Digital Glossary
A/B Testing (or Ad Testing)
A/B Testing (or Ad Testing) is a powerful feature to unleash different ads to see which performs the best and drive potential customers to advertiser's website.
Active View
Active View is a technology on Display Network websites that allows Google Ads to determine if your ad is viewable by potential customers.
Ad Exchange
An ad exchange is a platform where many ad networks perform auctions for the buying and selling of ad inventory.
Ad Extension
Ad Extension is a feature that shows extra business information with your ad, like an address, phone number, store rating, or more webpage links.
Ad Group
Ad group is a group of ads and related keywords within a campaign. The ads will be displayed to potential customers searching for content related to advertiser's keywords and/or ads.
Ad Rank
Ad Rank is a value that's used to determine your ad position (where ads are shown on a page) and whether your ads will show at all. Ad Rank is calculated using your bid amount, the components of Quality Score (expected click through rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience), and the expected impact of extensions and other ad formats.
Ad Relevance
A keyword status that measures how closely related your keyword is to your ads.
Ad Scheduling
Ad scheduling lets advertiser set a specific day or time where advertiser's ad will appear. It is the practice of scheduling the ad day based on advertising objective, budget and competitors.
Ad Strength
Ad Strength provides you with feedback to help you focus on providing the right messages to your customers. Ranging from “Incomplete”, “Poor”, “Average”, “Good” to “Excellent,” this metric measures the relevance, quality, and diversity of your ad copy.
Ad Views (Impressions)
Ad views are referred to as impressions. It is an advertising metric (standard of measure) that refers to the number of times an advertisement (e.g. web banner or text ad) has been viewed by visitors.
AdSense
AdSense is a Google product that provides a way for website publishers of all sizes to earn money by displaying targeted Google ads on their websites.
App Extensions
App extensions allow you to link to your mobile or tablet app from your text ads. People click either on your ad headline to go to your site, or on the link to your app.
AR (Augmented Reality)
Augmented Reality is an interactive experience which superimposes a computer-generated image on a user's view of the real world, thus providing a composite view.
Attribution Models
On the path to conversion, customers may interact with multiple ads from the same advertiser. Attribution models let you choose how much credit each ad interaction gets for your conversions. Attribution models can give you a better understanding of how your ads perform and can help you optimize across conversion journeys.
Auto-tagging
Auto-tagging is a feature that automatically creates custom URLs to help you track your ad performance using website tracking programs like Google Analytics.
Average Session Duration
Average session duration is a Google Analytics metric that reports the average amount of time users spend on your website.
B2B (Business-to-Business)
B2B (Business-to-Business)
B2C (Business-to-Consumer)
B2C describes commerce transactions of businesses that sell products or provide services to end-user consumers.
Bid Strategy
Your bid strategy type is how you've chosen to set bids for your ads. Strategies can be manual or automated, depending on your performance goals.
Bounce Rate
Bounce Rate is a term used in web site traffic analysis. A bounce occurs when a web site visitor leaves a page or a site without visiting any other pages before a specified session-timeout occurs. Bounce Rate for a web site is the number of web site visitors who visit only a single page of a web site divided by the total number of web site visits. Bounce rates basically measure how interesting other pages of advertiser's site are to advertiser's visitors. Use this metric to measure visit quality - a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages are not relevant to advertiser's visitors.
Broad Match
Broad Match is a keyword setting that allows your ad to show when someone searches for that keyword or a variation of it. The broad match keyword 'bicycle bell' can cause your ad to show if someone searches for variations like 'bicycle bells', 'buy a bell for a bicycle,' and 'bell reviews for bikes.'
Brand Safety
Brand safety refers to practises and tools allowing to ensure that an ad will not appear in a context that can damage the advertiser’s brand.
Cache
Cache is a temporary store of data collected by your Internet browser as you surf the web, including elements from webpages that you frequently visit.
Call Extensions
Call extensions let you add phone numbers to your ads, which can significantly increase clickthrough rates. When your call extensions appear, people can tap or click a button to call your business directly.
Call to Action
Call to Action is a phrase written or a button to motivate the reader to take a specific action, e.g. a button for instant call on mobile ad.
Callout Extensions
Callout extensions can promote unique offers to shoppers, like free shipping or 24-hour customer service. When customers see your ads, they get detailed information about your business, products, and services.
Click
The action that occurs when an ad, a link or webpage is selected.
CTR (Click-through Rate)
CTR is a way of measuring the success of an online advertising campaign. A CTR is obtained by dividing the number of users who clicked on an ad by the number of impressions generated.
Content Exclusion
Content exclusion settings let you opt out of showing your ads alongside certain categories of websites, videos, and mobile apps that may not be appropriate for your brand or serve your advertising goals.
Content Marketing
Content Marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire and engage a clearly defined target audience in order to drive profitable customer action.
Content Match
Content Match displays advertiser's ads alongside relevant articles such as product reviews, news articles, etc. on the Yahoo-partner network (which includes msn, openrice, sina, uwants, on.cc and many others). In Content Match, the content of advertiser's ad title, description, landing page and the user's IP address are used to determine the position of ads.
Contextual Advertising
Contextual advertising is the displaying of ads that are targeted to the content of the website. This is done through an automated scanning of keywords and content on the website.
Contextual Targeting
Contextual Targeting is one of the web's most popular ways to match an ad that was popularized by Google. For contextual targeting, Google Ads looks at the themes of the keywords in an ad group to decide whether to show advertiser's ad for relevant content. Many kinds of formats can be used, such as text ad, image ad, flash ad, and video ad.
Conversion Goals
Conversion goals help you organize your conversion actions so that you can more easily optimize toward your advertising objectives. Actions that you want your customers to take, or conversion actions, are grouped together based on related categories to form these conversion goals.
Conversion Page
Conversion Page is a page of your website that someone reaches after performing a valuable action, like a purchase confirmation page.
Conversion Rate
Conversion rate is the percentage of advertiser's ads that generate sales or leads. This means the number of people who clicked on advertiser's ad and went on to purchase his products and / or services.
Conversion Tracking
Conversion tracking is a free tool that shows you what happens after a customer interacts with your ads -- whether they purchased a product, signed up for your newsletter, called your business, or downloaded your app. When a customer completes an action that you've defined as valuable, these customer actions are called conversions.
CPC (Cost per click)
CPC is the cost of advertising divided by the number of clicks.
Cost-Per-Mille (CPM)
CPM is the cost of a thousand impressions on a website or web page.
CPA (Cost per Acquisition)
Cost per acquisition means the cost of someone take a particular action which can be download coupon, leave an enquiry form, download an app.
CPV (Cost per View)
A bidding method for video campaigns where you pay for a view. A view is counted when a viewer watches 30 seconds of your video ad (or the duration if it's shorter than 30 seconds) or interacts with the ad, whichever comes first.
Cookies
Cookies are a small file saved on people's computers to help store preferences and other information that's used on webpages that they visit.
Demand-side platform (DSP)
Software or technology platform that enables brands and agencies — the buyers — to identify available digital advertising inventory and buy it through the use of automation. DSPs allow buyers to transact in the open exchange or private marketplaces (PMP), and generally are integrated with third-party data providers and verification partners for targeting and reporting purposes.
Description
In search marketing, description is the concise summary of the products or services advertiser wish to advertise. For best results, an ad's description should correspond to its related keywords.
Directory Service
In software engineering, a directory is similar to a dictionary; it enables the look up of a name and information associated with that name. A directory service is simply the software system that stores, organizes and provides access to information in a directory.
Domain
A domain is the main subdivision of Internet addresses, i.e. the last three letters after the final dot. It tells you what kind of organization you are dealing with. There are six top-level domains widely used: .com (commercial) .edu (educational),.net (network operations), .gov (government), .mil (military) and .org (organization). Two letter domains represent countries; e.g. .hk for Hong Kong, uk for the United Kingdom, .dk for Denmark, .fr for France, .de for Germany, .es for Spain, .it for Italy and so on.
Dynamic Image Extensions
Dynamic image extensions are an automated extension that allows Google to curate relevant visuals from your ad’s landing page to complement your existing search ads.
Editorial Guideline
A set of guidelines that give advertisers direction for creating ads that provides a quality experience for users on search marketing. To display ads in search engines, advertisers need to follow the editorial guidelines.
Electronic Direct Mail
With the increased importance of email application nowadays, advertisers can send email promotion to specific customer database within a short period of time through Electronic Direct Mail. The advertising message can be sent to local and overseas customers quickly with low cost, which facilitates close contact with customers.
Engagement
Engagement means getting the audience to response to your ad or post in social media. The response can be like, comment, share, click, etc.
Engagement Rate
The Engagement rate is the percentage of audience who saw a piece of content or ad and engaged with it.
Exact match
Exact match is a keyword setting that allows your ad to show only when someone searches for the exact phrase of your keyword or close variations of the exact phrase of your keyword. The exact match keyword 'bicycle bell' can cause your ad to show only if someone searches for 'bicycle bell' or close variations of 'bicycle bell' exactly, with no other words.
First-party data
First-party data is gathered by a website owner and reflects its visitors’ online behavior. It is the most valuable data as it is proprietary to the publisher or website owner and provides precise and accurate data about its audience.
Flash
A vector-based animation program that has become a popular technology used to deliver content. Search engines currently have difficulty indexing flash effectively as robots cannot read the text that is held within.
Forms
The pages in most browsers that accept information in text-entry fields. They can be customized to receive company sales data and orders, expense reports or other information.
Frequency capping
A feature that limits the number of times your ads appear to the same person.
Geo-targeting
Delivery of ads specific to the geographic location of the visitor. Geo-targeting allows advertiser to specify where ads will or won't be shown based on the visitor's location, such as country, region/ state, city, etc. It will give a more localized and personalized results.
GIF (Graphics Interchange Format)
GIF, Graphics Interchange Format, is a bitmap image format. This format supports up to 8 bits per pixel, allowing a single image to reference a palette of up to 256 distinct colors chosen from the 24-bit RGB color space. It also supports animations and allows a separate palette of 256 colors for each frame.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free Google product that provides in-depth reporting on how people use your website. You can use Google Analytics to learn what people do after clicking your ads.
GDN (Google Display Network)
GDN is a group of more than a million websites, videos, and apps where your ads can appear. Sites in this network show relevant Google Ads.
GIF (Graphics Interchange Format)
GIF, Graphics Interchange Format, is a bitmap image format. This format supports up to 8 bits per pixel, allowing a single image to reference a palette of up to 256 distinct colors chosen from the 24-bit RGB color space. It also supports animations and allows a separate palette of 256 colors for each frame.
Hard Bounce
A Hard Bounce is generated when the recipient mail server specifically indicates that the recipient mail box does not exist, or that recipient does not want to receive messages sent by the sender.
Hit Rate
Hit rate is an index of advertising performance. This percentage value is equivalent to the browsing rate of advertiser's advertisement in the website. It shows how many of advertiser's website visitors enter advertiser's website from clicks of search results or banner advertisements.
HTML (HyperText Markup Language)
HTML, an initialism of HyperText Markup Language, is the predominant markup language for webpages. It provides a means to describe the structure of text-based information in a document—by denoting certain text as links, headings, paragraphs, lists, and so on—and to supplement that text with interactive forms, embedded images, and other objects.
Hyperlink
This is the clickable link in text or graphics on a web page that takes you to another place on the same page, another page or another site. It is the single most powerful and important function of online communications.
Image Extensions
Image extensions allow advertisers to upload rich, relevant visuals to complement their existing text ads.
Impressions
The number of times an ad is displayed. For example, a Sponsored Search ad that is displayed four times has four impressions.
Impression Share
Impression share (IS) is the percentage of impressions that your ads receive compared to the total number of impressions that your ads could get. Impression share = impressions/total eligible impressions.
Inbound Link
An inbound link is a hyperlink to a particular web page from an outside site, bringing traffic to that web page. Inbound links are important because many search engines algorithms use the quality and quantity of inbound links to measure the popularity of a web page.
Insertion Order
An insertion order can best be considered a Purchase Order between the parties.
Inventory Type
Inventory type identifies the kind of inventory or medium in which an ad serves.
JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group)
In computing, JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) is a commonly used method of compression for photographic images. JPEG is a graphics format newer than GIF which displays photographs and graphic images with millions of colors, it also compresses well and is the most common format for storing and transmitting photographic images on the World Wide Web.
JavaScript
JavaScript is a popular scripting language that is used on websites to perform client side actions without requiring full page refreshes.
Keyword
Keyword is a word or phrase that relates to the products or services advertiser wish to advertise. It is used for online search. Keyword searching is the most common form of text search on the web. A keyword can reflect search behaviour, purchase motive and purchase desire. Displaying keywords related to advertiser's business nature could attract target customers to contact advertiser actively. It will help to increase business opportunities and improve cost-effectiveness of the advertisement.
Keyword Bidding
Keyword Bidding is the way or procedure used by search engines marketers to determine the ranking of paid keywords results in Google, Yahoo, and other search engines pay per click advertising to decide advertiser's rank and position in their search results and in content results on partners' sites.
KOL (Key Opinion Leader)
Key Opinion Leader, also known as an "influencer", is a person or party who has expert product knowledge and influence in a respective field.
KPI (Key Performance Indicator)
KPI is a metric that indicates whether a website is achieving its goals.
Landing page
Landing page is the web page where customers end up after they click your ad. This page is usually the same as your ad's Destination URL.
Lead Form Extensions
Lead form extensions help you generate leads by letting people submit their information in a form directly in your ad.
Location Extension
Location Extension is an additional ad function to show your business address and a map marker with ad text of search result.
Mailing List
A mailing list is a collection of names and addresses used by an individual or an organization to send material to multiple recipients. The term is often extended to include the people subscribed to such a list, so the group of subscribers is referred to as 'the mailing list', or simply 'the list'.
Media Buying
In marketing promotion, media buying is an important aspect in the promotional campaign. Suitable online advertising media packages are designed with the professional knowledge and experience of media buying professionals, promotional strategies and advertising budget of advertisers.
Meta Tag
Meta tags are HTML codes inserted into the header on a web page to describe some aspect of the contents of a Web page.
MPEG (Moving Picture Experts Group)
MPEG is a file format that is used to compress and transmit movies or video clips online.
Native Ad
Native advertising is a form of online advertising that matches the form and function of the platform on which it appears. The word 'native' refers to the content's coherence with other media on the platform.
Negative Keyword
A type of keyword that prevents your ad from being triggered by a certain word or phrase. Your ads aren’t shown to anyone who is searching for that phrase. This is also known as a negative match.
Newsgroup
A newsgroup is a repository usually within the Usenet system, which allows messages posted from many users in different locations. It is usually a discussion group.
O2O (Online to Offline)
O2O refer to an Online to Offline business model that utilize web-based markets and tools to attract digital shopper to participate in in-person retail consumption.
Page View
Each time a user visits a web page, it is called a page view. It is tracked by website monitoring applications to record a website's traffic. The more page views a website has, the more traffic it is receiving. Page views are often used in online advertising, where advertisers use the number of page views a site receives to determine where and how to advertise.
Phrase Match
Phrase match is a keyword setting that allows you to show your ads on searches that include the meaning of your keyword. The meaning of the keyword can be implied, and user searches can be a more specific form of the meaning.
Private Marketplace (PMP)
Groups of ads curated by a publisher or SSP based on demographic target, content category, performance, and more. A deal id is then assigned to the group which allows it to be identified and purchased programmatically through a DSP. PMPs are separate from, and more controlled than, an open auction.
Programmatic Advertising
Programmatic advertising is a system that automates the processes and transactions involved with purchasing and dynamically placing ads on websites or apps.
Promotion Extensions
Promotion extensions can add more value to your Search Network text ads by highlighting your sales and promotions for people that are searching for the best deals your business has to offer.
Portal
A portal presents information from diverse sources in a unified way. Apart from the standard search engine feature, web portals offer other services such as e-mail, news, stock prices, information and entertainment.
Programmatic Advertising
Programmatic Marketing is automated bidding on advertising inventory in real time, for the opportunity to show an ad to a specific customer, in a specific context.
Quality Index
A relative measure of advertiser ad's performance by Yahoo! Search. The quality index takes into account the click-through rate and other relevant factors.
Quality Score
In Google, a keyword's quality score updates frequently and is closely related to its performance. In general, a high quality score means that advertiser's keyword will trigger ads in a higher position and at a lower cost-per-click (CPC).
Ranking
Ranking is the order of advertiser's displayed ad on a search results page. It provides advertisers with information on an ad's performance across sites.
RSS (Really Simple Syndication)
RSS uses a family of standard web feed formats to publish frequently updated information: blog entries, news headlines, audio, video.
Remarketing
Remarketing is a feature that lets you reach people who have previously visited your website. Your ads can show to these customers when they visit other websites in the Google Display Network.
Responsive Display Ads
Responsive display ads automatically adjust their size, appearance, and format to fit available ad spaces in Google Display Network.
Responsive Search Ads
Responsive search ads let you create an ad that adapts to show more relevant messages to your customers. Enter multiple headlines and descriptions when creating a responsive search ad, and over time, Google Ads automatically tests different combinations and learns which combinations perform best.
RLSA (Remarketing List for Search Ad)
Remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA) is a feature that lets you customize your search ads campaign for people who have previously visited your site, and tailor your bids and ads to these visitors when they're searching on Google and search partner sites.
Responsive Website
Responsive Website refers to a mobile friendly website built in a manner that can be compatible with multiple screen size.
Registration
A process for site visitors to enter information about themselves. Sites use registration data to enable or enhance targeting of ads. Some sites require certain registration in order to access their content. Some sites use voluntary registration.
Real-time bidding (RTB)
This is a real-time auction that occurs between a DSP and SSP, where multiple traders bid on an impression offer via an SSP through their DSP of choice. The trader who is willing to pay the highest price wins the auction and their brands ad is served.
Response Rate
Response Rate means the number of customers that has opened advertiser's email message or visited advertiser's website through advertiser's email promotion.
ROI (Return On Investment)
Return on investment = (Revenue - Cost)/ Cost, expressed as a percentage. ROI is a performance indicator used to evaluate the efficiency of Internet marketing and advertising. Determining ROI and the actual ROI of Internet marketing and advertising is more accurate than that of television, radio, and traditional media.
ROAS (Return On Advertising Spending)
Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS) is the amount of revenue a company receives for every dollar spent on an advertising source. This is a gauge of the effectiveness of online advertising campaigns.
Search Engine
Search Engine is a Web search engine for searching information on the World Wide Web. Users can input keywords as per individual needs. The Search Engine will then show reference links to users in real time from its own directory. It helps minimize the time required to find information and the amount of information that must be consulted. Users can select suitable website to browse. Common search engines nowadays include Yahoo!, Google, Sogou and Badiu, etc.
Search Marketing
Search Marketing is a method of placing online advertisements on Web pages that shows results when a user searches for a given keyword. These are usually text ads, which are shown with the top priority or displayed in the right column of the search results. This will help to increase its chance of being clicked, thus generating more business opportunities. Advertisers only pay when the ad or text link have been clicked, meaning that the advertising money is truly spent on getting actual click rates for the website. Search Marketing is seen as an online promotion channel with high return on investment. Today the major search engines include Yahoo!, Google, Baidu and Sogou etc.
Search Partners
Sites in the Search Network that partner with Google to show ads and free product listings. Search partners extend the reach of Google Search ads and listings to hundreds of non-Google websites, as well as YouTube and other Google sites.
SEM (Search Engine Marketing)
SEM, Search Engine Marketing, is a form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs). SEM includes Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay Per Click advertising (PPC), as well as using all other areas and services offered by Search Engines.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
SEO, Search Engine Optimization is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via natural/ organic search results. Typically, the earlier a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will draw to the site.
SERP (Search Engine Result Page)
SERP are the pages displayed by search engines in response to a query by a searcher.
Sitelink Extensions
To add more links to your ads, you can create sitelink extensions. Sitelink extensions take people to specific pages on your site (for example, a specific product or store hours).
Stream Ad
Stream Ads is a kind of advertising product from Yahoo, it appear front and center across major Yahoo sites by naturally blending into the content streams viewed by users. They’re served in the personalized content streams of major properties including Yahoo News, Yahoo Sports, Yahoo Movies, Yahoo Mail, and more.
Structured Snippets Extensions
Highlight specific aspects of your products and services with structured snippets extensions. Structured snippets show beneath your text ad in the form of a header (ex: "Destinations") and list of values (ex: "Hawaii, Costa Rica, South Africa").
Second-party data
Second party data is also data collected about online users, only it is provided by an external partner and compliments the “proprietary”data. It is usually acquired through partnerships but can also be bought.
Social Media
Social Media is a category of sites that is based on user participation and user-generated content. They include social networking sites like Facebook and other sites that are centered on user interaction.
Soft Bounce
Soft Bounce that is not hard bounce nor transient bounce is considered Soft Bounce. In general, a soft bounce is generated when a delivery error is encountered and it is not immediately clear that the error is non-recoverable but the server has already given up trying.
Supply-side platform (SSP)
Software or technology platform that allows publishers and inventory owners — the sellers — to sell their digital advertising inventory in an automated fashion. SSPs allow sellers to set floor prices in the open exchange, and/or package inventory into more exclusive bundles called PMPs.
Target Customers
Advertisers can identify their main target-selling group according to the features, demand, and value of specific products / services. This type of customer classification can help to easily identify the main target customers. Advertisers can then focus on the target customers and gain higher return on investment through online advertising.
Targeted Customer Segments
In order to send advertising message to targeted customers accurately, targeted customer segments are classified by age, gender, income, qualification, occupation, interest and habit in the huge customer database.
Third-party data
Third party data can be bought on a much larger scale. Some companies are specialized in data buying and will buy it from a broad range of publishers, allowing companies to get a better overview of their market. Collected data will be segmented into user attributes that define an online user, such as demographics, interests and online behavior, and will help build the behavior profile that will be used for ad targeting.
Time Decay
One of the attribution modeling from Google. Time Decay looks at all of the marketing/campaign efforts that a user entered from leading up to a conversion.
Title
Title is an element of a webpage. It appears in the top left of most browsers. It is a part of the directory submission that expresses the title of the website. One of the most important parts of SEO is ensuring an optimized title or unique titles across all pages of website.
Tracking code
The Google Analytics tracking code is a snippet of JavaScript that collects and sends data to Google Analytics from a website.
Unique Users
Unique users is the total number of different users or computer terminals who have visited a website. This is measured by using advanced tracking technology or user registration system. Unique users give advertiser an idea to determine how many people have viewed the content within a given period of time.
Universal Analytics
Universal Analytics is the most current data collection technology for Google Analytics. It uses the analytics.js tracking code for websites, an SDK for mobile apps, and the Measurement Protocol for other digital devices.
URL (Uniform Resource Locator)
URL is a unique address used in the World Wide Web to indicate a certain site. It is the unique identifier, or address, of a web page on the Internet.
Video Advertising
Video Advertising is an online advertisement that combines sound, graphic, motion and text. This will enhance the attractiveness of the advertisement.
Viewability
The metric which is used to track ad impressions that were actually seen by a person.
Web Browser
Web Browser is an application program that enables a user to display and interact with text, images, videos, music, games and other information typically located on the World Wide Web.
Web Site
A web site (or 'website') is a collection of related Web pages, images, videos or other digital assets that are hosted on one Web server, usually accessible via the Internet.
Web Traffic
Web traffic is determined by the number of visitors and the number of pages they visit. Incoming and outgoing traffic of the sites are monitored to see which parts or pages in a website are popular.
WAP (Wireless Application Protocol)
WAP is a technical standard for accessing information over a mobile wireless network. A WAP browser is a web browser for mobile devices such as mobile phones that uses the protocol.