Programmatic Advertising: The Definitive GuideThis is part one of a four-part informational series written to define the common and not-so-common terms used in the digital marketing world.
Do you ever freak out at all of the programmatic advertising lingo used in industry whitepapers? Does a bewildered look ever creep on your face after a colleague spits out a series of advertising-related acronyms you’re not familiar with? DSP, DMP, IDK. Well, you’re in for a treat because we’ve compiled a programmatic advertising cheat sheet that’ll make you the brainiest guy this side of the water cooler.
Familiarize yourself with the lingo all of the kids are using by reading our definitive guide to all things programmatic advertising. Get a gold star by downloading our Digital and Social Media Cheat Sheet— that way, you’ll always be Optimus Primed and ready to go. Programmatic Advertising: The new way online advertising bought. It’s data-driven and focuses on talking to the right audiences. Ad impressions are triggered by multiple events, such as website visits, a search keyword in Google, or a particular behavior online. Advanced rules and algorithms find your audience and optimize in real-time.
Real Time Marketing vs. Real Time Bidding: RM is the practice of creating viral content in tune with real events. RTB involves buying advertisements in real-time in order to target individuals based on their online behavior.
DMP: Data Management Platform is used to manage first and third-part data that may be useful to advertisers.
DSP: Demand Side Platform is the platform that actually serves the ads that you see on the web through ad exchanges.
Ad Exchange: facilitates the buying and selling process of online media from all the various networks. The actual “bidding” part is managed by technology as opposed to the historical approach of negotiating prices directly with the site (publisher). Examples are double click and Facebook Exchange.
Cookie: a small text file that sits on your computer in a folder dedicated to cookies. That cookie file contains anonymous information about you, which could be a simple ID number or many other points of data. The cookie can be understood by the company that put it there because they are encrypted.
Pixels: bits of javascript or a tiny image placed on an advertiser’s web sites for programmatic advertising. There are two types of pixels. The optimization pixel is used to optimize retargeting campaigns by better identifying ideal targets. Conversion pixels track when conversion events occur, including successful purchases, form completions, or landing page visits.
Algorithms (very basic answer): A very complex math equation that is ever evolving (data training equations).
View-Through Attribution: When an ad is shown online to an individual, and the individual goes to the site by navigating to it themselves. It is also known as a post-impression visit.
Audience Buying: Years ago, advertisers used to go direct to publishers to buy impressions on their specific sites in the hope the site’s market would reach the advertiser’s target. Men’s Razor company buying USA Today would reach women who went to the site for news. Now we just buy men who have an interest in shaving (Audience buying), and reach them on any number of sites.
Digital GRP: a unit of measurement that represents the percentage of online viewers reached within a total targeted audience population.
Big Data: any data that is too big for humans to comprehend or manage on their own.
Universal Live Profile: Is actually a way to make Big Data actionable in real-time by using it to build out a customer profile based on a number of data points such as search behavior or site actions across a multitude of devices, all in real-time.
KPI: Key Performance Indicators. What are the goals of the campaign? Web site convergence, revenues, and others.
