Digital Glossary

The method used to decide the cost and placement of digital advertising on certain ad networks. A new ad auction occurs each time an ad is placed on an ad network.

This column shows the number of ad changes, such as adding or deleting an ad, that have been made during your selected date range.

How it works: Click the number to see each change displayed in your change history.

Good to know: Changes made yesterday are displayed after 10am (PST) today.

The market for digital advertising space, run via computerized auctions that bring together both parties (advertisers and publishers) of the transaction.

Additional information that can be included in paid search ads. Often used to provide more detail and improve a user’s interaction with an advertisement. It's a Google Ads feature that shows additional information in your top placed ads such as,

location and phone number
site links to pages deeper in your website
call outs
structured snippets
reviews,
address,
pricing,
callouts,
app downloads,
sitelinks,
and click-to-call.

It's Ad extensions help advertisers create richer, more informative ads that take up more on-page real estate, which generally lead to higher Click Through Rates.

Determines which ad formats can be in an ad group.

What it is: An ad group is a collection of ads that all have the same format/theme, for example, text (standard) or Shopping ads.

Keep in mind: To run both in-stream and video discovery ads in Google Ads video campaigns, you’ll need to create 2 different ad groups.

A grouping of websites or digital properties (like apps) where ads can appear. and it can also be a group of websites that have ad inventory for advertisers to purchase.

For example, Google has 2 ad networks: the search network (text ads that appear in search results) and the display network (image ads that appear on millions of websites that have partnered with Google) and Facebook Audience Network.

A place for advertisers to create advertising campaigns and select where to show their ads from the available inventory. Google & Facebook are two of the largest ad platforms

Google’s method for determining each ad’s position on a search engine results page. The advertiser with the highest ad rank will be placed in the top position followed by the ad with the second highest ad rank and so forth. Ad Rank is calculated based on the bid received, Quality Score and ad assets (formerly extensions), for each ad eligible to appear.

The rank of an ad in a given auction compared to other ads in that auction used to determine the ad’s position. Ad rank may be different in each auction

"Ad relevance" measures how closely your keyword matches the message in your ads. A below average score may mean that your ads are too general or specific to answer the user’s query, or that this keyword isn’t relevant to your business.

Ad relevance is one component of your keyword’s overall Quality Score.

Since Google will only show one ad at a time from an advertiser, ad rotation determines which ad to display if there is more than one ad contained in an ad group.

the act of scheduling particular advertisements in order and tailoring your next advertisement according to the user’s actions on the first advertisement, to increase conversions.

Ad servers are automated servers that help you request, bid on, and place your ads on websites, as well as monitor the progress of each campaign. For advertisers handling billions of data per day, ad servers make it easy to select the ads with the most potential and place them on appropriate websites.

A style of website design that creates web pages of different sizes in order to appear appropriately on devices with different screen sizes. It differs from Responsive Web Design in that it is actually multiple websites of different sizes rather than a single website which is coded to adapt to different screen sizes.
Today, Responsive Web Design is now the recommended style, and Adaptive Web Design is no longer the recommended style for creating responsive websites.

Ads Manager is Facebook’s tool for creating, running and analyzing social ads. It can manage your ad campaigns on Facebook, Instagram, or Audience Network. It offers a wide variety of features for ad targeting, budgeting, and optimization as well.

A Google platform that allows websites to earn money by publishing Google network ads on their website.

Advertising Policies provide information about what kinds of ad content and practices are allowed or not allowed on the site.

This is a type of performance-based marketing where a brand rewards affiliate partners for each website visitor or customer brought by the affiliate’s own advertising efforts. Affiliates typically receive discounts or payments based on the number of visitors or customers they bring.

Agile is a method of working quickly that is designed to adapt to rapid changes. Teams are often small and work in short sprints without lengthy processes or blockers to slow them down.

A process or set of rules that computers follow to perform a task. In digital marketing, algorithm usually refers the the sets of processes Google uses to order and rank websites in search results. The SEO industry gives various Google algorithms their own nicknames like Penguin (which analyzes the quality of links pointing to a website) and Panda (which assesses the quality of the content on a website). The main ranking algorithm is SEO is referred to as “The core algorithm”.

in digital marketing, the algorithm usually refers to the procedure that search engines go through, process and use to rank websites in Search Engine Results. while in social media it means the set of rules a social network uses to automatically decide which posts come first in your feed. For example, if Facebook decides that it wants to prioritize posts with lots of comments (as it did with recent algorithm changes), it adjusts the rules of its feed algorithm to push those posts up.

“All changes” shows the number of changes made to your campaigns or ad groups during your selected date range.

Changes are shown after 10 a.m. PST the day following the change. Changes before May 19, 2014 aren’t shown.

Text added to images to help search engines understand what the images are about and how they relate to the content on the page. Alt text also can be read aloud by a screen reader for blind users. It's also known as an attribute added to HTML code for images, used to provide vision impaired website visitors with information about the contents of a picture.

Best practice dictates that all images on a website should have alt text, and that the text should be descriptive of the image.

The estimated total amount of money you've spent on your campaign, ad set or ad during its schedule.

Total shares of content, organic tagged mentions, branded hashtag use, user-generated content.

The average price an advertiser pays when a user clicks on their ad.

Comprises the information gathering, analysis, and reporting process. Data is derived from all online touchpoints (i.e. a website, direct, organic, and paid channels), analyzed for insights and trends, and then delivered for strategic implementation.

A Google platform that allows webmasters to collect statistics and data about website visitors. Google Analytics (sometimes abbreviated as GA) allows webmasters to see where web traffic comes from and how visitors behave once on the site.

Analytics is essentially the discovery and visualization of important patterns in data. In the context of marketing 101 terms, it is looking at the data of one’s metrics (website visitor reports, social, PPC, etc.), noticing trends within that data, and then creating insights that can be utilized when making marketing decisions. Popular analytics services include Google Analytics, Hubspot, Mixpanel, Kapost, and Kissmetrics among many others.

In a social media context, analytics is the process of following metrics on your social media performance and using that data to improve your strategy. For instance, watching your engagement rate over time to see if your posts are becoming more or less compelling to your followers is one way of using social analytics.