost for a single click-through of an ad to a client’s Web site.
Cost per lead (CPL): Similar to CPA (cost per action), the CPL pricing model pays web publishers for every banner click resulting in a lead for the advertiser. Meaning, advertisers pay publishers only when a visitor performs a desired action on their site (such as sign up for information or create an online account).
Cost per Thousand (CPM): Cost per thousand banner displays. A $12/cpm rate means that an advertiser will pay $12 for every 1,000 times their banner is shown. Note – the “M” in CPM stands for mille which is Latin for one thousand.
Creatives: A creative is the same thing as a banner.
Impressions: Every time an advertiser’s banner is displayed, it counts as an impression. If a banner is viewed 12,103 times, that is the amount of impressions the banner received.
Lead: A lead describes a potential customer who has expressed interest in a product or service, usually established when information is requested or an an online registration is performed. Some affiliate programs pay on a CPL, or Cost Per Lead, basis.
Page Views: The number of pages that get viewed in a certain amount of time – i.e. monthly page views. For example, if your website has a total of ten pages and each of those pages get viewed ten times in a month, your site’s monthly page views for that month would be 100.
Traffic: Traffic is a common term used to describe the amount of visitors to a blog or site. The most valuable measures of traffic are considered to be unique visitors and page views.
Unique visitors: This term is referring to a unique visit from an individual person – usually determined by their IP address. An IP address is a numerical identifier that each computer or network has and is used to communicate with other networks.
Visitor: A visit happens when someone or something (robot) visits your site and views one or more pages. One unique visitor can have many visits to your site and be counted multiple times.
Yield: is the percentage of times a banner gets clicked on compared to the amount of times it is viewed. For example, if an advertisement gets clicked on 4 times out of 100 views its click through rate would be 4%. This can also be referred to as click through rate (CTR)
