The Complete Digital Advertising Glossary [2022]

A term that describes the process of making ads relevant for the people who see them. Insights for ad personalization can be derived from demographic information, interests, buying behavior, etc. This information comes from cookies and pixels.

Personalized ads result in better performance as consumers tend to respond to the ads that they find relevant.  Retargeting and targeting lookalike audiences are the most effective ways of providing a high level of ad personalization.

The CPM equation is: 

Cost per impression = 1 000 x Total advertising cost / Total measured impressions.

For example, an advertiser spends $200 on an ad campaign that brings 100, 000 impressions. The CPM of such a campaign is:

CPM = 1000 x 200/100, 000;
CPM = $2.

A metric that is used to measure the cost per one thousand impressions. An impression is one time a person sees an ad. The meaning of CPM lies in the fact that it helps assess the efficiency of the ad spend.

An ad format that allows interested users to fill out a form if they want to hear back from the business, get additional information or sign up for a newsletter. For users’ convenience, some info on the form may be automatically pre-filled, and they just need to confirm it rather than entering it. Advertisers can automatically integrate these ads with their CRM to qualify leads immediately. Also, this ad format can help increase brand awareness and reach, and enhance customer acquisition.

Facebook ads with the objective to reengage people that have already expressed their interest in the products or services. Facebook retargeting ads help businesses reach out to people who have visited the website, submitted their email, followed a Facebook page, liked or commented on the post, interacted with Facebook Events and/or apps, the Instagram page, etc.

The main benefits of such campaigns are engaging people who are already familiar with the business, personalize ads automatically, and ensuring retention of existing customers. To run retargeting ads, advertisers need to install Facebook Pixel.

A promotional message that appears on Facebook. It can feature an image, a video, a set of images/videos, a lead form, a link to the Facebook Page or the website. Business owners use such messages to tell potentially interested people about their products/services and to reengage the website visitors.

The most common ad placements (places, where the ad appears) are:

• Newsfeed on desktop and mobile;
• in the right column of Facebook on desktop;
• on Facebook Stories;
• In-Steam Videos, etc.

To see all placements, visit Facebook’s Business Help Center. Advertisers can optimize their Facebook ads according to the objectives — Brand Awareness, Reach, Lead Generation, audiences, placement, budget, formats, and more. Business owners and marketers can view and optimize their performance in the Ads Manager.

A mobile-only ad format that offers users a full-screen experience. Facebook Canvas Ads are now known as Facebook Instant Experiences. When creating the ad, marketers can choose a template or select Custom Instant Experience to add and arrange videos and photos, carousels, tagged products, buttons, text blocks, etc.

Such ads load up to 15x faster compared to standard mobile web ads. Instant Experiences ads are great for brand awareness and mobile shopping. Advertisers can create their ads from scratch or choose one of the easy-to-use templates.

Ads powered by machine learning that automatically select relevant products depending on the person’s interests and shopping history. Facebook Dynamic Product Ads are displayed as carousel and collection ads. It demonstrates positive results when advertising to broad audiences and retargeting the store visitors that interacted with one or several products on the store’s website.

The benefits of such ads are personalization, reengaging the potential customers, and delivering ads to people who are interested in products similar to yours.

Ads that appear on Google and partnered websites and mobile apps. Google Discovery Ads help business owners reach over 3 billion customers.

This type of ads is great for building brand awareness by reaching out to new people and re-engaging people who are already familiar with your brand including existing customers.

Ads that appear on the Google Search page above the search results. Google Shopping Ads feature shopping information including the name of the product, image, price, and the seller.  You can set up, optimize and view reports of such campaigns in Google Ads.

Merchants can use product groups to choose the products to advertise in each campaign. Also, such product groups can be divided into subgroups by category, the type of the product, and brand.

Ads that appear on the Google Search page. Google Search Ads help businesses increase sales, generate leads, and bring website traffic by targeting people looking for specific products and services. Then, you can create ad groups for different Google searches and target the keywords for each group. Google offers a dynamic way of creating an ad group where Google algorithms target searchers and create ads based on the website content.

Also, when adding headlines and descriptions to the ads, it is important to make sure that they match the targeted keywords.

Video ads that support a range of ad formats. Such ads are hosted on YouTube and placed on YouTube and across Google video partner sites. They can appear on desktop, mobile, and TV screens.

Google video ads can be:

• skippable and non-skippable in-stream ads;
• video discovery ads;
• bumper ads;
• outstream ads;
• masthead ads.

It is recommended to use this type of ads to increase brand awareness and extend the reach within a short period.

Visually rich ads that appear on articles, websites, YouTube, and mobile apps. Google Display Ad Formats are great for giving a brand large exposure as they are served on Google Display Network that reaches about 90% of internet users.

Such ad formats are responsive which means that when you create an ad, you just need to provide the text, images, and logo, and Google will optimize the ad to ensure high performance. This makes sure that your ad “natively” fits the website it is published on. Since Display ads target audiences based on their interests, they are effective for attracting the attention of people before they even start looking for a product.

Ads that appear on Instagram Stories. They are full-screen in vertical format and can feature photos, videos, and Call-To-Action. Instagram Stories Ads are available only to business accounts. Such ads are created in Ads Manager and can be optimized for a variety of objectives such as reach, video views, traffic, conversions, app installs, and brand awareness. The insights on the performance are accessible in Ads Manager and also right in the Instagram app in the Insights section.

Ads placed on Instagram that feature a photo. Such ads can appear on both Instagram Feed, Explore, and Stories. Instagram Photo Ads are great for such objectives as reach, app installs, brand awareness, lead generation, conversions, messages, traffic, etc.

To run Instagram photo ads, you can either create a new ad from scratch in the Ads Manager or the Instagram app in the Insights section → Promotion. Alternatively, you can choose one of the posts on your page and tap Promote. Instagram often suggests the best-performing posts to advertise.

Videos that advertisers use for paid promotion of their businesses. Instagram Video Ads can appear on Feed, Explore, IGTV Ads, and Stories. Also in early April 2021, the company started testing placing ads in Reels.

Here are several things you need to keep in mind when running such ads:

First, а include the most important information in the first seconds of the video, because if your video doesn’t catch attention right at the start, a user will scroll on to the next post.

Also, add captions as Instagram video is muted by default, and you don’t want to lose consumers because they don’t understand what is happening in the video.

Lastly, focus on providing a solution to the relevant problem of your target audience to increase the performance of your video ads.

Ads where the content is presented as slides. Instagram Carousel Ads appear in Feed and Stories. To create a carousel, you will need from two to ten images or videos. You can also choose the order in which the slides appear in the ad.

As in the other campaigns, you can choose the button depending on your objectives and the action you want people to take. Also, you can select Instagram as the placement when setting up Facebook Carousel Ads in the Ads Manager.

An ad format on Instagram that enables brands to deliver ads to potential consumers on mobile devices. Instagram Collection Ads help display several products offered by the business. The ad features images, videos, and text. The creative below the header can be chosen either manually or dynamically.

Also, to run the ad on Facebook and Instagram, it’s best to include primary text (90 characters) and headline text (25 characters). The ad can be optimized for such objectives as traffic, conversions, catalog sales, and store visits.

Meta Pixel (formerly known as Facebook Pixel) is an analytics tool that allows you to measure the effectiveness of your advertising by understanding the actions people take on your website.

Facebook ads that appear on Facebook Messenger. To create such ads, advertisers need to choose Messenger as their placement in the Ads Manager. Messenger Ads appear right in the Chat tab in the Messenger app, as well as in Messenger stories. Also, businesses can offer people to start a conversation with them by optimizing their ads for Messages.

A way to link marketing activities to certain results such as sales. The main purpose of such attribution is to see the efficiency of the marketing practices.

There are various marketing attribution models:

• last interaction — last touchpoint receives all the credit for a conversion;
• linear — each touchpoint receives the same credit for a conversion;
• time decay — the touchpoints closer to the conversion receive more credit.

Using marketing attribution allows companies to optimize creatives and see which ones to get rid of, improve personalization, optimize budgets, and increase ROAS.

Google ads that feature multiple headlines and descriptions that adapt depending on the performance. When creating Responsive Search Ads, you can create up to 15 headlines and 4 descriptions. Later, Google runs tests with different combinations of headlines and descriptions to understand which ones have the best performance. Thus, with time you will receive the best copy for your ad depending on the keyword, device, etc.

A marketing tactic to re-engage people who previously interacted with the content on a website or mobile app. Google ads retargeting (also known as Remarketing Google Ads) allows eCommerce merchants to target their online store visitors on Google, YouTube, Gmail, and partner websites.

This tactic helps strengthen brand awareness and motivate consumers to make the purchase. The main benefit of this ad that it targets warm audiences that are familiar with the brand and the product and are more likely to convert. Google Remarketing Ads are available across devices on websites and mobile apps.

An online advertising tactic where a business delivers their ad to the people that have previously been to the website, ideally with the same or similar product that a person has checked. Since there are very few people who make a purchase on the first visit, retargeting is a powerful way to convert website visitors into customers. The ad should be relevant, i.e. feature the very product that the user viewed before.

Advertisers use cookies and pixels to identify which online users have visited their website to target them in the ads later. For example, if you check out a pair of sneakers on a Nike website, but don't buy them, you will most probably see an ad for these sneakers someplace online.

Many marketers use the terms Remarketing and Retargeting interchangeably. For example, Remarketing on Google and Retargeting on Facebook are based on the same marketing principle — advertising products to the website visitors.

However, some marketers point out the difference between the terms. They claim that while Retargeting is about reaching out to potential customers that have seen your products with ads, Remarketing is the practice of reengaging already existing customers via emails.