Reference
Digital advertising glossary
Plain-English definitions for common advertising, measurement, supply-chain and reward terminology.
Ad exchangeA marketplace or technical system that connects advertising demand with publisher inventory.
Ad impressionA recorded delivery of an advertisement under a platform's counting rules.
Ad serverSoftware that selects, delivers and records ads and related events.
ads.txtA publisher-hosted file declaring which systems are authorized to sell web inventory.
AttributionA rule or model that assigns credit for an outcome to advertising interactions.
BidA buyer's offered price for an advertising opportunity under specified conditions.
Brand safetyControls intended to avoid clearly harmful or inappropriate advertising contexts.
Brand suitabilityAdvertiser-specific decisions about which otherwise safe contexts fit a campaign.
CTRClicks divided by impressions.
Completion rateCompleted video views divided by a defined base.
ConversionA defined business outcome such as a purchase or verified registration.
CPASpend divided by conversions.
CPCSpend divided by clicks.
CPMSpend divided by impressions, multiplied by 1,000.
DSPTechnology used by advertisers or agencies to evaluate and buy ad opportunities.
Fill rateThe share of eligible opportunities that result in an ad being served.
First-party dataInformation collected directly through a publisher's or advertiser's own relationship with users.
Floor priceA minimum price or pricing rule below which an opportunity may not be sold.
Frequency capA limit on how often the same user or device is exposed to a campaign.
IdempotencyA property that lets the same logical operation be repeated without duplicating its side effect.
Invalid trafficAd interactions that should not be treated as legitimate billable user activity.
OpenRTBAn IAB Tech Lab protocol family for real-time programmatic transactions.
Programmatic advertisingAutomated buying and selling of digital advertising opportunities.
PublisherThe owner or operator of content or a service where advertising inventory is created.
Rewarded advertisingAn ad experience in which a user knowingly participates in exchange for a defined benefit, subject to provider policies.
sellers.jsonA file published by an advertising system identifying direct sellers and intermediaries.
SSPTechnology used by publishers to manage and sell advertising inventory.
SupplyChain objectAn OpenRTB object describing entities involved in selling or reselling a bid request.
ViewabilityA measure of whether an ad had an opportunity to be seen under defined thresholds.
YieldThe economic return a publisher generates from advertising inventory.