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8 February 2017 / News

A glossary of programmatic display terms

Tom Geekie / Managing Director

When talking about programmatic display, it’s not long before buzzwords such as ‘DSPs’, ‘exchanges’ and ‘PMPs’ are mentioned.

With investment in programmatic display rapidly increasing, it’s likely that if you work in digital marketing, you’ll be hearing terminology like this much more often.

We’ve put together a glossary of the most frequent programmatic display terms and what they stand for and mean, to help you better understand the world of programmatic.

ATL: This stands for ‘above the line’, and relates to mass market media, for example TV, radio, press, and out-of-home.

CPA: Cost-per-action – this is an online advertising pricing model where the advertiser pays for each specified action / conversion that is completed. These actions can be different on a case-by-case basis such as completing a contact form or login page, an online purchase or downloading a file.

CPE: Cost per engagement – this is an online advertising pricing model where the advertiser pays each time an engagement is performed. An engagement is dependent on the format of the advertisement used or the platform the ad is hosted on. For example, the advertiser using a CPE model would pay every time a targeted user clicks ‘play’ on a video ad, opens up an expandable ad, or ‘likes’ a Facebook ad.

CPM: Cost per mille (cost per thousand) – this is an online advertising pricing model where the advertiser pays for each thousand of impressions delivered by an ad campaign.

CPUL: Cost per unique land – this is an online advertising pricing model where the advertiser pays for each person to land on site. If the same person visited a website multiple times, the advertiser would only pay for the first visit.

CTR: Click-through-rate – this is the ratio of users who click on an advert to the number of total users who viewed the advertisement in total.

CVR: Conversion – when somebody performs a desired action, such as downloads a form, signs up, registers, footfall in store.

DMP: Data Management Platform – this is a centralised system that stores audience data from publisher websites, cookies and third-party data sources, enabling advertisers to create highly targeted segments.

DSP: Demand Side Platform – this is the software that automates the bidding process for ads.

Exchanges: The exchange is the online marketplace where publishers and advertisers buy and sell online advertising space.

Impression: An impression is when the ad is served on a website in front of the user.

LAL: Look-a-like – this is taking your best customers and finding users who display similar attributes to these.

PC: Users that have clicked on an ad and gone on to make a purchase.

PMP: Guaranteed publisher ad space or a ‘private marketplace’, is an invite only auction to guarantee a set volume of impressions on a specific site.

PV: Users who have seen an ad and gone on to convert, without clicking on the ad.

Reach: The number of individual users who have been exposed to an advert.

RTB: Real Time Bidding is bidding for advertising space on an impression-by-impression basis for display inventory. This can happen within milliseconds of a user in your target segment visiting a web page with ad space available.

SSP: Supply-Side Platform or Sell-Side Platform – this is a technology platform that publishers can use to manage their inventory more efficiently. It’s the same as a DSP but for people selling ad inventory rather than trying to bid on it.

So there you go. If you’d like to know more about what programmatic can do for you, get in touch. We’d love to hear from you.