The terms you will meet when buying or selling performance traffic, in one place.
- CPC · cost per click
- A pricing model where the advertiser pays each time a user clicks an ad. CPC suits campaigns that measure success by traffic to a landing page, and it moves the risk of low engagement from the advertiser to the publisher.
- CPM · cost per mille
- A pricing model where the advertiser pays for every thousand impressions, whether or not anyone clicks. CPM is common for reach-oriented campaigns and for formats where the view itself is the unit, such as display and video.
- CPA · cost per action
- A pricing model where the advertiser pays only when a defined action happens, such as a registration, deposit, install or purchase, confirmed by the advertiser's tracking. CPA shifts most of the performance risk to the traffic side.
- eCPM · effective cost per mille
- Revenue or cost expressed per thousand impressions regardless of the pricing model actually used. Publishers use eCPM to compare CPC, CPM and CPA demand on the same scale.
- Push traffic
- Ads delivered as notifications to users who subscribed to a website's or app's notifications. Push ads are short, appear outside the page, and are used mostly for direct-response offers.
- Native advertising
- Ads that follow the look of the surrounding content, typically a headline, image and short description placed among editorial articles or recommendations.
- Pop-under and tabs traffic
- Ads that open a landing page in a new tab or window behind the current one. The format delivers high volume and is used for offers whose landing page converts on arrival.
- In-app advertising
- Ads shown inside mobile applications, as banners, full-screen interstitials or rewarded placements where the user opts in to an ad in exchange for an in-app benefit.
- S2S postback
- A server-to-server message an advertiser's tracker sends to the traffic platform when a conversion happens. It carries the click identifier, so the conversion is attributed to the source that produced the click without relying on browser cookies.
- Invalid traffic (IVT)
- Impressions or clicks that do not come from a genuinely interested human: bots, data-centre traffic, click injection, hidden placements or accidental clicks. Invalid traffic is filtered before billing and is not paid to publishers.
- OpenRTB
- The industry protocol, maintained by the IAB Tech Lab, that supply and demand platforms use to exchange bid requests and bid responses in real-time bidding auctions.
- Self-serve ad platform
- A platform where advertisers create and manage campaigns, and publishers add and monitor traffic sources, themselves, without going through an account manager for every change.