MP INSIGHTS · REFERENCE

The programmatic & ad tech glossary.

The 45 terms that come up most often in programmatic conversations, defined in one to three plain sentences each and alphabetized for quick lookup.

July 202645 termsVendor-neutral

Programmatic advertising runs on shorthand. Deal types, standards files, measurement methods, and platform names all get compressed into acronyms, and most explanations assume you already know them.

This glossary defines 45 of the terms that matter most. The definitions are vendor-neutral, one to three sentences each, and written for marketers who are smart but new to the plumbing.

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A

Ad exchange
The marketplace where programmatic bids clear. An exchange runs the real-time auction between sell-side platforms and buy-side platforms and matches each impression to the winning bid. Google AdX, OpenX, and Magnite operate at this layer.
Ad server
The system that makes the final call on which ad is delivered, then serves the creative and counts the impression. Publishers and advertisers each run their own; Google Ad Manager and Freewheel are the most common on the sell side.
Addressable TV
Television advertising targeted and delivered at the household level through cable, satellite, or streaming infrastructure. Two homes watching the same program can see different ads.
ads.txt
A public text file a publisher posts listing every company authorized to sell its inventory. Buyers check it to confirm a bid request comes from an approved seller, which makes domain spoofing detectable. It is an IAB Tech Lab standard introduced in 2017.
ATT (App Tracking Transparency)
Apple's consent framework, introduced with iOS 14.5, that requires apps to ask permission before tracking a user across other companies' apps and websites. It sharply reduced the identity signal available in mobile advertising.
Attention metrics
Measurement that estimates how much genuine human attention an ad received, using signals such as time in view, player size, and interaction, often calibrated against eye-tracking panels. Providers include Adelaide, DoubleVerify, and IAS. Attention goes a step beyond viewability, which only confirms the ad had a chance to be seen.
Attribution
See MMM, MTA, and incrementality, the three main families.
The practice of assigning credit for a conversion to the marketing that preceded it. Every attribution approach is a model built on assumptions, so mature teams read several methods side by side.

B

Brand lift
Measurement of how ad exposure changed awareness, recall, consideration, or purchase intent, usually through surveys that compare exposed audiences with a control group. It suits campaigns whose goal is a change in attitude before any purchase happens.

C

CDP (customer data platform)
Software that unifies a company's own customer data, such as site behavior, purchases, and CRM records, into persistent profiles the marketing team can activate. A CDP manages known customers, while a DMP historically managed anonymous segments.
Clean room
A secure environment where two companies match and analyze their datasets without either side seeing the other's raw, personally identifiable records. 65% of enterprise advertisers now use them (IAB State of Data, 2024). Providers include Snowflake, AWS, LiveRamp Safe Haven, and Google Ads Data Hub.
Contextual targeting
Targeting based on the content of the page or stream where the ad will appear, with no reliance on the identity of the person viewing it. Because it needs no cookies or personal data, it has regained importance as identity signals decline.
CPM / CPC / CPA
The three basic pricing models. CPM is cost per thousand impressions and is the standard unit for buying media. CPC is cost per click, and CPA is cost per action, which prices against a completed outcome such as a sale or a signup.
CTV (connected TV)
Streaming video inventory watched on a television screen, through a smart TV or a plugged-in device. It is bought programmatically like digital video and watched like linear television.
Curation
The packaging of inventory, data, or both into ready-made deals, typically by an SSP or a specialist curator, and sold through a deal ID. Buyers get a shortcut to vetted supply or audiences; the trade-off is an added fee and one more intermediary in the path.

D

DMP (data management platform)
A platform that collects and organizes audience data, historically anonymous cookie-based segments sourced from third parties, for use in programmatic targeting. As cookies fade, much of the DMP's traditional role has shifted to CDPs, clean rooms, and identity graphs.
DOOH (digital out-of-home)
Digital billboards and screens in public places, from roadside boards to transit, elevator, and gas-station displays. A growing share is bought programmatically.
DSP (demand-side platform)
The buyer's bidding tool. A DSP evaluates impressions across exchanges, applies the advertiser's targeting and bid logic, and buys at scale. The Trade Desk, Amazon DSP, Google's DV360, Yahoo, and StackAdapt are widely used examples.

F

First-party, second-party, and third-party data
First-party data is what a company collects directly from its own customers. Second-party data is another company's first-party data, acquired through a direct partnership. Third-party data is aggregated from many outside sources and sold at scale, and it is the category most disrupted by privacy regulation and cookie loss.
First-price auction
Bid shading is the buy-side response: algorithms trim each bid toward the expected clearing price so buyers avoid systematic overpayment.
The auction model where the highest bid wins and pays exactly what it bid. Programmatic moved from second-price to first-price auctions industry-wide during the late 2010s.
Frequency capping
A limit on how many times one person is shown the same ad within a set period. Reliable cross-device capping requires an identity graph, because per-browser caps undercount how often a person actually sees the ad.

H

Header bidding
A technique that lets multiple SSPs compete for the same impression in parallel before the publisher's ad server makes its final selection. Introduced broadly around 2015, it replaced the sequential waterfall and lifted publisher yields; Prebid.js is the open-source standard.

I

Identity graph
RampID is LiveRamp's identifier, built on one of the most widely used commercial identity graphs.
A database that links the many identifiers belonging to one person, such as email addresses, device IDs, cookies, and CTV IDs, so advertisers can recognize that person across screens for targeting, frequency capping, and measurement.
Incrementality
A ghost bid is a deliberately lost bid that creates the control group for this kind of test.
Measurement designed to establish whether an ad actually caused a conversion or the customer would have converted anyway. Holdout groups and geo-based experiments are the standard methods, and the discipline is widely treated as the gold standard for proving causation.
IVT (invalid traffic)
Impressions generated by anything other than a real person with a genuine opportunity to see the ad, including bots, spoofed apps, and hijacked devices. Verification vendors classify and filter it, and the industry distinguishes general IVT from harder-to-detect sophisticated IVT.

L

Lookalike audience
An audience modeled to resemble a known seed group, usually a brand's existing customers. The platform identifies shared traits in the seed and extends targeting to statistically similar people at scale.

M

MFA (made-for-advertising)
Sites built chiefly to capture ad spend, marked by extreme ad density, minimal original content, and heavy reliance on purchased traffic. They can look efficient on a CPM basis while delivering little real value, so many buyers exclude them using classifications from firms such as Jounce Media.
MMM (marketing mix modeling)
A top-down statistical method that estimates each channel's contribution to sales from aggregate data over time. It requires no user-level tracking, which has driven its resurgence; Meta's Robyn and Google's Meridian are open-source frameworks, and modern implementations refresh weekly instead of annually.
MTA (multi-touch attribution)
A bottom-up model that splits conversion credit across the individual touchpoints in a user's path. It depends on user-level tracking, so signal loss on iOS and CTV has narrowed the situations where it works well.

O

OLV (online video)
Video advertising served on websites and in apps, in-stream inside a video player or out-stream within page content. In common usage the term covers desktop and mobile video, while CTV refers to video on the television screen.
Open auction
The open programmatic market in which any eligible buyer can bid on an impression. It offers the widest reach and the least control over context among the deal types.
Open web
Contrast with walled garden.
The universe of independently owned websites and apps outside the large closed platforms. It is where most programmatic infrastructure operates and where transparency standards such as ads.txt and sellers.json apply.
OTT (over-the-top)
Video delivered over the internet without a cable or satellite subscription. OTT describes the delivery method and CTV describes the device, so a stream watched on a phone is OTT, and the same stream on a smart TV is both OTT and CTV.

P

Performance Max
Kokai is The Trade Desk's AI bidding platform, a buy-side example of the same platform-owned automation.
Google's automated campaign type, which buys across Google's owned surfaces, including Search, YouTube, Display, Gmail, and Maps, toward a goal the advertiser sets. Targeting, bidding, and placement decisions are largely automated, with less granular control and reporting than a hand-built campaign.
PMP (private marketplace)
Negotiated deals of every type are referenced by a deal ID, the code a buyer enters in the DSP to access the agreed inventory.
An invitation-only auction in which curated buyers bid on curated inventory, usually above a negotiated price floor. It sits between the open auction and fully guaranteed deals in both control and commitment.
Preferred deal
A fixed-price arrangement that gives one buyer a first look at a publisher's impressions before they go to auction. The buyer can pass on any impression, and neither side commits to volume.
Privacy Sandbox
Google's set of browser-side advertising technologies, including Topics and Protected Audience, designed to support targeting and measurement with less cross-site tracking. Google announced in July 2024 that Chrome would keep third-party cookies, and in 2025 it began phasing out several Sandbox APIs.
Programmatic guaranteed (PG)
A deal with fixed price and fixed volume, executed through programmatic pipes. It is the programmatic equivalent of a traditional direct buy, with automation in place of manual insertion orders.

R

Retail media network
Commerce media is the broader umbrella, extending the same model to non-retail transaction businesses such as travel and delivery platforms.
Advertising sold by a retailer on its own properties and powered by its purchase data, spanning on-site sponsored placements, off-site audience extensions, and in-store screens. Amazon, Walmart, and Kroger run prominent examples.
RTB (real-time bidding)
OpenRTB is the IAB Tech Lab specification that standardizes how bid requests and responses are structured.
The mechanism at the core of programmatic: each impression is auctioned to eligible bidders in roughly 100 milliseconds, before the page finishes loading.

S

sellers.json
The SupplyChain object (schain) completes the audit trail by recording every intermediary a bid request passed through.
A public file each SSP or exchange publishes listing the sellers it represents, so buyers can see who is actually behind every bid request. Paired with ads.txt, it lets a buyer audit the selling chain end to end.
SPO (supply path optimization)
The buy-side practice of consolidating spend onto fewer, cleaner routes to the same inventory, cutting duplicate hops and intermediary fees. ISBA's 2020 supply chain study measured an average of 31 supply paths per impression, which is the redundancy SPO exists to reduce.
SSP (supply-side platform)
The publisher's yield tool. An SSP packages, prices, and monetizes a publisher's inventory across many buyers at once. Magnite, PubMatic, Index Exchange, and OpenX are major examples.

U

UID2 (Unified ID 2.0)
An open-source identity framework that builds an advertising identifier from hashed, encrypted email addresses, developed as a post-cookie ID for the open web. It originated at The Trade Desk and is now supported across a broad set of platforms.

V

Viewability
The measure of whether an ad had the opportunity to be seen. Under MRC standards, a display ad counts as viewable when at least half its pixels are on screen for at least one continuous second, with a two-second threshold for video.

W

Walled garden
Contrast with open web.
A closed platform that sells its own inventory, keeps user-level data inside, and limits independent measurement. Google, Meta, and Amazon are the usual examples, and their scale shapes how the rest of the market trades.
?

Common questions

What is a DSP in advertising?

A demand-side platform (DSP) is the software an advertiser or agency uses to buy digital ad impressions across many exchanges and supply sources through real-time bidding, from a single interface. It applies the buyer's audience, budget, and bidding rules to each auction.

What is the difference between a DSP and an SSP?

A DSP is the buyer's tool for bidding on impressions across many sources. An SSP, or supply-side platform, is the publisher's tool for offering inventory to those buyers and maximizing its yield. They sit on opposite sides of the same programmatic auction.

What is made-for-advertising (MFA) inventory?

Made-for-advertising sites are low-quality pages built mainly to carry ads rather than to serve readers, often heavy with auto-refreshing units and cheap sourced traffic. They absorb budget while returning little real attention, which is why buyers screen and exclude them from clean supply paths.

What is incrementality in advertising measurement?

Incrementality is the additional outcome a campaign causes above what would have happened anyway, isolated with a holdout or test-and-control design. It is a stricter standard than last-click attribution, which credits conversions that might have occurred without the ad.

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