Glossary of Advertising & Online Marketing Terms

Are you having trouble with all the marketing terms and acronyms being used in the advertising industry? We’re here to help with our definitions.

You’re having trouble understanding all the marketing terms and acronyms being used by your fellow affiliate marketing specialists, media buyers, and advertisers? Trust us, you are not alone. And we’re here to help shed some light on the most common and important terms being thrown around in the online advertising world. Whether you’re an advertiser buying traffic or a publisher selling it, this glossary of marketing terms will benefit you! The list is sorted alphabetically for convenience.

A

Above the Fold: The area visible without scrolling, once a web page has finished loading completely.

Account Manager: The person in charge of handling your account within an ad network, ad exchange, affiliate network, etc. This individual is generally your first point of contact, when dealing with the company. In affiliate networks, this person will often also be called an affiliate manager.

Ad Campaign: An advertising campaign is a planned series of advertisements. It may contain one or several links, banner ads, or native ads. An ad campaign is generally utilized to target a specific audience.

You can learn how to create your first ad campaign at PlugRush here.

Ad Code: A piece of code given to webmasters functioning as publishers in an ad network, in order to implement adzones (f.ex. banner ads) on their website.

Ad Creative: An image-based ad unit generally intended to generate ad clicks. Examples may be banner ads and native ads.

Ad Exchange: Groups of traffic sources connected to Demand-Side Platforms (DSP) and Supply-Side Platforms (SSP).

Ad Network: A network that connects advertisers (i.e. media buyers) to publishers (i.e. webmasters running one or multiple websites) to facilitate efficient web traffic buying & selling, which would be difficult to achieve otherwise.

Side note: PlugRush is an ad network with a supplementary function as an ad exchange.

Advertiser: From an ad network perspective, an advertiser is a person who buys traffic. In the affiliate marketing world, an advertiser is the owner of an offer or product, which can be promoted by affiliates.

Affiliate: Person who gets paid for each click, conversion, lead, or sale generated by traffic they sent to an offer provider or merchant through an affiliate network or program. Affiliates generally buy traffic from ad networks or utilize visitors from their own websites for ad monetization purposes.

Affiliate Link: A unique link code to track visitors sent to a specific offer by a media buyer. The URL link is generally provided by the affiliate network running the offer.

Affiliate Marketing: A form of marketing where affiliates (generally advertisers buying traffic from ad networks) are rewarded monetarily by affiliate networks or programs on a performance basis.

Affiliate Network: A company functioning as an intermediary between affiliates sending traffic and affiliate programs rewarding them for said traffic’s performance.

Affiliate Program: An automated system that allows webmasters and media buyers to earn money by sending web traffic to a merchant company’s websites, offers or products. Generally payouts are on a performance basis, measured by leads or sales generated. An affiliate program may also be called an associate, partner, referral, or revenue sharing program.

Alexa Rank: A popularity measurement tool for websites, which bases its ranking system on the estimated traffic of websites, as well as visitor engagement on them.

Application Programming Interface (API): A system that allows for, through the use of various functions, an automated way to access data and interact with another system programmatically. With regards to ad networks, this is primarily used to retrieve statistics, but may also be utilized to for example generate or update blacklists/whitelists of an ad campaign. Many other functions are possible to use depending on the API’s versatility.

Android Application Package (APK): A common offer type provided in affiliate marketing to install mobile apps.

Automated Rules: A set of rules used to automatically optimize an ad campaign utilizing conversion information received by the ad network via conversion tracking.

You can find out more about the PlugRush Automated Rules system here.

Automatic Download: When the end user is sent to the advertiser’s landing page, f.ex. via a banner ad click on a webmaster’s website, and something is downloaded automatically as a direct result of this without further consent.

B

Backlink: An incoming link to a website from another website. This is often also called an inbound link.

Banner Ad: An image-based advertisement on a website. It may be a JPEG, PNG or animated GIF file. Banner ads are used by media buyers to purchase clicked traffic to the offers or products they’re promoting.

Blacklist: A list applied to an ad campaign of websites, IP ranges, and/or traffic sources that should be excluded going forward.

Browser Cookie: A small data piece stored on a user’s computer by the web browser, which is sent from a given website. Cookies are used by websites to remember user preferences, if the user is logged into the website, and similar. The term browser cookie is generally synonymous with the terms cookie, web cookie, and Internet cookie.

C

Chargeback: The return of funds to a customer, i.e. if they’re unhappy with a product or service they’ve purchased and ask the bank that issued their credit card to get the money back.

Click Fraud: A fake (bot-generated) or otherwise fraudulent (possibly generated by a human using an actual browser) click. People who create ways to generate click fraud are usually banned from ad networks, affiliate networks, etc. because these fake clicks are useless.

Click ID: An alphanumeric or numeric value assigned to a specific user, when they’re sent to an ad campaign by an ad network, for identification purposes by advertisers, media buyers, and affiliate networks.

Contextual Link: A clickable text link added to the written content of your web page, which may highlight keywords as part of an effective SEO strategy.

Conversion: Generally this refers to when an end user generates a sale, lead or subscription on an offer or product.

Conversion Funnel: A term describing the journey of an end user from before a click on an ad occurs to them generating a conversion (i.e. sale or lead). This usually includes the path from the visitor clicking an advertisement, then arriving on a prelander, moving on a to an offer landing page, and eventually converting. The most successful media buyers are masters at creating effective conversion funnels.

Conversion Rate: The percentage of visitors sent to an ad campaign that generate a conversion.

Conversion Tracking: Usually accomplished with a postback URL in Server-to-Server (S2S) conversion tracking or with a pixel placed on the post-conversion page, conversion tracking is used to inform f.ex. an ad network if a given visitor sent to an ad campaign has generated a conversion. This requires the use of a Click ID parameter in the campaign URL.

You can read more specifically about PlugRush’s conversion tracking feature here.

Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) Also called Cost Per Action, CPA refers to a pricing model where the offer provider or merchant only pays for end users that generate a conversion.

In some cases, when a sale is the conversion, then it may also be called Cost Per Sale (CPS) in some affiliate programs or networks. Additionally, when the sale is specifically some sort of order being placed, it can also be called Cost Per Order (CPO).

Cost Per Click (CPC): The price you pay per click in an advertising campaign.

Note: PlugRush is a CPC-based ad network.

CPC Bid: The amount you’re willing to pay per visitor sent to your advertising campaign in a CPC-based ad network.

Cost Per Lead (CPL): In this case, the offer provider pays per lead generated. A lead is usually generated when an end user provides their contact information in some form (f.ex. by submitting their e-mail address). While this isn’t a final sale with payment, it affords the offer provider a method to contact the end user in order to promote products or services.

Cost Per 1,000 Impressions (CPM): Also called eCPM, where the e stands for effective, this metric identifies how much an advertiser (media buyer) in an ad network pays for 1,000 ad impressions.

For publishers (website owners or webmasters), CPM is a metric that shows them how much they earn per 1,000 impressions on their website(s).

Comma-Separated Values (CSV): A common file format used to store advertising data in a tabluar manner, for example as a database or spreadsheet. CSV files can be easily imported to and exported from applications like Microsoft Excel or OpenOffice Calc, which store data in tables.

D

Daily Budget: An amount of money assigned to your ad campaign for spending on a daily basis. Once reached, the ad campaign will stop until the next day, when its daily budget is refreshed.

Dayparting: Using a schedule to only allow your campaign to run during certain days and/or certain hours of the day. This is usually utilized by media buyers to target the most productive times of given days with their ad campaigns for optimal performance.

Note: At PlugRush, you can daypart for free using the built-in schedule function of our campaign creator.

Deep Linking: A method of linking to a specific page of a website, as opposed to its home page. This is often supported by affiliate programs and networks, to allow media buyers to link to specific pages they feel will perform best to convert a given offer, product or service.

Demand-Side Platform (DSP): A platform in place to buy visitors, generally as part of an ad exchange, often through RTB. Essentially functioning as a programmatic advertiser or media buyer.

Desktop Advertising: Online marketing geared toward monetizing end users that use desktop computers or laptops to access the Internet. The types of advertisements used for them may be different than the kinds used for mobile visitors.

Display Ad: A synonym for ad creative.

Read about how easy it is to upload several display ads quickly to use for ad campaigns with PlugRush here.

Domain Authority: A search engine ranking score created by Moz, which aims to predict how well a website will rank in search engine results.

Domain Name: Usually just called a domain, it’s used to identify a group of web pages that belong together at one Internet address. For example, in the URL https://www.plugrush.com/guides the domain name is plugrush.com

Double Opt-In: A subscription to a service that has been confirmed by the end user twice.

Duplicate Content: A large block of content that can be found on several web pages on the Internet.

Dynamic Tracking: Using URL parameters or tokens in a campaign URL in order to pass specific information about the visitor being sent by an ad network to a landing page URL. Examples of these tokens could be ones that pass information about the end user’s operating system, browser, traffic source, Click ID, etc.

E

Earnings Per Click (EPC): A very important metric and Key Performance Indicator (KPI) for affiliate marketers and media buyers. It reflects how much you’re earning per click sent to an offer.

Extensible Markup Language (XML): A markup language with a set of rules that makes it readable by humans and machines. XML is very often used by ad exchanges in an RTB setup.

F

Frequency Cap: A restriction on the number of times a given visitor is sent to your ad campaign within a 24 hour period.

Note: The default frequency cap PlugRush uses is 1 in 24h, meaning each visitor will only be sent to a given ad campaign once within 24 hours.

G

GEO: A synonym for country.

H

Hyperlink: Often simply called a link, a hyperlink in advertising is used to link from one web page to another. The link may be triggered via plain text. In that case, it’s called a text link and will often be colored blue or purple, and it may or may not be underlined. A link can also be triggered by a click on an image or a button placed on a web page.

Hypertext Markup Language (HTML): Often called HTML code, this is the standard markup language used to create web pages.

Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP): A server-side scripting language that’s used for web development and also can be used as a programming language.

Note: Implementing PlugRush’s adzones on your website as a webmaster involves uploading a PHP file called our Main Ad Code to make it work properly. So we use PHP to make ads work on your website.

Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS): The protocol used to transfer data between a web browser and website. The added S in HTTPS stands for secure, which means all transfers of data between the browser and web page are encrypted.

I

Impression: An ad impression represents one view of the ad by an end user.

Incentivized Traffic: Visitors that are convinced to click a link or generate a lead with an incentive (i.e. a prize or discount) as motivation. Because the visitors often act only to receive the incentive, they are generally considered to generate less valuable conversions.

In-House Media Buyer: A media buyer who doesn’t work independently for themselves, but rather for a company (f.ex. an ad network or the offer provider directly) as part of their internal media buying team. An in-house media buyer’s job may be to purchase and monetize web traffic from third parties or they may be hired to help turn available traffic into a profit.

Internal Link: A hyperlink from one web page of a domain to another page on that same domain.

Internet Service Provider (ISP): A company that provides people with access to the Internet.

Internet Protocol (IP) Address: An alphanumeric or numeric label that uniquely identifies a computer connecting to the Internet.

IP address ranges can be used to identify and target ISPs or carriers in an ad campaign using an IP range whitelist.

J

No terms yet.

K

Key Performance Indicator (KPI): Something that can be accurately measured as a metric to indicate the performance of an offer or ad campaign, for example the ROI, profit or EPC when it comes to media buying.

Keyword: A word or phrase that describes the content of a web page. It’s important for SEO.

Keyword Density: A measurement given as a percentage which shows how often a particular keyword is used on a web page compared to the total number of words on the page. It’s an important metric in SEO.

Keyword Research: The act of searching for the best keywords to use on a web page in order to have it rank for desirable keywords (f.ex. ones that are frequently searched for) in search engines. SEO experts do keyword research in order to find the most popular keywords.

L

Landing Page: The entry point of a website or a web page an end user is sent to first, after they’re bought via an ad network. This page is generally used to convert the visitor.

Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI): This is used by search engines to define what web pages are about by looking for words that may be related to the main keyword of the page, for example acronyms and synonyms of the primary keyword.

Lifetime Value: How much money a given end user spends with a company during the entire time they’re active.

Link Building: Getting other website owners to link to your website or web pages to increase the amount of backlinks you have. This can help with SEO of your website, provided the backlinks you gain are of high quality and relevant to the content of your website.

M

Manual Approval: The review process generally conducted by an admin of a system or company. In PlugRush, some things subject to manual approval are identification documents submitted in order to enable PayPal deposits, withdrawal requests, and also ad campaign submissions.

Market Segment: A particular part of the market. A mobile advertising segment could for example be identified by the end users from a certain country that are also using a certain operating system and browser, while accessing the Internet via a specific mobile carrier.

Note: PlugRush allows advertisers to target very specific segments with its vast targeting options available.

Media Buyer: An individual purchasing advertising space from an ad network to convey a marketing message for the offers or products they are promoting. They may be self-employed, work in-house for an ad network, or work directly for the offer provider, affiliate network, or affiliate program.

Meta Tags: Elements in the head portion of your site’s HTML code, which make it easier for search engines to determine what your web page is about. They are visible in your HTML source code, but not to visitors simply browsing through your web site. Meta tags generally include tags for title, description, and keywords (among others).

Mobile Advertising: Also called mobile marketing, this refers to advertising and marketing geared specifically toward mobile users that are using mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, to access the Internet (and thus be exposed to advertisements on these mobile devices). Ad formats used for this type of advertising may be different than ones used for desktop advertising.

Mobile Network Operator (MNO): May also be called wireless service provider, wireless carrier, cell company, and/or mobile network. A telecommunications service provider that enables wireless voice and wireless data (generally to access the Internet) communication to the mobile users subscribed to it. Well-known examples are Verizon, AT&T, Vodafone, Airtel, China Mobile, Telefonica, MTN, Orange, Telenor, and Telekom.

Note: In advertising, it can be beneficial to target specific mobile carriers, as end users of specific carriers may be most or exclusively suitable for a given offer. For this, PlugRush has two solutions: A carrier targeting option built into our campaign creator; and also the ability to create IP range whitelists, which can be utilized to target specific mobile operators.

N

Native Advertising: In this type of advertising, native ads are used to closely match the content of the web page they’re placed on. This improves CTR and is a more user-friendly way to display advertisements on a website.

Native Ad: An image-based advertisement that is intended to blend in with the actual content of the website it’s on. Native ad images should be plain photographs (they should not contain any graphics) and are displayed with a short descriptive title. Media buyers frequently utilize this ad type to purchase clicked traffic. Webmasters use them to help create a user-friendly advertising experience for the visitors of their websites.

If you’d like to know how to properly optimize native ad and banner ad campaigns, you should read more here.

Niche Marketing: The process of targeting a (sometimes very) specific segment of a market or industry.

O

Offer: A product or service presented to end users by advertisers or media buyers with the help of website owners that provide access to said end users (visitors). Generally, the offer is owned by a company and affiliate networks aggregate many offers for media buyers to promote in their varied marketing efforts.

OpenRTB: A Real-Time Bidding (RTB) protocol that provides open standards for ad networks and ad exchanges. It allows for a more simplified way to communicate between those looking to buy advertising and those looking to sell ad inventory through RTB.

Operating System (OS): A general system to manage computer hardware and software. Examples would be Microsoft Windows, Mac OS or Linux.

P

Pay Bump: An increase in how much is earned per conversion on a given offer. Certain affiliates in an affiliate network may be able to negotiate a pay bump, if they’re exceptionally capable of converting a particular offer at a higher rate than other media buyers promoting it.

Pay Per Click (PPC): Often used synonymously with Cost Per Click (CPC). A form of advertising in which advertisers in an ad network only pay when their ads are actually clicked on. PlugRush is a PPC (or CPC) based ad network.

Payment Threshold: The amount of money you must earn in an ad network as a website owner selling traffic to the network, before you’re able to request a withdrawal. On PlugRush, this amount is $25.

Payout: The amount of money earned as a publisher for a given time frame, which is added to your account balance in an ad network. On PlugRush, the payout period is one week.

In affiliate networks, payout generally refers to how much you earn for a single conversion generated on an offer.

Performance-Based Marketing: The merchant only pays commissions to affiliates / media buyers that generate conversions (i.e. sales or leads).

Pin Submit Mobile Content Billing: When promoting offers to mobile users, a popular way to process their payments is by using what are called pin submits. They allow for the ability to bill end users that convert for an offer directly (so they don’t have to use a credit card for example). This way the charge will show up on their phone bill. There are two basic types of pin submits:

  1. A direct billing flow works with MSISDN detection, so the mobile carrier identifies the end user’s phone number automatically, and then they can be billed with only a single click needed in the case of a 1-click flow. As 1-click flows are very prone to accidental signups, 2-click flows are becoming the required standard with many mobile operators. A 2-click flow requires two clicks made by the end user, to essentially confirm they want to subscribe with a second click. This naturally lowers conversion rates, but is much more user-friendly for the person purchasing a product or service.
  2. Because the direct billing flow is only possible with mobile carriers that allow it and also cannot be used by mobile end users that are connected to the Internet with a Wi-Fi connection, some offers also utilize the SMS flow. For a conversion to occur with an SMS flow setup, the end user will receive a text message on their phone to confirm their subscription either with a code they input somewhere, or by replying to the text message.

Plug-In: This may also be caled an add-on or extension. It’s essentially a small app within a larger application intended to improve the functionality of the larger app. For example, in a web browser you may be using a plug-in to activate antivirus software. So the small app (the antivirus software extension) improves the functionality of the larger app (the web browser).

Postback URL: A URL used in an affiliate network’s system to notify an ad network, when a conversion has occurred from an end user (tracked with a Click ID token added to the ad campaign URL). This allows the ad network (i.e. PlugRush) to display this information for the advertiser promoting a given offer. It also helps to allow for automated campaign optimization via Automated Rules.

Prelander: A landing page a purchased visitor is sent to before they are presented with the actual offer landing page is called a pre-lander. This can be an effective method in a media buyer’s bag of tricks to set up a conversion flow that works.

Privacy Policy: A document that explains to users how their personal information may be used by a product or service provider.

Profit: The thing everyone in the marketing game chases. The money that is left over after all your expenses are paid.

Publisher: In an ad network, publishers are synonymous with website owners or webmasters.

Q

Query: A request, for example a bid request sent via a request URL to an XML feed within the context of Real-Time Bidding (RTB).

Queries Per Second (QPS): How many requests something receives per second. For example, this could quantify how many searches are made in a search engine per second. Or how many requests are sent from an SSP or ad network to a DSP for a given campaign / feed.

R

Raw Traffic: Overall traffic generated by a website or purchased by an advertiser in a given time frame, not considering which portion of it is composed of unique visitors. This may be broken down into raw impressions and raw clicks.

Real-Time Bidding (RTB): A method in which a bid auction occurs in realtime (as a web page is loading) on an individual ad impression or ad click, as opposed to in bulk (which is the case for more traditional ad campaigns).

Reciprocal Hyperlinks: An exchange of links between webmasters. They will link to each others websites in an effort to improve SEO. This is often done in an ABC fashion, where Webmaster 1 will link to a site that belongs to Webmaster 2, but then Webmaster 2 will link to a third site owned by Webmaster 1.

Redirection: Forwarding an end user from one URL to another through a 301, 302 or meta refresh redirect.

Referral: Providing a referral generally means that you refer another person to use a given product or service.

NOTE! At PlugRush, you will earn 5% of our revenue on spendings and earnings generated by all users you refer to us. We are the only ad network that allows you extra income for referrers – advertisers and publishers (webmasters). More details about our affiliate program here.

Referrer: The web page a given visitor was sent from to get to another URL. The referring domain would be example.com, while the referring URL would be the full URL, i.e. http://www.example.com/some_page.html

Return On Investment (ROI): Your ad campaign’s profit divided by its cost, generally given as a percentage. F.ex. if your profit is $50 but you paid $25 for your campaign, then your ROI is $50 / $25 = 2… or 200%. Achieving an overall positive ROI is going to be the primary goal of any media buyer.

Revenue: The amount of money generated. In advertising, this is usually provided as a value that doesn’t factor in expenses.

Robots.txt: A text file uploaded to a website in order to give instructions to search engine robots, web crawlers, and similar.

Run Of Network (RON) Traffic: Visitors purchased through an ad campaign in an ad network from (potentially) all websites sending traffic to said ad network. This can be narrowed down with the use of targeting options and source exclusions with the help of blacklists or Automated Rules, among other optimization tools. It’s also impacted by the activity of competitors, who may buy parts of the available traffic.

S

Scalability: In marketing, when an offer can be scaled, it means it’s possible to promote it effectively with a larger amount of traffic than is currently being purchased for it.

Search Engine: Software that indexes Internet content (f.ex. web pages and images) and allows end users to search for the indexed items with the use of keywords.

Search Engine Index: Often also just called index, this refers to the data collected by a search engine about web pages and websites to index them. The results listed on search engine results pages (SERPs) are provided by the search engine index.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM): Marketing of websites, products, offers, or services by means of paid promotion on search engine result pages (SERPs).

Search Engine Optimization (SEO): A broad term to describe all the possible techniques, strategies and tactics utilized to improve the search engine ranking of a given website or individual web page within a website. It’s utilized by webmasters to increase the amount of organic search engine traffic their website(s) can obtain for free.

SEO factors may be on-page, for example your HTML code, keyword selection and placement, keyword density, meta tags, and many other things. And SEO optimization can also happen off-page, which could be backlinks from other web pages or your site’s Alexa Rank.

Search Engine Results Page (SERP): A list of results returned by a search engine, when it responds to a given keyword or phrase query.

Single Opt-In: A subscription to a service (conversion) that has been confirmed by the end user once.

Smartlink: One link that rotates offer URLs depending on various metrics about the visitor being sent to them. The direct URLs PlugRush may provide to publishers for selling traffic are essentially smartlinks.

Social Media Marketing: Marketing on social media platforms, where end users interact through online communities like Facebook or similar.

Split Testing: Also called A / B testing is the practice of comparing two versions of content or advertisements against each other directly, generally by sending similar traffic to them. This is done to find out which performs best, before scaling.

Supply-Side Platform (SSP): A platform in place to sell visitors, generally as part of an ad exchange, often through RTB. Essentially functioning as a programmatic publisher that serves ad impressions or clicks on an individual basis as opposed to in bulk (as an ad network would generally do).

Sweepstakes: An offer type where the end user can enter to win a prize of some sort, and in return provides contact details (effectively generating a lead).

T

Targeting: In advertising, targeting means offering the right product or service to the matching audience. In ad networks, this is done via a variety of targeting options, i.e. browser, OS, country, carrier, etc.

Terms of Service (ToS or TOS): The rules you agree to abide by when you sign up for something or join a traffic network like PlugRush (for example). They may also be called Terms of Use (ToU) or Terms and Conditions.

Note: Terms of Service may also simply function as a disclaimer of some sort on a website.

Tier of Traffic: When speaking about tiers in advertising, generally this refers to how a given country is categorized. Tier 1 GEOs would be countries that most marketers want to target, when possible within the context of a given offer. These countries are generally the wealthiest, where end users have a significant amount of disposable income, and there is a lot of competition for the traffic available from them. Tier 2 is a bit less competitive with the average income per person being lower. Tier 3 countries are usually developing countries, where the average person has low purchasing power, but there is also less competition for the traffic. The most successful media buyers know how to utilize all tiers by taking advantage of the pros of each tier’s traffic.

Top Level Domain (TLD): The extension of a domain, f.ex. in the domain plugrush.com the TLD would be .com

Tracking Platform: A third party system used to track various metrics about traffic you’re buying as a media buyer. PlugRush has an advanced stats analysis system built into our ad network, which eliminates the need to use an external tracking platform entirely. This saves our advertisers time and money, especially if they use Automated Rules.

Tracking Token: A dynamic URL parameter inserted into your ad campaign URL, in order to track certain metrics about a visitor being delivered to your campaign. For example, if you track the {$source_id} token in a campaign URL with PlugRush, we will pass the corresponding Source ID the visitor is being sent through, by replacing the token with an actual ID as the visitor is processed in our system to be sent to your landing page.

Tracking URL: The URL to an offer’s landing page generally provided by an affiliate program or network, which uniquely identifies visitors coming to it as originating from a specific media buyer’s marketing efforts.

U

Uniform Resource Locator (URL): Your website’s address on the Internet, f.ex. PlugRush’s URL is https://www.plugrush.com

Unique Traffic: The unique portion of web traffic purchased by advertisers (media buyers) or sold by publishers (website owners). A unique visitor is generally identified via their IP and user agent, possibly other metrics as well, in a given time frame. Usually 24 hours. Unique traffic is either lower than or (at most) equal to raw traffic.

User Agent: A string sent from your web browser to websites you connect to, which helps the web server identify the browser and operating system you’re using. Ad networks may use this user agent string to help identify unique visitors. Malicious publishers sending fake traffic to engage in click fraud may spoof user agents in an attempt to hide their fraudulent activity.

V

Vertical: A specific area that a given product, service or offer focuses on; i.e. dating, auto insurance, finance, gaming, real estate, retail, solar, etc. In vertical advertising, these are used to focus marketing strategies on specific industries in order to accomplish niche-targeting to go after the desired audience.

Viral Marketing: A marketing method that convinces end users to share information about a product or service with their friends and family, f.ex. by sharing it through a social media platform. The marketing flow works essentially through word-of-mouth, spreading much like a virus would (hence viral marketing).

W

Web Browser: Usually just called a browser, it’s a software application used to access the Internet or World Wide Web (WWW). Some popular browsers are Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Safari, and Microsoft Edge.

Web Crawler: Also called web spider, web robot, or search engine robot. A web crawler is an automated script that browses through websites, generally with the end goal being to index and categorize them in some way. Almost all search engines use crawlers for example.

Web Host: A web hosting company uses web servers to store and serve website files and pages. Publishers generally need to purchase hosting in order to run their website, unless they utilize a free host (which generally has some disadvantages associated with it).

Webmaster: The owner of and/or person responsible for running one or multiple websites. In an ad network, they are called publishers.

Web Traffic: The amount of visitors a website or ad campaign receives.

Whitelabel: When a merchant allows its affiliates to use their own brand name in order to promote a product, offer or service. With white labeling, the end user will generally believe that it is the affiliate providing the product, offer or service being provided. Generally speaking, there will be no mention of the actual merchant on a whitelabel.

Whitelist: A list applied to an ad campaign of websites, IP ranges, and/or traffic sources that should be targeted exclusively going forward.

X

XML Feed: A feed written in Extensible Markup Language (XML), which may be used to store information about an ad network’s inventory, allowing for it to be queried in the context of Realtime Bidding (RTB).

Y

No terms yet.

Z

No terms yet.