40 Online Advertising Terms Every Entrepreneur Should Know

The online advertising market is experiencing continuous, significant growth each year. More and more small businesses are allocating a large segment of their marketing budgets to online advertising initiatives. According to a report from market watcher Forrester Research, by 2016, advertisers will spend almost $77 billion online, comprising 35% of overall ad spending.

If your small business plans on utilizing, or is already engaged in, online advertising here are several basic terms that every entrepreneur should know.

1. Ad/advertisement: a commercial message targeted to an advertiser’s customer or prospect.

2. Ad audience: the number of unique users exposed to an ad within a specified time period.

3. Ad banner: a graphic image or other media object used as an advertisement. See iab.net for voluntary guidelines for banner ads.

4. Ad impression: an ad which is served to a user’s browser. Ads can be requested by the user’s browser (referred to as pulled ads) or they can be pushed, such as e-mailed ads.

5. Ad recall: a measure of advertising effectiveness in which a sample of respondents is exposed to an ad and then at a later point in time is asked if they remember the ad. Ad recall can be on an aided or unaided basis. Aided ad recall is when the respondent is told the name of the brand or category being advertised.

6. Ad space: the location on a page of a site in which an advertisement can be placed. Each space on a site is uniquely identified. Multiple ad spaces can exist on a single page.

7. Affiliate marketing: an agreement between two sites in which one site (the affiliate) agrees to feature content or an ad designed to drive traffic to another site. In return, the affiliate receives a percentage of sales or some other form of compensation generated by that traffic

8. Behavioral Targeting: a technique used by online publishers and advertisers to increase the effectiveness of their campaigns. Behavioral targeting uses information collected on an individual’s web browsing behavior such as the pages they have visited or the searches they have made to select which advertisements to be displayed to that individual. Practitioners believe this helps them deliver their online advertisements to the users who are most likely to be influenced by them.

9. Blog: a generic name for any Website featuring regular posts arranged chronologically, typically inviting public comments from readers. Blog postings are generally short and informal, and blog software is generally free and very easy for individual users, making it a popular tool for online diaries as well as more professional publications.

10. Clicks: a metric which measures the reaction of a user to an Internet ad. There are three types of clicks: click-throughs; in-unit clicks; and mouseovers.