Advertising Technology

Kevel documentation has a wonderful glossary of several terms used in the AdTech industry (source):

Metrics

Name	Description
Clicks	Number of clicks on the ad. These clicks can go anywhere - a lead generation form, a website, a product page, an eBook, etc
Conversions (Actions)	Number of post-click actions (such as making a purchase, filling out a form, etc)
Impressions	When an ad is displayed on the site/app
Viewable Impressions	Technical term for number of impressions where at least half of the ad was shown for at least 2 seconds
Video Views	How many times a video ad was viewed. Sometimes broken down by how far the user got into it, like 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100% completed.
Cost-per-action (CPA) or cost-per-conversion	Total cost (ad spend) divided by actions/conversions ”
Cost per click (CPC)	Total cost (ad spend) divided by clicks
Cost-per-mille (CPM)	Total cost (ad spend) divided by thousand impressions. 1M impressions at $1KspendwouldbeaCPMof$1.00
Click-through-rate (CTR)	Clicks divided by impressions. AKA, the rate that people click on the ad after seeing it
Conversion Rate (CR)	Conversions divided by clicks. AKA, the rate that people undergo a desired action after clicking

Types of Custom Ads

Name	Description
Companion Ads	Ads from the same advertiser that appear in tandem. Often refers to display ads that appear alongside a video ad, such as on YouTube
Dynamic Ads	Catch-all term for ads that change depending on who is viewing it. For instance, showing rain gear to people who are currently living somewhere where it is raining
Full-Screen Takeover	An ad that takes over the entire screen (most relevant on mobile)
In-Feed/In-Stream Ads	An ad that appears within the flow of content, such as Facebook’s mobile in-feed ad unit
Promoted/Sponsored Post	Native ads - often on social networking sites - that look and feel like organic posts. Think Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, etc
Recommendation Widgets	The rectangular ‘around the web’ content ads you often see on media/news sites
Responsive Ads	Ads that automatically change size based on screen/browser size
Session Takeover	Where you show the same user the same ad (or ads from the same advertiser) for their entire browsing session
Sponsored Articles	Articles on news/media sites that are sponsored by a brand. Done correctly, these are not self-promotional (like H&R Block sponsoring an Onion article on taxes). However, there are also ‘advertorials’ - ads that promote a product while trying to look like objective editorial pieces
Sponsored/Promoted Listings	Used by eCommerce, marketplaces, and any company that shows “listings”. Here, companies/people pay for their organic listing to be artificially high up in the search results. For instance, Amazon lets vendors pay to have their product be the first listing for a given search word
Sponsored	A custom native ad unit sponsored by a brand. Can be anything. Tinder has “sponsored profiles”; AllRecipes as “sponsored ingredients”; it’s really up to your imagination!
Viewable Ads	To counter concerns that some ads are displayed but never seen, some advertisers may ask for ‘viewable ads’. The IAB considers a viewable ad to have 50%+ of its pixels visible for at least 2 seconds