Ad Network, advertising network serves advertising (usually in the form of text links, banners links or video) on its members’ websites and shares the advertiser revenue with each publisher. The actual advertisers may have options to purchase advertising in a variety of ways including pay-per-click, impressions, pay per action, etc.

Ad server technology and services place advertisements on online inventory. Typically ad servers place ads, count them, choose ads that will make the advertiser the most money and monitor the progress of the various campaigns.

Affiliate Network A “middle man” or intermediary media company that connects advertisers directly with publishers (website owners) .

• What do the affiliate get out of it? Access to advertisers and new merchants reporting tools and easy / quick payment options.

• What the merchants get out of it? Access to a large base of sites that may offer any number of different advertising models include PPL, PPS, PPA or any of the other acronyms on this list depending on the particular network.

Contextual advertising advertisements that are served by an automated system based on the particular content being displayed by a media user (like a website visitor ).

CPA – Cost Per Action see PPA

CPL – Cost Per Lead

CPC - Cost Per Click

Demographic targeting – trying to pinpoint or direct specific advertisements or marketing campaigns at a specific subset of the population that share a desired characteristic (like “young male gamers”)

Interactive Marketing – Marketing that makes an effort to start a conversation as opposed to being completely transaction based.

Mobile marketing – marketing to users of mobile phones and other handheld portable devices

Online advertising inventory Anything online that advertising can be sold on, this includes websites, rss feeds, instant messaging applications, and software that also displays advertisements (called adware).

PPA – “Pay Per Action“ Advertising model where you pay whenever a particular action is completed (like a lead, a sale, a new user signup, etc)

PPS – “Pay Per Sale”

RSS – “Really Simply Syndication”

SEO – “Search Engine Optimization“ aims at increasing the natural search ranking of a particular website, recently though this term has expanded to include activities that increase the visibility and traffic to a particular website without directly paying for the traffic (for example, most people agree that PPC falls outside of the term SEO)

SEM – “Search Engine Marketing” – Marketing methods aimed at increasing the traffic and visibility of a particular website. This is a broad term that can encompass SEO and PPC as well as SMM, SMO and community building / viral marketing initiatives (I know lots of buzz words, but hey they’re all defined right here.

SMM – “Social Media Marketing” – Activities aimed at getting traffic and delivering messages to social media sites and communities.

SMO – “Social Media Optimization” – Modifying a website and its content to improve the opportunities to gain / warrant traffic and promotion from social media sites and communities.

SMS messaging – “Short Message Services” – sending short text messages across mobiles phones and other portable electronic devices. (PDA, personal media players, etc)

Social Media – online technology and practices that enable people to communicate with each other. Common examples include message boards, blogs, social networks, news and video sharing sites.

Social Network – common use of the term as referring to an online community ) A website that enables, encourages, or is built around the ability for its users to interact with each other. Most famous example would be myspace, where users can blog, put up pictures, videos, have “friends” message each other and do a host of other tasks.

Vertical market (also referred to as “vertical”) A similar group of customers or businesses that engage in commerce based on a very specialized or specific set of needs. Usually a vertical market is a subset of a larger industry. — Think niche market, like small-mid size independent hotel owners would be a vertical.

Web Analytics measurement of how visitors to a website or web application behave. This commonly includes return / unique visitors, navigation paths, what website or search engine referred them there, any available demographic information (like geography based on ISP) among many other detailed metrics.

XML Extensible Markup Language a standard web language used for formatting data in a usably way. Technical info here.

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