Glossary

a

Above the fold (ATF): Refers to the top half of a page or portion of a website that is visible in a browser when a page first loads, before any scrolling occurs. Generally, a premium space where a large number of users will see the content and ads.
Acquisition: Refers to the gain or addition of new visitors to a website.
Active IDs: Represents known active users from all IDs that are received by The Trade Desk within a data segment.
Activity: The history of all changes made.
Ad agency: The business that manages the design, creation, and development of advertisments. Typically works with media agencies to strategically place advertisements so that targeted consumers see the ad.
Ad environment: The browsing environment in which various types of ads can be served, including web, mobile-optimized web, and in-app environments.
Ad exchange: Service that connects publishers, advertisers, and demand-side platforms, and conducts auctions among bidders per impression.
Ad format: The size of an ad (width x height), generally measured in pixels.
Ad fraud: The practice of falsifying aspects of ad serving for financial gain, including search and click-ad fraud.
Ad group: A campaign strategy that enables marketers to assemble targeting strategies to specify when, where, and how to serve ads. They can manage budgets, goals, creatives, site lists, inventory, and viewability, as well as targeting options for audiences, devices, locations, languages, times of day, and video adjustments across ad groups.
Ad inventory: The amount and types of ad space that a website can offer to advertisers for purchase; typically defined by size, format, location, and available impressions.
Ad network: The company that connects advertisers with publishers by matching supply of ad inventory with demands for ad placement.
Ad tech: Any digital tool, software, or service that is used to help advertisers manage and analyze their ad campaigns.
Ad verification: The service or system that verifies whether a campaign has been carried out as intended, ensuring ads appear on the correct websites and reach the intended audience.
Ad-supported video on demand (AVOD): Content services like YouTube and Hulu that offer content for free or reduced subscription fees.
Addressable TV: A strategy of placing different ads on TVs in households that are watching the same TV program.
ads.txt: A text file introduced by the Interactive Advertising Bureau that participating publishers attach to their websites that enables transparency by allowing the creation of public records of authorized sellers of their inventory.
Advanced TV: A bucket term for all the ways marketers can serve ads to their TV-viewing audiences, from streaming services to addressable TV and across devices.
Advertiser: A company, group, or brand that buys ad space online in order to sell products or services to a target audience.
AI-powered: Tools and systems that use artificial intelligence and machine learning to automate tasks.
Allowlist: A list of websites that an advertiser has deemed acceptable to display ads on.
Angel investor: A high-net-worth individual or entrepreneur who provides financial backing for startups in exchange for ownership or equity in a company.
API: A set of access points and tools that enable developers to build custom workflows and applications that can access certain features and data.
Aspect ratio: The width of a video creative to its height. Used for developing video and TV advertisements.
Attribution: The process of determining credit for a conversion, or desired action a customer takes depending on the advertiser's preference. Includes identifying steps a user takes before converting, placing value on each step, and assigning credit to either single or multiple steps. Helps better understand what drives customers toward conversion.
Attribution window: The period of time after a click or impression occurs that a conversion is tracked for credit to the click or impression.
Auction: An online marketplace where advertisers place real-time bids to buy publishers' ad inventory.
Audible and visible on complete (AVOC): The percentage of impressions where an ad was served to a human and seen and heard in its entirety.
Audience Accelerator: A data solution that aggregates TV ad exposure and viewership data from a multitude of partners, including multichannel video programming distributors and over-the-top providers. Data can be leveraged to inform programmatic strategies like focusing spend on expanding reach to net-new households and maximizing audience penetration.
Audience Booster: A feature that automatically optimizes campaign audiences by adding high-performing segments to audiences most likely to convert.
Audience Excluder: A feature that enables our AI, Koa, to use lookalike model data to update audiences least likely to convert, removing them from the marketer's audience. Highly recommended for conversion-based campaigns and for contextual strategies.
Audience Predictor: A feature that enables artificial intelligence to use lookalike model data to create and continuously update an audience of users who are most likely to convert, and target them in the marketer's audience.
Audio: The digital streaming of audio content, such as music, talk shows, and podcasts, through platforms like Spotify and Pandora.
Audio advertising: The process of inserting ads into audio content.
AutoAllocator: A budget-optimization feature that reduces the time and effort it takes to manage spend through either automatic prioritization or manual prioritization. Empowers our AI, Koa, to prioritize ad groups based on performance and direct spend to better-performing ad groups first, before assigning remaining budget to lower-performing groups. Manual prioritization allows regulating how ad groups are prioritized and how spend is allocated.
Automatic content recognition (ACR): Used to identify content played on a media device or present within a media file.
Available impressions: The ad opportunities that are open to bid on.
Average rating: The percentage of people viewing a program compared to the total population of TV viewers.
Awareness: How familiar customers are with a brand.
Awareness campaign: An ad campaign that works to increase brand visibility and recognition by educating potential customers on the existence of a brand.

b

Base bid: The starting price that a marketer pays for an impression before applying bid factors.
Behavioral targeting: The practice of using browsing history to determine which ads would be relevant to individual users, and which ads to present them with on a particular website.
Bid: The offer made in an auction to pay for an impression. Can also refer to the final price or number of offers an advertiser makes.
Bid factor: The multiplier applied to a base bid to increase or decrease the bid sent out in an ad exchange and adjusted based on individual customer characteristics. Can be applied to any vector, including device type, geo location, demographic. Ensures bids are adjusted to achieve an advertiser's goals.
Bid request: The signal a supply-side platform sends to a demand-side platform that enables the latter to purchase ad inventory, as well as details about that impression.
Bid response: The signal a demand-side platform (DSP) sends to a supply-side platform in response to a bid request. In a bid response, the DSP indicates a bid price and, potentially, creative specifications.
Blocklist: A list of websites that an advertiser does not want its ads to appear on.
Brand lift: A way for advertisers to understand if their advertising is resulting in awareness, consideration, or purchase of their product or service. This is done by comparing a control group (not exposed to the ad) and exposed group (exposed to an ad), and measuring the difference between the two.
Broadcast TV: TV programming delivered via airwaves and accessible for free without a cable subscription.
Broadcast video on demand (BVOD): Streaming services offered by traditional TV broadcasters.
Budget: How much to spend on ads over a given time period.
Buy side: Advertisers, agencies, demand-side platforms, and data management platforms that purchase ad space online.

c

Cable TV: Programs delivered to subscribers via traditional cable providers.
Call to action (CTA): Any technique advertisers use to encourage consumers to respond promptly.
Campaign: A strategy for purchasing ad inventory driven by goals, or KPIs, that covers a set budget for a set period of time.
Category: Lists of keywords and phrases matched to content of webpages and apps.
Channel: The medium through which ads are served, which could include video ads, display ads, mobile ads, audio ads, and more.
Click: When a user interacts with an ad by clicking it.
Click ad fraud: Ad fraud that involves a party using a bot to repeatedly click an ad to generate money for a publisher that is paid per click.
Click retargeting: Targeting audience segments based on users that have clicked on creatives.
Click-through conversion: When a user clicks an ad and then converts via whatever is considered a conversion action, such as buying a product or performing a location lookup.
Click-through rate (CTR): A ratio that divides the number of clicks by the number of ad impressions to show how often users who see an ad click on it.
Commitment: A non-guarantee agreement between advertisers and publishers in which advertisers agree to spend a certain amount of money during a campaign flight.
Companion banner: A display banner ad that is served alongside a video ad.
Completion rate: The percentage of ads served in an ad campaign that are viewed, played, or heard in their entirety.
Connected TV (CTV): A television or device that connects to the internet and enables users to stream TV programming on their television.
Consent management platform (CMP): A tool that supports transparency and openness by enabling publishers to present website visitors with opt-in and opt-out information so that visitors can see how and why their data is collected.
Consumer packaged goods (CPG): Products sold in sealed packages, such as food, beverages, and household items.
Content signals: Attributes, or metadata, applicable to all online video and audio content used to forecast, target, exclude, or optimize toward certain types of inventory.
Contextual categories: Categories that enable marketers to deliver relevant ads by matching identified keywords with the content of a website or an app, where an ad can potentially be placed.
Contextual targeting: A strategy that delivers relevant ads by matching identified keywords with the content of a website or an app, where an ad can potentially be placed.
Contract groups: A feature that enables marketers to group multiple private marketplace contracts and assign them across ad groups.
Conversion: The desired action a user takes after being exposed to an ad.
Conversion rate: The percentage of users that engage with an ad and complete an action, which is calculated by dividing the total number of conversions by the number of visitors to a website or media channel.
Cookie: A small file stored by websites on a web user's computer to record data about the user's browsing history.
Cookie mapping: The process of syncing cookies and sharing user IDs from one system to another.
Cookieless: Describes data collection options and audience-targeting methods that don't rely on third-party cookies.
Cost per acquisition (CPA): A pricing model in which an advertiser pays a publisher based on the number of times users perform a specific action.
Cost per click (CPC): A pricing model where an advertiser pays publishers based on the number of times users click on an ad.
Cost per completed view (CPCV): A pricing model where advertisers pay publishers when users view a video ad in its entirety.
Cost per engagement (CPE): A pricing model where advertisers pay publishers each time a user engages with an ad.
Cost per install (CPI): A pricing model where advertisers pay publishers each time a user installs an application.
Cost per landing (CPL): A pricing model where advertisers pay publishers for each individual visit to the advertiser's website.
Cost per mille (CPM): A pricing model where advertisers pay publishers for every thousand ad impressions served.
Cost per point (CPP): A measure of cost-efficiency, typically for television advertising, that equals one rating point or 1 percent of the population in any geographically defined market.
Cost per view (CPV): A pricing model where advertisers pay every time users play or interact with a video ad.
Creative: The actual advertisement served to users to draw attention, communicate a message, or convert a visitor. Creatives can consist of text, images, video, audio, and animated elements.
Cross-device: A scenario in which users move and are converted through two or more devices.
Cross-device attribution: Enables advertisers to track the interactions a user has with an ad across multiple devices and properly credit conversions when users view an ad on one device but convert on another.
Cross-device targeting: Enables advertisers to scale high-value audiences across devices and environments, working in tandem with frequency capping to limit the number of times a user sees an ad across their devices.
CTV advertising: The process of serving video ads on internet-enabled TVs during TV programs.
CTV device: A device that connects a TV to the internet and enables access to content without the need for a cable subscription.
Customer data platform (CDP): A prebuilt system that centralizes customer data from all sources and makes this data available to other systems for marketing campaigns, customer service, and customer experience initiatives.
Customer relationship management (CRM): A technology that stores information a company has about their customers.

d

Data Alliance: A data provider that blank-labels third-party audience data and charges based on a percentage of an ad campaign’s total media cost.
Data management platform (DMP): Collects, processes, and stores large amounts of audience data such as cookie IDs, first-party data, and third-party data, while handling vast quantities of information in real time to better target online ads at specific audiences on a given website.
Data marketplace: An online platform that facilitates the buying and selling of data.
Data onboarding: When advertisers move data from one technology platform to another.
Data-driven marketing: Reaching consumers with advertising that uses information, or data, to help marketers determine the strategies, channels, and audiences that result in their consumers buying a product or service.
Dayparting: A strategy that enables advertisers to schedule and display ads for specific times of day or days of the week to reach audiences more effectively.
De-duplication window: The period of time during which duplicate clicks or conversions are disregarded for attribution in order to filter out user errors.
Deal ID: A unique number in a private marketplace, assigned to an ad buy that enables buyers and sellers to identify and match with one another based on pre-negotiated criteria.
Decisioning: The power advertisers have in programmatic advertising to make decisions on who, where, when, what, and how to spend.
Demand-side platform (DSP): An ad platform that helps advertisers buy ads through real-time bidding exchanges and manage multiple ad exchange accounts in order to optimize bidding processes using a single interface.
Demographic data: Information about a person's age range and/or gender.
Demographic targeting: Targeting audiences based on age range and/or gender.
Deterministic data: Data that is known to be true when linking to an individual and used to identify them across apps, websites, channels, and devices.
Developer Portal: A publicly available website that includes the API reference and other documentation on how to build to The Trade Desk API.
Device: Hardware that is used to consume digital media and that supports digital advertising.
Device ID: A unique string of numbers and letters that identifies an individual smartphone or tablet that can be retrieved by an app.
Digital advertising campaign: A type of marketing plan, or campaign, that is facilitated via online channels like mobile, websites, streaming, and more.
Digital out-of-home (DOOH): An ad environment made up of outdoor ad placements like digital billboards and signs in a variety of locations.
Direct response marketing: A marketing technique designed to elicit an instant response by encouraging prospective customers to take a specific action.
Direct-to-consumer (DTC): The act of selling products directly to people without the use of third-party intermediaries or brick-and-mortar stores.
Display advertising: Advertising in which ads are served in standard, reserved spaces on webpages, generally at the top, middle, side, or bottom.
Dynamic creative: Personalizes advertising by assembling multiple iterations of an ad based on audience, context, browsing data, ad engagement, or historical performance.
Dynamic creative optimization (DCO): Personalizes advertising by assembling multiple iterations of an ad based on audience, context, browsing data, ad engagement, or historical performance.
Dynamic Creative Rules: The guardrails put in place when using dynamic creative optimization to ensure that the correct combination of messages and images are swapped out and shown to the right audience.
Dynamic parameters: Code that advertisers add to images or universal pixels to allow sites to pass specific information from the page about revenue, order size, and any details that may be present on a page based on a user’s activity.

e

eCPM: Measures how much revenue is generated for every 1,000 impressions that are served, and is calculated by dividing a campaign's revenue by the total number of impressions and multiplying that value by 1,000.
EUID: Built for advertisers in Europe and specific to regional regulations, EUID uses data to identify and reach consumers with relevant advertising across channels and devices.
Excess potential: The additional budget an ad group can spend during a day without changing any targeting settings.
Expandable: An online display ad that expands to a larger ad format when viewers scroll over it.
Expressiveness: A measurement of the number of unique bid combinations possible for a strategy that is calculated by using the unique nonzero bid factors applied to each dimension.

f

First-party contract: An agreement that a buyer makes with a publisher to purchase inventory.
First-party data: Data owned and collected on a company's website that a company, brand, or advertiser manages, which includes user behaviors, actions, or interests demonstrated through websites, subscriptions, or social media, including cross-platform data from mobile web or apps or data from the customer relationship management.
First-price auction: An auction in which the winning bidder pays the bid amount regardless of how much higher it is than the second-highest bid.
Flight: Refers to the length of an ad campaign from a set start date to a set end date.
Floor price: The minimum price for a valid bid set by the publisher.
Fold: The bottom of a visible webpage. Above-the-fold ads are positioned so users can view them without scrolling down, while below-the-fold ads are only viewable after users scroll down.
Forecasting: A tool that uses historical data to estimate potential media spend or impressions and potential reach or frequency for an ad group configuration.
Forward market: Buying and selling media in advance so that buyers and publishers can lock in prices for inventory that will become more valuable over time.
Free ad-supported streaming TV (FAST): An advertising model used by TV streaming services where the service or subscription is at no cost and advertising pays for content.
Frequency capping: A method for ensuring that a user does not see the same ad too often by setting a maximum number of times an ad is displayed to the user within a given time period.
Frequency goal: A specified number of impressions to be targeted for a user.
Full-episode player (FEP): Professionally produced, TV-like content that appears on devices across apps and web browsers with commercial breaks.

g

General invalid traffic (GIT): Invalid traffic that can be identified through routine methods of filtration.
Geotargeting: A targeting method that serves ads to users based on their location.
Gross rating point (GRP): A metric that is used to determine how many people within an advertiser's target audience saw an ad. The GRP can be calculated by multiplying reach (expressed as a percentage) by the average frequency multiplied by 100.

h

Hash: A string of characters transformed into an anonymous string of characters.
Header bidding: Inserting a line of code into the header of a webpage so publishers can sell inventory in multiple programmatic auctions at the same time.
Household Extension: Expanding a campaign to every device in a user’s household IP address, which includes tablets, smartphones, and any other device connected to a household’s WiFi network. Generally used by advertisers to deliver targeted impressions to all users in a specific household.
Household graph: Assigns an anonymized identifier for each household and deterministically links all over-the-top devices in the household to that identifier using smart TVs and streaming media players like Apple TV and Fire TV as anchors, which never leave the home.
Household rating: An audience measurement that represents the percentage of American households watching a TV program.

i

Identity Alliance: A performance-enhancing feature that enables marketers to make the most of cross-device targeting by combining all available cross-device vendors into a single graph that provides a more complete picture of each user's device for each impression.
Image pixel: A static tracking tag that contains a piece of HTML code with an invisible image loaded from a tracking domain when a user visits a page.
Impression: A single ad that is served to a user. The ad does not need to be clicked on, only visible. Measuring impressions enables better tracking and improves the effectiveness of a campaign.
In-app ad: An ad served within a mobile application, rather than on a webpage or mobile browser.
In-app event tracking: Enables an advertiser to get a detailed overview of the post-installation activities inside their apps and insights into the way users interact with their apps.
In-banner video ad: A video ad that is displayed within the banner space on a webpage.
In-stream: Ads shown inside video or TV content either before, during, or after the video plays.
In-stream video ad: A video ad that is played directly before, during, or after the video content that a user has requested.
In-view rate: The number of impressions where an ad was in view for a certain period of time.
Incremental reach: A KPI, or goal, for a campaign to focus on maximizing the number of unique viewers beyond those who have already been reached through linear TV, or other channels.
Inferred Brand Intent (IBI): A product that measures conversions that might have been influenced by exposure to ads. If a customer required additional time before making a purchase decision or conversion, IBI can provide insight into what triggered the action.
Insertion order (IO): A formal written agreement between an advertiser and a publisher to run an ad campaign. It includes specifications like the campaign name, flight dates, ad sizes, websites receiving the order, total cost, cost per mille, discounts to be applied, reporting requirements, and possible penalties or stipulations relative to failure to deliver the impressions.
Interest targeting: A tool that improves behavioral audience targeting with pre-built audience categories, such as business and finance, computers and technology, education, and more. This enables AI to identify the most relevant related segments based on lookalike modeling and include them in an audience.
Interoperability: A product or system's ability to work with other products or systems, at present or in the future, in either implementation or access, without any restrictions.
Interstitial ad: An ad served while a user is navigating between different pages or websites, which are generally full-screen overlays that appear during a natural pause in the use of a website or application.
Invalid traffic: Traffic that doesn't come from authentic human sources and involves false clicks or impressions that exaggerate the cost or earnings of online ad efforts.
Inventory contract: A contract that references the individual terms of a specific deal between a buyer (advertiser or agency) and a seller (publisher).

k

Key performance indicator (KPI): A metric that measures the success of an ad campaign by driving performance and delivering results based on primary, secondary, and tertiary KPIs that align with a campaign's high-level objectives.
Koa™: The artificial intelligence that powers our platform. Its algorithm prioritizes and selects the best-performing and most relevant inventory based on a campaign's goals, ensuring the right price is paid per impression.

l

Label: A marker that is attached to a campaign to help keep track of things like tactics, regions, and more.
Last-touch attribution: A type of attribution that gives credit to the last marketing touchpoint before conversion. In campaigns with multiple partners, this means that the partner with the last impression or click before a user completes an action/conversion gets credit.
Linear TV: Traditional TV consumption where users watch a TV program when it airs on its original channel via cable or satellite.
Livestreaming: The process of streaming TV content in real time over the internet.
Local TV: Affiliates of broadcast networks that provide local content as opposed to national content.
Lookalike modeling: A technique that identifies an audience of potential new users based on the known characteristics and behaviors of an audience of existing users. Advertisers can select a specific group of users and have an algorithm compare them to the general population to generate a secondary audience that shares statistically significant characteristics with the original group.
Lookback window: The period of time during which data is collected for attribution credit or reporting purposes. A lookback window set to 30 days would not give attribution credit for conversions or actions until 31 days after that impression is served.

m

Macros: Strings of characters in a creative's code that enable ad managers to tailor their creative settings.
Market mix modeling (MMM): A research technique that helps marketers understand the contribution of marketing and nonmarketing factors (economy, seasonality, weather) to their marketing goals.
Marketing funnel: A model used to describe the path that a customer takes toward the purchase of goods or services from awareness into action, or conversions. Targeting parts of the funnel would have funnel-specific goals, or KPIs.
Marketplace quality: The desirable aspects of inventory, typically used in conversations about ad fraud.
Max bid: The maximum amount an advertiser is willing to bid, including bid factors.
Media planning: The process advertisers go through selecting optimal media strategies to reach their desired audiences that involves the best combination of media channels, mobile, connected TV, etc., to achieve campaign objectives.
Mid-roll: Video ads that play in the middle of video or TV content.
Mobile: Devices that consumers carry with them, such as smartphones and tablets.
Mobile advertising: Ads placed on mobile devices on the web and in-app.
Mobile measurement partner (MMP): An impartial third-party provider that attributes campaigns to different user behaviors, or conversion events, within mobile apps by optimizing app event goals, building and retargeting audience app events, and connecting campaigns to in-app outcomes.
Mobile over-the-top: Refers to television content that is served over the internet and viewed on a mobile device.
Multichannel video programming distributor (MVPD): A subscription service that provides multiple broadcast or satellite television channels either live or on demand.

n

Native advertising: Advertising where ads are formatted to blend in with the design, function, and tone of the page on which they are placed.

o

Omnichannel: Advertising that incorporates all available channels (including mobile, display, native, video, audio, and TV) into a unified strategy and ensures ads are delivered seamlessly and consistently to consumers across channels, devices, and platforms.
On-target percentage (OTP): A metric that measures effectiveness in reaching intended audiences by using third-party measurement partners like Nielsen.
Online video (OLV): Movies, TV programs, or video clips that are streamed from the internet.
Open exchange: A programmatic ad buying and selling marketplace that enables buyers to buy publishers’ inventory through real-time bidding technology and where any user of a supply-side or demand-side platform can conduct media transactions on an impression-by-impression basis.
Open internet: A competitive, privacy-conscious, transparent, and open marketplace of ideas, content, and commerce that is powered by relevant advertising.
OpenPass: A streamlined, universal single sign-on solution that enables a consumer to view content in exchange for their email address, ensuring a frictionless experience when logging in to gated website content across publishers on the open Internet.
OpenPath: A simplified, direct connection to premium publishers that supports an objective, transparent supply path that maximizes value for advertisers and publishers. Not a supply-side platform, OpenPath provides buyers with an alternate efficient path to each impression, cleaning up supply chains by reducing the number of intermediaries required in the real-time bidding process.
Optimization: The process of reviewing what aspects of a campaign are helping to reach the goal then using settings and features to focus spend on the best-performing aspects.
Options TV buy: A negotiated condition whereby an advertiser can cancel a percentage of purchased inventory by preestablished dates each quarter.
Outstream video ad: Video ads shown independently from other video content. These ads load and play once a user has scrolled through a visible portion of the website’s content, such as between paragraphs of a written article.
Over-the-top (OTT): Television content served over the internet rather than through a cable or broadcast provider and using devices that connect to the internet, such as smart TVs and devices like Roku.

p

Personally identifiable information (PII): Data that can be used to identify an exact individual. Examples of PII are full name, phone number, email address, and home address.
Pixel: A piece of code that loads an anonymous cookie every time a new user lands on a website. When a user leaves a site, the cookie continues to track their behavior. Pixels enable retargeting, which means that the same ads might be displayed on other websites that the user visits.
Post-roll: Video ads that play in-stream directly after the video content that the user has viewed ends.
Pre-bid targeting: Targeting that enables advertisers to bid only on traffic that falls within certain parameters. Advertisers can block fraudulent traffic, bid only on ads likely to be in view, or target pages related to relevant contextual categories.
Pre-roll: Video ads that play in-stream directly before the video content that the user has requested begins. Content providers and publishers can provide the option to skip the video, or require users to watch all of it.
Predictive Clearing: Using artificial intelligence to analyze historical clearing prices to find a lower, optimal bid for each impression served in a first-price auction, without impacting the win rate.
Preferred deal: A fixed-price deal between a single advertiser and a single publisher that is accomplished using a deal ID. Enables publishers to offer inventory to a selection of preferred buyers at a fixed price before the inventory is offered at open auction.
Premium distributors: Connected TV (CTV) inventory sources that mirror the look and feel of digital cable or satellite TV providers. CTV ads through premium distributors allow advertisers to access users' registration data and to better target large, scalable audiences. Some premium distributors create and own proprietary content.
Prime time: The block of time during which TV shows are expected to have the largest audience. Typically between 7:30 p.m. and 10 p.m.
Privacy: The act of keeping consumer information anonymized, safe, and unable to be linked to a specific individual, and within consumer control on the internet.
Private marketplace (PMP): An auction that requires an invitation (in the form of a deal ID) to access. Allows advertisers to bid on ad space in real time with a smaller pool of other advertisers that are invited to bid on that publisher's ad space.
Probabilistic: Refers to data that use probability, or a likelihood of something occurring, to link an individual. Made up of individual pieces of data, like IP address or operating system, to identify a user across apps, websites, channels, and devices.
Programmatic advertising: The automated buying and selling of ad inventory using software. Helps advertisers improve performance through data-driven decisions and save time by centralizing the buying experience in a single platform where advertisers can customize the target audience, channels, publishers, geographies, and more with just a few clicks.
Programmatic audio: Digital audio inventory that is available for programmatic purchase.
Programmatic guaranteed (PG): Deals between advertisers and publishers in which the two negotiate a fixed price for ad inventory in advance. This enables advertisers to bid on ad inventory using real-time bidding while being guaranteed a certain number of impressions from the publisher.
Proximity targeting: Targeting customers in real time based on their current location using GPS and mobile network triangulation to understand a user’s location and proximity to a reference point. This allows a user entering a defined geographic area, such as a mall or a retail store, to receive push notifications on their smartphone.
Publisher: A company, website, or entity that owns and provides digital content and makes money selling ad inventory to agencies and advertisers.
Publisher direct: Describes the act of purchasing inventory directly from the publisher.

q

Queries per second (QPS): A metric that indicates the number of requests that a server is receiving each second. It measures the traffic that an ad server, ad exchange, demand-side platform, or supply-side platform can handle.

r

Reach: The total number of unique users who are exposed to an ad. Reach can be a KPI, or goal, for a campaign when focusing on maximizing the percentage of a target audience that is exposed to an ad. Cost per mille will be lower since frequency capping determines how often a user should be targeted.
Real-time bidding (RTB): Refers to the buying and selling of ad impressions in an ad exchange. In RTB, auctions are automated and occur within milliseconds. During this time, ad exchanges invite advertisers to bid on an impression through demand-side platforms, and the winning bid has its ad served.
Recency: An advertising metric that refers to how long it's been since a user saw an ad.
Retail media: A way to buy advertising space that applies data collected from retailers, including loyalty shopper data and purchase history. Can be used by advertisers to target consumers.
Retail media platform: An ad buying technology that retail brands develop to monetize their consumer shopping data and also sell advertising space on their digital channels (e.g., websites, apps).
Retargeting: Targeting ads at users who have previously interacted with a website or an app. Designed to recapture the interest of users who have demonstrated interest in a website or app. This strategy retains existing customers and can convert potential new customers.
Return on ad spend (ROAS): The ratio of total revenue to total ad spend. A measure of campaign effectiveness, it tells advertisers how much revenue they get in return for each dollar they spend on advertising, according to how the marketer defines the value of different conversions.
Return on investment (ROI): The ratio of total revenue to total spend, or money invested. If the revenue is $40,000 and the total media spend is $10,000, the ROI is 4:1.
Rich media: Describes ads that include multimedia features like embedded videos and interactive elements.

s

Scatter TV buy: A media-purchasing strategy that is used by both TV networks and agencies. Used to sell air time at higher ad rates at the last minute as opposed to in a forward market, where TV ad space is prepurchased.
Second-party data: Data collected directly from the partner that owns it. A partner's first-party data that an advertiser gets permission to use. Different from third-party data, which has intermediaries that collect information from several sources and aggregates them to purchase from a data marketplace.
Second-price auction: A type of auction in which the winning bidder pays an amount equal to the second-highest bid plus one cent. A bid of $5.00 over a second-highest bid of $4.50 in a second-price auction means that the winner pays $4.51.
Seed: When a client gives us their first-party data, we use seeds to build lookalike audiences that help expand reach to users with similar online behaviors to a seed audience.
Segment: A group of users targeted as an audience because they share a defining characteristic, such as gender, region, or an action that they’ve taken online. Also called "audience segment."
Sell side: Describes companies in the advertising industry that sell ad space online, including publishers and supply-side platforms.
Smart TV: A TV set with a built-in connection to the internet.
Sophisticated invalid traffic (SIVT): A form of invalid traffic that requires advanced detection and analytics tools to identify.
Spend: The amount of money a client spends on advertising efforts in our platform.
Streaming: The act of viewing video content or TV programs through an internet connection.
Streaming device: Sticks, dongles, and cubes through which media is sent from the internet to a home TV in a continuous "stream."
Subscription video on demand (SVOD): A type of monetization where users pay a certain fee upfront to get access to content.
Supply path optimization (SPO): Used by advertisers to look at all the ways they buy media on the internet and remove any redundant intermediaries and streamline their access to supply.
Supply-side platform (SSP): A technology company that enables publishers to manage and automate the selling of their ad inventory so they can generate the maximum amount of revenue per ad impression.

t

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR): A European privacy and security law that regulates how organizations target or collect data related to residents of the European Union.
The Trade Desk: We're a technology company that empowers ad buyers to create, manage, and optimize data-driven digital ad campaigns through our self-service, cloud-based platform.
The Trade Desk Edge Academy: Our online platform that provides education on programmatic advertising and allows learners to earn certifications.
Third-party data: User data that a single company collects on various platforms, but does not own, and sells to other companies, advertisers, or brands. Includes data on users who tend to frequent sites, and an advertiser might pay to use that data for a campaign.
Trading desk: A sub-unit within an agency that optimizes the purchase of programmatic ads to offer clients increased value from each impression.
Traffic: Refers to the number, or volume, of visitors to a website or specific webpage.
TV Quality Index (TVQI): An aggregate score from 1 to 100 that quantifies the quality of connected TV and video impressions. Derived from the weighted scores of six criteria (content, addressability, playback type, device type, content duration, market type) across three pillars of quality (content, ad experience, signals).

u

Unified ID 2.0 (UID2): An open-source ID framework that publishers, advertisers, and digital advertising platforms can use to establish the identity of a user across the open internet, while also offering users transparency and privacy controls.
Universal pixel: A tracking tag that contains JavaScript and enables management of multiple processes with just one pixel added to an entire website. Universal pixels are dynamic and help capture every website visitor no matter what page they're on. They also enable segmenting all website visitors based on the different pages they visit.
Upfront TV buy: A commercial investment for the upcoming year based on a negotiated cost per mille and guaranteed demographic as dictated by Nielsen.
User-generated content (UGC): Content that consumers (rather than brands) create and publish. Content created by users is usually not as regulated.

v

Value-based buying: A way to buy media rooted in the return on the media cost (real-world results) instead of the focus on the price of media itself.
Video ad-serving template (VAST): The most widely adopted Interactive Advertising Bureau standard ad script, tag, or code that is produced by ad servers that allows them to share basic information (data) with video players on a publisher's site. While it does not offer robust metrics or interactivity options, it is the most widely accepted tag type by publishers.
Video completion rate (VCR): The percentage of video ads that are played in their entirety. Used as a performance metric.
Video on demand (VOD): Video content that users can stream or download whenever they want after it airs.
Video player–ad interface definition (VPAID): An Interactive Advertising Bureau standard ad script, tag, or code that is produced by ad servers that allows them to share robust metrics like viewability, completion rate, and click-through rate. Not as widely available, it offers interactivity and can report on more advanced metrics. Ad servers generate a VPAID tag and video ad unit on the publisher's side that needs to be VPAID-enabled.
View-through conversion: When a user views an ad served to them, it goes to the advertiser’s site organically (without clicking the ad) and converts via the conversion action.
Viewability: A metric for whether an ad has been viewed by a user (rather than only served on a webpage and not viewed). Calculated by dividing viewed impressions by tracked impressions.
Viewable cost per mille (vCPM): The estimated percentage of cost per mille (CPM) impressions that are in view. Calculated by dividing the estimated CPM by the number of impressions that were in view.

w

Walled garden: Refers to an organization that keeps its technology, information, and user data to itself with no intention of sharing it. A closed ecosystem operated by people within the ecosystem, without involvement from outside organizations. Often used to describe Google, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram.
Win: The count of impressions won through auctions.
Win rate: A percentage that measures the total number of impressions won divided by the total number of bids.

y

Yield management: Adjusting the price of a product in response to market factors, like demand or competition. In programmatic advertising, the cost of impressions will go up or down based on the number of advertisers bidding for that impression.