Navigating the world of digital advertising and marketing can be challenging with its specialized terminology and fast-evolving practices. This comprehensive glossary aims to clarify key terms and concepts, providing clear and concise definitions to help marketers, advertisers, and anyone interested in digital marketing better understand the industry's jargon.

Active ID: A unique digital identifier associated with an individual device for tracking, targeting, and optimizing ad delivery and performance.

Above The Fold (ATF): Refers to any content shown when a page loads. This limited space is reserved for premium content and messaging to drive the user further down the page.

Ad Exchange: A digital marketplace allowing advertisers to buy and sell ad inventory on the open internet. Publishers offer their ad space, and advertisers and ad networks can bid on the inventory in real-time auctions.

Ad Format: The size of an ad (width by height), usually measured in pixels.

Ad Group: A container within a campaign that holds one or more creatives and their associated targeting settings. Each ad group targets a specific Persona and can be configured independently for budget, bidding, and audience strategy.

Advertiser: The brand or business whose products or services are being promoted. In Agility, an Advertiser is a required entity that must be created before launching campaigns. Agencies may manage multiple Advertisers under a single account. See How To Add an Advertiser.

Attribution: Determines how much credit is given to each touchpoint that leads a prospect to a conversion. Attribution identifies the steps a user takes through the buyer's journey and determines the value of each step.

Auction: An online marketplace allowing real-time bids on various publishers' digital ad inventory.

Audience Library: The section within Agility's Persona tab where you create, manage, and organize all of your audience segments. Audiences in the library can be layered together into Personas for targeting. See Audience Types.

Behavioral Targeting: Uses browsing history and other user data to determine which advertisements would be most relevant to place in front of a user on a given website.

Bid: Offer placed by an advertiser in a digital auction to claim an impression.

Brand Building: Marketing efforts aimed at increasing awareness, trust, and positive sentiment for a brand. Typically focused on long-term value rather than immediate conversions.

Budget: The amount an advertiser will spend in a period.

Buyer Capture: A campaign moment focused on converting users who have already shown interest or intent. Buyer Capture campaigns typically use retargeting and lower-funnel channels to drive action from engaged audiences.

Buyer Creation: A campaign moment focused on generating awareness and interest among new audiences. Buyer Creation campaigns use upper-funnel channels to introduce your brand and build consideration.

Channel: The medium used to deliver ads, such as display, video, audio, or connected TV.

Clicks: The number of times users clicked on an ad. Often used as a basic engagement metric.

Click-through Rate (CTR): The percentage of clicks advertisers receive on their ads or links per number of impressions.

Companion Banner: A static display ad that appears alongside an audio or video ad. Most audio ad placements support a companion banner that shows on screen while the audio plays, giving listeners a visual reference and clickable element.

Completion Rate: The percentage of video or audio ad plays that were watched or listened to in full. A higher completion rate indicates stronger audience engagement with your creative. Formula: Completions ÷ Impressions

Connected TV (CTV): Television sets connected to the internet through smart TV apps, streaming devices (Roku, Apple TV, Fire Stick), or gaming consoles. CTV allows advertisers to serve video ads during streaming content. CTV viewers cannot click ads, so campaigns are typically optimized for awareness and brand recall.

Contextual Advertising: Placing advertisements on web pages that closely relate to the on-page content. (e.g., Inserting an ad for luggage on a travel site or blog.)

Conversion Rate: A measurement of how many users take a desired action, such as making a purchase, clicking through an ad, or filling out a form. It is a measurement of the success or failure of a marketing campaign.

Conversion Tag: A tracking pixel or code snippet placed on your website that fires when a user completes a specific action (such as a purchase, sign-up, or form submission). In Agility, conversion tags are added during campaign setup to track user activity after ad exposure. See What is a Tracking Tag.

Contribution Margin After Marketing (CMAM): The amount of revenue left over after covering direct costs and all marketing expenses.

Cost-Per Action (CPA): The average cost of a previously defined user action. (e.g., time spent on a website, interaction with a specific link, a conversion.)

Cost-Per Mille (CPM): The cost a marketer will pay for every one thousand impressions of a digital ad.

Cost Per High Intent Site Visit: The average cost to bring a high-intent user to your site. Formula: Spend ÷ High-Intent Site Visits

Cost Per Site Visit: The average cost to generate any visit to your site, regardless of intent. Formula: Spend ÷ Total Site Visits

CPC (Cost Per Click): The average cost per click on an ad. Formula: Spend ÷ Clicks

Cost Per Sales Activation: The cost to generate a user action that signals sales intent. Formula: Spend ÷ Number of Sales Activations

CRM Audience: An audience type built from your own customer data (emails, phone numbers, names, addresses). CRM Audiences are uploaded as CSV files and matched to device IDs for targeting. Ideal for re-engaging existing customers or running loyalty campaigns. See CRM Audience.

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): The cost associated with acquiring a new customer, including all marketing and sales expenses. It includes all resources required to convince a customer to buy the service.

Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV/LTV): The predicted net profit attributed to the entire future relationship with a customer.

Data Management Platform (DMP): A technology platform used for collecting and managing data, primarily for digital marketing purposes.

Day-Parting: An ad group targeting setting that controls which hours of the day and days of the week your ads are eligible to serve. Day-parting lets you concentrate spend during peak engagement windows. See Adjusting Ad Group Targeting Settings.

eCPM (Effective CPM): The effective cost per thousand impressions, calculated by dividing total spend by total impressions and multiplying by 1,000. Unlike standard CPM (which is a bid price), eCPM reflects what you actually paid on average. Useful for comparing cost efficiency across campaigns or channels. Formula: (Total Spend ÷ Total Impressions) × 1,000

Excess Potential: The leftover budget that ad groups have access to spend if no targeting settings are changed.

First-party Data: Data that a company gathers directly from its users. This data is gathered through user interactions with the company's website, social channels, and other direct engagement points. Data can include demographics, purchase history, and preferences and is voluntarily shared by users.

Flight: The total duration of an ad campaign from start to finish.

Forecast Simulation: A modeling tool within Agility that lets you project potential revenue, efficiency, and incremental impact before launching a campaign. Simulations use your business inputs and assumptions to estimate outcomes across a defined time period. See Simulation for details.

Forecasting: Using historical data to estimate the potential spend, impressions, reach, and frequency for a campaign or specific ad group.

Frequency: Metric measuring the rate at which ads are served to the same target audience. Balancing frequency with messaging and reach allows for increased brand recall and recognition.

Frequency Cap: An ad group targeting setting that limits the maximum number of times your ad can be shown to the same device per hour. Lower caps spread impressions across more unique users; higher caps increase exposure to the same users for stronger recall. See Adjusting Ad Group Targeting Settings.

Geofencing: Serves relevant ads based on the user's current location and proximity to stores, restaurants, and other services. Fences can be drawn around precise locations to observe trends and identify target audiences.

Household: Groups of individuals who share a common physical address or reside together.

High-Intent Traffic: Website visitors who show strong commercial intent, such as those viewing pricing pages, returning frequently, or interacting with product features.

Image Tag: A simple 1×1 pixel tracking tag that fires when a user loads a specific page. Image tags are the most basic form of conversion tracking in Agility and are useful for tracking single page-load events like a thank-you or confirmation page. See Setting up Image Tags.

Impression: A single instance of an advertisement on a web page or app. When a user views a web page or interacts with an app where an ad is displayed, it counts as one impression. Impressions indicate that the ad was loaded and appeared on the user's screen.

Incrementality: A measurement approach that isolates the additional impact directly caused by your advertising, beyond what would have happened without it. Agility's Simulation tool uses incrementality metrics to estimate the true lift from your campaigns.

Industry Benchmark: A reference point derived from aggregated performance data across similar advertisers in your category. Agility uses industry benchmarks in Simulations to help you evaluate whether your assumptions are realistic.

Initiative: A guided workflow in Agility that helps you plan, build, and launch multi-channel campaigns from a single setup process. Initiatives let you define personas, select channels, allocate budgets, map creatives, and set goals — then automatically generate the full campaign structure. See Initiative for details.

Intelligence: A feature within Agility that provides AI-generated insights about your brand, competitive landscape, and market trends. Intelligence pulls data from multiple sources to help inform your media strategy and campaign planning.

Key Performance Indicator (KPI): An important metric used to measure the success of an organization, team, or campaign. KPIs are chosen and prioritized based on their overall performance impact. (e.g., Revenue Growth Rate, Conversion Rate, Customer Lifetime Value, and ROI.)

Last Touch: An attribution model that assigns 100 percent of the conversion credit to the final ad interaction before the conversion occurred.

Lookalike Audience: An audience segment made up of users who share behavioral or demographic characteristics with your existing customers but have not yet interacted with your brand. Lookalike audiences help expand reach to new prospects who are statistically likely to convert.

Marketing Efficiency Ratio (MER): A measure of marketing effectiveness, typically calculated as the ratio of customer lifetime value (CLTV) to customer acquisition cost (CAC).

Media Spend: The portion of total spend allocated to paid media buying across channels such as display, video, and social.

Moment: In Agility's Initiative workflow, a moment represents a stage in the buyer's journey. Campaigns are organized into two moments: Buyer Creation (upper funnel) and Buyer Capture (lower funnel). Each moment has its own channel selections and budget allocation.

Multichannel: Uses more than one channel to execute campaigns. This is done manually on a channel-by-channel basis. Content has little differentiation or personalization and is published on every channel with rudimental segmentation. This results in quantity over quality.

Omnichannel: A customer-centric, data-driven approach to advertising focused on customer behavior, preferred channels, and lifecycle stage. With this data, resonant messaging can be sent to the right channel at the right time. All channels are integrated so the customer has a unified and consistent experience across platforms.

Pacing: The distribution and timing of ad impressions or budget spend over a specified period, ensuring that campaign goals are met smoothly and efficiently without exhausting resources too quickly or too slowly. (e.g., The campaign is now pacing to 100%.)

Pending Sales: Sales that have been initiated but not yet finalized or verified, such as unconfirmed purchases.

Persona: A data-driven representation of a typical or ideal customer used to guide targeting, messaging, and creative strategy. In Agility, Personas are reusable audience definitions that include behavioral, contextual, and demographic segments. Each ad group must have a Persona assigned for the campaign to launch.

Persona Cluster: A group of related Personas that share common characteristics or targeting strategies. Clusters help organize and manage multiple Personas within an advertiser, making it easier to coordinate targeting across campaigns.

Pipeline Value: The projected revenue from leads or opportunities generated by a campaign that have not yet converted.

Programmatic Advertising: Automated buying and selling of digital advertising space allowing for real-time bidding on online inventory and dynamic ad insertion across the open internet. Allows for precision targeting of segmented audiences.

Reach: The number of unique individuals who saw your ad at least once during a specific timeframe.

Real-Time Bidding (RTB): An automated process of buying and selling ad inventory through real-time auctions. Ad buyers bid on an impression in real time, and if the bid wins, it is immediately shown on the website. The entire process occurs before a website's loading.

Realized Sales: Confirmed purchases attributed to your campaign activity, typically verified through post-click or post-view tracking.

Retargeting: A strategy that serves ads to users who have previously visited your website or interacted with your brand but did not convert. Retargeting keeps your brand visible to interested users as they browse other sites. In Agility, retargeting is typically achieved by building a Website Audience from pixel events and including it in a Persona. See How to Exclude Converted Users from Targeting for related workflows.

Return On Ad Spend (ROAS): A metric that measures the revenue generated for every dollar spent on advertising. Calculating and keeping track of ROAS gives insights into the effectiveness of an ad campaign.

Revenue Growth Rate (RGR): The rate at which a company's revenue grows over a specific time.

ROI (Return on Investment): The overall profitability of campaign spend. Formula: (Revenue - Spend) ÷ Spend

Sales Activation: An individual user action that signals buying intent, such as starting a checkout or submitting a lead form.

Sales Activation Value: The total value generated from users who performed sales activation behaviors.

Sales Activations: The count of user actions that indicate high purchase intent or engagement with sales-driving features.

Simulation: See Forecast Simulation.

Site Visit: A single user session on your site, often initiated by clicking an ad or link.

Spend: The total amount of money used for advertising, including bids won through programmatic platforms.

Supply Side Platform (SSP): An AdTech software platform that allows digital publishers to sell ad space in automated auctions. Publishers use SSPs to manage and optimize their display, video, and native ads. SSP advertising helps publishers monetize their websites.

Traffic: The total number of visitors to your website, regardless of their behavior or intent.

Universal Tag: A JavaScript-based tracking tag that captures detailed user behavior on your website, including page views, button clicks, form submissions, and purchase events. Universal Tags are more flexible than Image Tags because they can track multiple event types from a single installation. See Setting up Universal Tags.

Urgency Signals: In Agility Intelligence, urgency signals are prioritized alerts that highlight items requiring your immediate attention, such as competitor activity changes or market shifts. Each signal is tagged as high or medium priority.

Urchin Tracking Module (UTM): A code attached to a URL to track and analyze the effectiveness of digital marketing campaigns. UTMs allow marketers to monitor and measure various campaign metrics, such as clicks, conversions, and traffic sources. UTM parameters typically include values for parameters such as source, medium, campaign, term, and content, which identify the source of traffic.

Value Created: The total measurable impact of a campaign, including sales, lead value, and brand exposure metrics aligned with business goals.

Viewability: A metric that measures whether an ad was actually seen by a user, not just served. An ad is typically considered viewable if at least 50% of its pixels are in the browser viewport for at least one second (display) or two seconds (video). Higher viewability rates indicate better ad placement quality.

Walled Garden: A closed ecosystem of company data, hardware, software, and services. Google and similar companies make sure their data is inaccessible from the rest of the open internet, resulting in monopolies of digital user information.

Website Audience: An audience type in Agility built from pixel events fired on your website. When a Universal Tag or Image Tag tracks user behavior (such as a purchase, page view, or form submission), those events can be turned into a Website Audience for retargeting or exclusion. Website Audiences must be created in the Audience Library before they can be used in Personas. See How Personas, Audiences, and Campaigns Work Together.

Win Rate: The percentage of bid requests where your ad won the auction and was served. A low win rate may indicate your bids are too low for the available inventory, while a very high win rate could mean you're overbidding. Formula: Wins ÷ Total Bids

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