Ad

Abbreviation for advertising banners (“ad” is an English abbreviation for “advertisement”).

Ad impression

Standard unit adopted by DMMV, GWA, VDZ, BDZV and VPRT industry associations at the end of 1998 as the binding unit to be used in future for measuring the performance of advertising media. In contrast to page impressions, this standard measures the number of times an advertising banner itself, rather than the page on which it is positioned is actually viewed.

Ad server

A central server that delivers banners to the website’s advertising
space independently of the web server for the site. Ad servers enable effcient banner management and uniform campaign management across different websites.

Advertiser

Used primarily by offerers from the USA, the word “advertiser” is synonymous with “merchant”. Via the affliate system, dealers make available the products and services that they offer online. Dealers allow linked distributing partners to market the merchandise via their websites. For each mediated sale, the dealer pays a predetermined commission based on a percentage of the sale’s volume.

Affiliate

A distributing participant in the partner program who is linked in this websites, newsletter or Ad-Words campaign in order to proft from the commissions (advertising medium).

Affiliate marketing

Online distribution channel and special discipline within performance marketing. Success-based payments are made via partner programs for all services mediated by affliates.

Affiliate network

Providers of technological and/or other services who take over tracking and invoicing on behalf of affliates and merchants. Also frequently known as “affliate platform.”

Banner

Ads displayed on a website. The commonest data formats until now are image fles in GIF or JPEG format. Innovative banner types (see “Rich media”) are gaining in importance, however. Banners contain hyperlinks to the advertiser’s website.

Banner burnout

Describes the decline in a banner’s advertising effectiveness, especially when expressed in falling click-through rates.

Click-through

A click on an advert hyperlink (e.g. a banner) that leads to the advertiser’s website.

Click-through rate

Ratio of click-throughs to ad impressions or ad views. Important benchmark for the effciency of online advertising. However, clickthrough rate does not take into account other key criteria for advertising effectiveness, such as awareness, image, communicative performance and likeability.

Cookie

A small text fle which a website can automatically place in the memory of the computer of a user who visited that website, thus enabling the website to subsequently identify the user. Sales and leads are assigned to the affliates via cookies.

Cost per click (CPC)

Billing unit for online advertising. What is billed is the number of click-throughs, i.e. how often users click on a banner and are taken to the advertiser’s website.

Cost per lead (CPL)

Fee per dataset. Also known as“PPL” (pay per lead).

Cost per objective (CPO)

Billing unit for online advertising that depends on whether the advertiser has achieved certain targets (generating address material - cost per lead, sales - cost per sale).

Cost per thousand impressions (CPM)

Billing unit for online advertising, analogous to the Thousand Contacts-Price (TCP). What is billed is the number of viewing contacts with a banner (see “Ad impression”).

Frequency

Refers to how often a user is supposed to see a particular banner. One of the potential targeting criteria for countering banner burnout.

Interstitial

Ad loaded in between two websites.

Lead

A mediated dataset, e.g. the postal address of a person, his email address, or both.

Merchant

The advertiser and the operator of the partner program.

One-stop shopping

Centralized handling of worldwide advertising campaigns by a marketer. Booking, guidance and invoicing occur via an interface.

Page impression

Number of viewing contacts with a particular HTML page that could potentially carry ads within an online offering. Unlike “hits”, the respective page is counted as a separate unit, regardless of how many different elements it contains (graphics, etc.). See also “Page view”.

Page view

Outdated parameter for determining the coverage of an online offering. Provides information of little relevance compared to page impressions, because each frame in a particular online page generates a page view. Sites loaded from cache are not counted.

Performance marketing

Measures to acquire customers and encourage their loyalty, with the goal of generating quantifable responses and/or transactions.

Publisher

Another term for “affiliate”.

Rate card

The media data for a website, detailing booking options, access figures and prices.

Rich media

Refers to a variety of technologies, such as Emblaze, Enliven, InterVu and Java, for creating innovative banner types. The effciency of a banner is considerably enhanced by rich media due to the greater scope for creativity and the integration of interactive components.

Run of network (RON)

By booking several websites, the coverage of a campaign is increased. State-of-the-art ad serving technologies enable specifc target groups to be targeted.

Run of site (ROS)

Campaign booking for a website, without specific sections of it being selected.

Site promotion

Advertising for websites on other websites, or in classical media.

Sponsoring

Alternative advertising option in addition to banner placement. Websites are linked exclusively to an advertiser’s messages and display the latter’s logo.

Targeting

Target-group-oriented use of advertising banners and other forms of advertising in the Internet. Users are assigned to a particular target group after they have responded by indicating a special area of interest at a website, after they have gone into the Internet with a particular browser, or after they have logged in from a particular country of origin.

Tracking

An ongoing technical process to record and document the success of specific affiliates and merchants. Well-functioning tracking is a precondition for the successful operation of a partner program.

Traffic

Number of users visiting a website. There are various ways of measuring this parameter.