The Pillars of Performance: 12 Terms You Need to Know

Audience: A classification of a user group that has some common characteristics or attributes such as demographic data, habits, interests, behaviors or more. These segments are used to target individuals when delivering online advertising campaigns.

Branding Channel: Also known as ‘Branding Tactics.’ A channel that is used primarily for branding and visibility. Branding channels vary per marketer.

Channel: An advertising channel is any application on a digital device (e.g. web browser, gaming app, email, social, video player, and more) on which companies market products and services. The amount of channels available to marketers has grown enormously with the advancement of digital devices to embellish traditional media advertising.

Engagement channel: A channel that is effective for generating various types of responses from users, such as a click,  form-fill,  purchase, a search, and more.

Execution: The act of creating and serving an ad. It can refer to the ad itself or the campaign as a whole.

Exposure: The concept of showing a user an ad.

First-party data: First-party data is generated when a cookie is placed on a website by the owner (publisher) so that the owner can recognize return visitors to the website. This can also include other data owned by a brand/client, which can come from onboarding first-party information on the brand/client’s CRM database. (Interactive Advertising Bureau of Canada)

KPI: Stands for ‘Key Performance Indicator.’ Each KPI is a set of quantifiable measures that a company or industry uses to gauge or compare performance in terms of meeting their strategic and operational goals. (Investopedia)

Offline data: Offline data refers to data used for data-driven marketing on digital marketing channels and which originates from offline sources. Offline data can be the owner’s data – from CRM data files – or data bought from offline data vendors. Offline data offered by vendors can be retail transactions from credit card networks, aggregated offline catalog transactions, syndicated loyalty-card data and more. Regardless of where offline data comes from, the onboarding process removes personally identifiable information, leaving the population that is targetable as a group, but anonymous. (The Digital Marketing Glossary)

Response: An action taken by a user based on the exposure to an ad.

Third-party data: Third-party data is generated when a cookie is placed on a website by a third-party, such as an ad server or data provider. Information from these cookies is collected and can be used to place users in one or more segments, based on their online activity. These cookies are used to target advertisements and segment audiences (Interactive Advertising Bureau of Canada).

Viewability: Viewability is an online advertising metric that tracks the opportunity for an impression to be seen by viewers. The Media Ratings Council’s standard for a viewable desktop display impression is a minimum of 50% of pixels (of the digital ad) in view (within the browser) for a minimum of one second. For example, if an ad is loaded at the bottom of a webpage but a user doesn’t scroll down far enough to see it, that impression is not considered viewable. (Digiday, 2014)