Glossary

The trade’s vocabulary, and this book’s, in one place. Terms specific to Promovolve are marked ⊛.

Advertiser — the party with something to sell and no attention; buys impressions. In this book, usually a small business with a landing page.

Bid shading — bidding below your true value to avoid overpaying in a first-price auction. An entire software industry exists to do this; second-price auctions make it pointless.

Campaign — an advertiser’s standing order: creatives + daily budget + CPM bid + targeted content categories.

Clearing price — what the winner actually pays, as opposed to what they bid. In Promovolve: quality-adjusted second price, clamped between the floor and the winner’s bid.

CPM — cost per mille: the price of a thousand impressions. The unit all bids and prices are quoted in.

Creative — the ad itself: images, copy, layout; the artifact readers see. One campaign may run several. In Promovolve a creative is a fluid layout, not a fixed-size image.

CTA — call to action; the “come do the thing” page or button. ⊛ In Promovolve’s event vocabulary, the CTA event is a tap-through from the expanded magazine to the advertiser’s landing page.

CTR — click-through rate: of the readers who saw a creative, the share who clicked it. ⊛ Here a “click” is opening the magazine — the expand.

Demand — the buying side: which campaigns want which pages, at what price. “Registering demand” = a campaign declaring the categories it bids on.

Dog-ear (fold) ⊛ — the reader’s corner-fold gesture that bookmarks an ad in their own browser. Free for the advertiser, invisible to learning, strongest quality signal the system has.

Fill rate — the share of ad slots that actually serve an ad. An unfilled slot earns nothing.

First-price / second-price auction — pay-what-you-bid versus pay-what-was-needed-to-win (just above the runner-up). Second price makes honest bidding the safe strategy.

Floor (price) — the publisher’s minimum acceptable price for a slot. Too low invites near-free clearing in thin competition; too high kills fill. ⊛ Promovolve measures floors per content category instead of asking the publisher to guess.

Impression — one person seeing one ad once. The atom of the business: counted, priced, paid for.

Inventory — publisher-side supply: the slots (attention) a publisher has to sell.

Landing page — the advertiser’s own destination page, where a reader lands after tapping through. ⊛ In Promovolve it is also the source the ad is generated from.

Line item — in traditional ad servers, a hand-configured delivery contract (dates, sizes, targeting, price). Promovolve has none.

Margin — the platform’s percentage cut of gross spend; the rest is publisher earnings.

Pacing — making a daily budget last the whole day instead of being spent by 9 a.m.

Publisher — the party with readers and costs; sells impressions. In this book, usually a small content site.

RTB (real-time bidding) — conventional ad tech’s model: an auction per impression, run in the ~100ms a page takes to load. ⊛ Promovolve replaces it with periodic auctions whose results are cached.

Settlement — the bookkeeping that turns a day of impressions into money owed (advertiser), money earned (publisher), and margin (platform).

Slot — a rectangle on the page the publisher rents out. In Promovolve, a div with dimensions.