A Reference Guide For Digital Advertising And Web Traffic

This time I wrote more educational post about terms commonly used in digital advertising and web traffic.
The motivation to write this mini guide came form netotraffic clients.
Mikel asked me if I can write something that explains commonly used traffic terms and I said why not.
It started more like FAQ about website traffic and transformed into this terms guide.
This is not a full guide and was not indent to be such, it is more like a quick reference guide for typical terms used in the advertising industry.
Enjoy the article and I hope it will be useful for you!

• A
• B
• C
• D
• E
• F
• G
• H
• I
• J
• K
• L
• M
• N
• O
• P
• Q
• R
• S
• T
• U
• V
• W
• X
• Y
• Z

A

Ad

An advertisement space that can contain text, image, video or other media.
It used to promote a brand or product in a digital channel.
The ad usually runs on Ad network.

Audience Targeting

In marketing, Target audience is a group of consumers that share the same target market to deliver
advertisement or message.
Targeting is consist of several elements that aim to find the best Target audience.
The criteria can be many and the more you add, the narrow is the group and more focused.
Such criteria can be: behavioral, demographic, geographic, interest, age, culture, language.
When making advertisement campaign, it’s important to verify you’ll get some targeting.
Because some advertisers and traffic sellers, deliver your ads without any targeting.
This can be useless to buy bulk traffic which match for any one.

B

Banner

A type of Ad that is commonly used.
The size of full Banner ad is typically 468 x 60 Pixels

C

CPM (CPI)
CPM stands for Cost per thousand (M =Roman numeral for 1,000).
It’s a term advertisers use to measure the price for 1,000 advertisement impressions.
A 5$ CPM says you need to pay 5$ for every 1,000 impressions to publish your Ad.

CPC
Cost per click is another method commonly used in website advertisement.
Is measure the cost that the advertiser need to pay each time a website visitor clicks on the ad.
When Comparing PPC to web traffic, you can see how cheap visitors traffic is.
With PPC advertisement, CPC can easily start from few hundreds dollars, like 200$ when you pay 0.2$
for a single click. That’s why PPC campaigns should be small and targeting specific audience.

Visitors traffic on the other hand, has CPC of 2$ and lower! (as example) which is only a fraction cost of PPC.
This is a huge difference, both methods have their pros and cons, but when it comes to price, website traffic wins.

CPA
In Cost per acquisition, the advertiser only needs to pay when the website visitor makes a specific action like purchase, lead, registration, etc…
That comes directly from clicking on the Ad.

CPS
In Cost per sale, one will get as many impression as he needs , until the client will make a sale action.
This can be very costly method, but worth for some advertisers.

CTR
Click through rate is a measure between the ratio of the number of times the ad is clicked compared to the total number of ad impressions.
Adversities use this to estimate the success of a campaign.

It is usually expressed In percentages and you want the CTR to be high as possible.
High CTR implies for converting traffic as you convince more people to do a specific action (like clicking a link).

What’s is considered a Good Click-Through Rate?
There is no simple answer for this question.
It depends on the industry, ad location and content design.
Using Wordstream Google AdWords Benchmarks data, the average CTR in AdWords is 1.91% for search and 0.35% for display.

D

Digital Advertising
Also called online marketing, Internet advertising or web advertising is a format of advertisement on the internet to promote digital products and services to consumers.
Today this format is used also in smart devices and other platforms.
The most known forms are SMM (social media marketing), SEM (search engine marketing), email marketing an ads networking.

E

Engagement Metrics
Publishers as Adversities like to measure and track their ads performance.
While the publishing network can be desktop or mobile devices, the methods are similar.
Few possible metrics are:

* Time spent on Ad
* Most focused or clicked parts of the Ad
* Number of Ads clicks
* Time that the Ad exist
* Number of conversions / downloads /leads
* Social shares

F

Frequency
The number of times an ad is delivered to a unique a consumer.
On some networks the advertisement can be shown more than once to a visitors.
It’s legitimate to have frequency cap greater than one, the more important is to see you unique visitor
That made a visit to your site only once.

G

Geo Targeting

Geo-Targeted Ads are shown to people based on their geographical location.
Marketers often lunch different advertising campaigns according to consumers locations.
This is one component exist in Audience targeting.

H

Heat Map

A heat map is a graphical representation of data using colors to highlight activity on a web page.
Areas of interest are where user clicked or mouse move and they will be marked as hots spots using light colors.
Low levels activity ares will be marked with dark colors.

For marketers and advertisers, heat maps are great tool to optimize the page or ad.
If for example, you have CTA (call to action) on a part of the page that users focus less or don’t reach much,
you can know about this and change it. This can lead to better conversions rates and higher CTR.
3 Hot Marketing Tips from Heat Map Analysis

I

Impression

This is the number of times that the ad is shown to users.
Every time the ad is fetched from the server , the Impression counter is increment by one.
The number of clicks is not taken into account.

CPM or CPI represent the cost of 1,000 impression for an ad.

Interstitial Ads

This kind of ad is something that web surfer must view before he can go to the destination page.
It can be shown while navigating between pages on the same domain or before one can see the desired website page.
Generally, this is a full page Ad.

J

No value.

K

Keywords

Keywords are essential for search engines to match pages upon user search.
Advertiser can use Google AdWords to bid on selected words and to lower PPC costs by selecting low bid keywords.
Another aspect is Keyword targeting where marketers place specific words in their ads.
These words and phrases are aimed for target audience that the ad is designed for.
Sometime they will use buyers keywords to increase sales and engagement.

KPI
KPI= Key Performance Indicators
This is a measurable value that demonstrates how effectively a company is achieving key business objectives.
To make a successful KPI you need need to define objectives and how you plan on achieving them.
Here is an example for few KPIs to Monitor With Your SEO Tracker

L

Lead Generation

lead generation is the process of initiating a consumer to discover, inquiry or buy product or service.
In this process, you find potential customers for your business and convert them into leads.
At the end of process these leads will untimely become your customers.

Look Alike Audience

Image source dailymail
Look alike is a  way to find people that will likely have interest in your product or business based on
customers with the same characteristics.
For example , you can find people that buy or visit at your competitors sites and make a new target audience based
on the similar characteristics.
Look alike can be effective way to successful lead generation.

M

Mobile Marketing

This is advertising optimized for display in mobile devices.
This niche evolved because the different screen size ,bandwidth and usage of users on mobile device.
Today it also include app-based marketing combined with ads.

N

Native Advertising

This is kind of advertising that integrates promotional content into users web page.
The format tries to be natural and integrate into the users form.
It can also come in a shape of paid content that targets specif audience.

O

Opt In

Opt in is when you ask for someone permission to receive content or offer.
One common practice widely used in digital marketing is utilizing landing pages and opt in forms.
The offer can be sent by email, download link, newsletter, video or other on-line marketing method.

P

What is Pop-under traffic ?

For sure you have seen pop up or under window many times while surfing the Internet.
The are very popular and used extensively in on-line advertising.
Pop up window is the one that shows above the user browser window, while pop under window will be shown below the user browser window.

Many user find these kinds of Windows disturbing and not relevant if they are jumped in front of their faces.
When one See’s a window that covers his front view (aka pop up) he will tend to close it immediately.
That is why Pop under traffic is considered better and less annoying and the kind that users are willing to keep longer.

There are two kinds of pop-under ads: click pop-under and real pop-under ads.
Click pop-under ads will only become activate if the user clicks on the Ad and than a new window to your site will be open.
real or traditional pop-under ads are the ones that will kept hidden in the background and will be seen only after the user is closing or minimizes all other
open Windows.
The acceptable size of pop up window is 250×250 pixels while for Pop under it is 720×300 pixels, but it can be different and depends on the advertising network.

Page Views

This parameter can be found in Google analytics and other tracking tools reports.

A request to load a single page will count as page view.
A unique pageview is defined as the number of visits during which the specified page was viewed at least once.
If user reloads a page ,it will also count as as an additional pageview, but not as unique pageview.

We than can talk about average page view per session, how many pages are vied by user during his session,
Or many pages he visits when he surfs your website.

Usually, you want the average page view per session to be more than one.
It’s also related to bounch rate, more pageviews can imply that users find the content in your website helpful.
But, not always. If you have many pageviews with low time on page it can be the other way around.
In this case, it can imply that users are looking in your site and not finding what they need , therefore they are switching pages.

Q

Qualified Lead
Marketing qualified lead is when someone who has interest in product or service has convert into a lead.
The qualifying parameters should be determined by marketer.
This In not like basic lead which could be limited to name and an email address.

R

Repeating Visitor

A unique visitor that has gone to a website two or more times during a specified time frame.
The reasons can be many, but if he has doubts about your product this can be opportunity for you.
Some plugins can detect returning visitors and offer them discounts or other goods.

S

Sessions

A new session is opened every time a user visit your site.
In Google Analytics, if user stays inactive in a website for 30 minutes or more, it will be considered as a new session.
Long session times are good sign for humans and search engines, because it’s a sign that people find things that make
Them stay longer and not to leave your site.

There are few techniques in marketing to make the session time longer.
One simple and effective is to chunk your post into more section and to put some other useful content inside (infographic, free stuff, download, etc…).
Another way is by using magic words that will tempt the reader to keep reading the next paragraph.

T

Traffic
Website traffic is the oxygen of every Internet page. This is a measure for the number of visitors that a website or page receive.
Without traffic and people viewing web pages, there is no real Internet business that can exist.
Traffic sources can be many: organic, social, ads,exchange and paid traffic are just few possible options.
There are few important metrics for traffic and essentially you should select the best traffic for your needs.

U

Unique Visitor
A visitor to a webpage that made the first visit to a page within defined time frame.
If this visitor is making multiply visits in that time frame, this will only count as one visit.
When you buy traffic, you want to make sure you get only Unique visitors for what you paid.

V

View Through
This is “side effect” of displaying ads, It measure the numbers of visitors to a target page that came from displaying the ad,
but not from clicking on it.
It’s actually shows the number of indirect visitors that came from the ad exposure.

W

Warming

In marketing we can characterize prospects into warm and cold.
A visitor that just landed on a page for the first time and don’t know nothing about your page is considered cold.
We can turn this cold visitor into a potential customer by warming.
In the process of warming we take more personalize action to the contact and can make some offers.
Warming can be done by sending email, a discount we give, special offer, social media message, CTA and more.
These all have the potential of converting the visitor into customer.

X

No value.

Y

Yield
In Ads ,this is a measure of successful action like: click, sign , etc…(conversion) from the total volume of delivered impressions.

Z

No value.