107 terms from Programmatic and Media Buying, each defined in a sentence or two, with a link to the calculator that works the number out where one exists.
The interruption itself, whether one ad or several.
The marketplace where bids and inventory meet.
The ad slots available to sell. Finite, perishable and worth nothing unsold.
Any venue where inventory changes hands.
A sequence of ads shown together in a video break.
The system deciding which ad renders in a slot and recording that it did.
Traditional TV where different households see different ads.
A public file listing who is authorised to sell a publisher inventory. Blocks a large class of fraud.
An umbrella term covering CTV, OTT and addressable television.
An agency-run buying operation, usually pooling client budgets for better rates.
The mobile app version of the same file.
How competition, floors and pacing interact to set what you actually pay.
How many bidders compete per impression. Thin density means cheap inventory and usually poor quality.
The same impression reaching you through several supply paths. You end up bidding against yourself.
The same idea from the buyer perspective, the price you must clear to compete.
The share of bid requests you responded to. Low bid rates usually mean targeting is too narrow.
The message describing an available impression, sent to buyers.
A buyer answer with a price and an ad.
A DSP quietly lowering your bid toward the likely clearing price so you do not overpay in a first-price world.
The flow of bid requests moving through the ecosystem.
Data extracted from those requests. Widely used, and legally shakier every year.
A charge applied on the demand side of the transaction.
Short for customer data platform.
The price the auction settled at.
Header bidding run in the visitor browser. More cookie matching, slower load.
Environments where the platform controls both the audience and the measurement.
Coordinating across media types rather than optimising each in isolation.
Reaching the same person across phone, desktop and TV.
Client-side ad insertion, where the player requests the ad. Easier to measure, easier to block.
Short for connected TV. High completion rates, high CPMs and weak click measurement.
A system unifying your own customer data into one profile. The first-party successor to the DMP.
A controlled environment where two parties analyse combined data without either seeing the raw records.
A charge for using audience data in targeting. Often invisible in reporting until you look for it.
A system for collecting and segmenting audience data, mostly third-party. Fading with the cookie.
The identifier that connects your buying seat to a negotiated deal.
How efficiently a buyer converts spend into results.
The system buyers use to bid across many exchanges from one seat.
Programmatically bought digital billboards and screens.
Inventory bought straight from a publisher rather than through an open exchange.
Short for data management platform.
Short for digital out-of-home. Measured on estimated impressions, not clicks.
Short for demand-side platform.
The demand-side platform cut, usually a percentage of media spend.
A floor that adjusts by user, time or demand rather than sitting fixed.
What the exchange keeps for running the auction. Stack all these fees and working media can fall below sixty percent.
Open the calculator →The share of ad requests that returned a paid ad. Unfilled inventory earns nothing.
An arrangement giving one buyer the first chance at inventory before it reaches the open auction.
The winner pays what they bid. Now the norm, and it makes bid strategy matter far more.
Tuning minimum prices to balance fill against revenue per impression.
Controlling how often one person sees your ads across all channels. Almost nobody does this properly.
A commitment to deliver a set volume of impressions.
Letting several exchanges bid simultaneously before the ad server decides. Raised publisher revenue and page weight in equal measure.
A map linking identifiers that belong to the same person or household.
The process of building and maintaining that map.
An estimate of how many impressions will be available at a given price and targeting.
The share of users a platform could recognise when matching two datasets. Falls every year.
The standard for rich media ads inside apps.
A deal with agreed terms but no volume promise.
The Open Measurement SDK, letting third parties verify viewability inside apps.
The public exchange anyone can bid into. Cheapest inventory and the least control over where you land.
Everything outside the big platforms. Where programmatic mostly operates.
The shared protocol for how bid requests and responses are structured.
Short for over-the-top.
Video delivered without a traditional cable subscription.
The share kept by the platform specifically.
Short for private marketplace. Higher prices, better inventory, less waste.
The open-source framework most header bidding setups are built on.
A fixed price with no volume commitment, giving one buyer first refusal.
An invite-only auction where a publisher offers inventory to selected buyers.
A specific negotiated arrangement inside a private marketplace.
Buying and selling ad inventory through automated auctions rather than by phone and insertion order.
Automated buying of podcast and streaming audio inventory.
The buy side of that process, run from a demand-side platform.
Automated execution of a directly negotiated buy.
A fixed volume at a fixed price, executed programmatically. Direct deal terms with automated delivery.
A guaranteed volume commitment executed through the pipes rather than by trafficking files.
The sell side, where publishers expose inventory to automated demand.
Buying straight from the publisher with no intermediary.
What a publisher earns per thousand impressions after fees.
What is left after direct deals are filled. Cheap, and cheap for a reason.
Short for real-time bidding.
The winner pays just above the second-highest bid. Largely retired.
Publisher-built audience segments passed in the bid request, replacing third-party cookie targeting.
A charge applied on the supply side.
A file exposing who each intermediary is, so buyers can trace the chain.
Header bidding run on a server rather than in the browser. Faster pages, less transparency.
Short for supply path optimization.
Server-side ad insertion, where ads are stitched into the video stream. Harder to block, harder to measure.
Short for supply-side platform.
The supply-side platform cut.
The sequence of intermediaries between advertiser and publisher. Each one takes a cut.
Cutting out redundant intermediaries between you and the publisher. Every hop takes a fee.
How efficiently a seller converts inventory into revenue.
The system publishers use to sell inventory to many buyers.
The percentage an intermediary keeps from each transaction.
The standard for serving video ads into a player.
An older interactive video standard. Heavy, and being phased out.
A platform that keeps data and measurement inside itself. Google, Meta and Amazon, mainly.
Publisher work to maximise revenue per available impression.