The words on the quote
29 terms that decide money. Each one is here because a buyer or a publisher has to make a call that turns on it — whether a CPM is expensive, whether an invalid-traffic deduction is fair, whether a link was the one that was paid for — so each entry says what to do about the word, not merely what it stands for.
How ads are priced
The models a quote arrives in, and what each one puts at risk for whom.
- Flat feeSponsorship · Flat rate · Fixed placement
- One price for one placement — a newsletter send, a sponsored post, a podcast read — regardless of how it performs.
- CPMCost per mille · Cost per thousand impressions
- The price of one thousand ad impressions — the standard unit for buying reach rather than outcomes.
- CPCCost per click
- A price paid per click rather than per view, shifting delivery risk to the publisher.
- CPACost per acquisition · Cost per action
- A price paid per completed action — a sale, a signup, a booked demo — rather than per click.
- CPLCost per lead
- A price paid per qualified lead — a form fill, a trial start, a booked call.
- Rate card
- A publisher's published prices by format — the starting point of a negotiation, not the end of one.
- ProgrammaticRTB · Real-time bidding
- Buying ad impressions through automated auctions rather than dealing with a publisher directly.
What gets counted
The numbers an invoice rests on, and where two honest parties count differently.
- Impression
- One instance of an ad being served — not necessarily seen, and not necessarily by a person.
- Click-through rateCTR
- Clicks divided by impressions, expressed as a percentage.
- Open rate
- The share of a newsletter's recipients recorded as having opened it — an increasingly unreliable number.
- Viewability
- Whether an ad was actually rendered in a position where a person could have seen it, usually defined as 50% of pixels for one second.
- Invalid trafficIVT · Bot traffic · Ad fraud
- Clicks and impressions that did not come from a real person acting on the ad — bots, prefetchers, repeat automation, and traffic from somewhere other than the booked property.
- UTM parameters
- Tags appended to a destination URL so the advertiser's own analytics can attribute the visit.
- PostbackS2S · Server-to-server tracking
- A signed server call from the advertiser back to the tracker saying a conversion happened.
- Attribution window
- How long after a click or view a conversion still counts as caused by that ad.
- Promo codeDiscount code · Vanity code
- A code unique to one placement, used to attribute sales where a click cannot be tracked.
Terms of the deal
The clauses that decide who is right when a campaign goes sideways.
- Insertion orderIO
- The signed document that fixes what will run, where, when, at what price, and what happens if it does not.
- Escrow
- Money held by a third party from the moment a campaign is booked until the agreed work is confirmed delivered.
- Make-good
- Replacement inventory a publisher gives when a campaign underdelivers against what was promised.
- Lead time
- How much notice a publisher needs between booking and the ad running.
- Retention periodLink retention · Post duration
- How long the publisher commits to keep a placement live after the paid window ends.
- Category exclusivity
- A commitment that the publisher will not run a competitor's ad for an agreed period.
- Share of voice
- The proportion of available ad slots in a property or issue that one advertiser holds.
- Frequency cap
- A limit on how many times one person is shown the same ad in a period.
Trust and disclosure
What has to be provable, and what has to be said out loud.
- Verification
- Proving that the person selling a placement actually controls the property it will run on.
- ads.txt
- A public file at the root of a domain listing who is authorised to sell that site's ad inventory.
- Sponsored disclosureAd disclosure · FTC disclosure
- The label that tells a reader the placement was paid for — "Sponsored", "Paid partnership", "Ad".
- Dofollow linkNofollow · rel=sponsored
- A link that passes ranking signals, as opposed to one marked so that search engines ignore it for ranking.
- Media kit
- The pack a publisher sends advertisers: audience size, demographics, formats, rates and past campaigns.
What these terms cost in practice is on the price index and the budget planner.