As a B2B marketer, you have seen demand generation go from art to (more of) science at your company over the past few years. You have had to learn new terms and concepts, from standard marketing automation to advanced lead scoring tactics, from Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) to Sales Accepted Leads (SALs).
You have been helped along this journey towards more marketing technology (or Martech) by your platform providers, industry analysts, and a whole new category of marketing services and consulting firms. And now with the rise of AdTech, many of you realize th
at you need to start connecting your outbound marketing programs into your Martech stack, which requires a whole new lexicon.
Feeling a little bit overwhelmed by the range of new marketing program and platform options that are available to you? Just keep our Martech meets AdTech Glossary handy. We promise you that you will feel much more prepared, as you walk into your next team meeting!
Key Players in the Ad Tech Ecosystem
Advertiser – A party that buys display ads through a real-time-bidding (RTB) platform, or an ad network (such as Google Display Network).
Demand Side Platform (DSP) – Also called buy-side platform, or real-time bidding (RTB) platform. Used by advertisers to bid for ad placements and buy ads. Kwanzoo works with several RTBs and DSPs
Publishers – They own websites, create content for their sites, and offer ad placements on their sites to ad networks, exchanges, RTBs and DSPs – who then bid to place their ads on their sites.
Real-time bidding (RTB) platform – A technology platform where advertisers can upload ad creative, and bid for ads to be served (with caps on pricing, frequency or how many ads served each day/week/month, and more).
Onboarding platform – A platform that aggregates a large pool of 3rd party cookies. These are web markers on individuals (consumers) or professionals (B2B) that are matched via a blind match to an email address or direct mail (physical address) and used for serving targeted ads to a specific user through an RTB or DSP.
Data Management platform (DMP) – A platform that brings together a range of 3rd party data that can again be used to identify specific pools of users with common characteristics (demographic, firmographic, interests, purchase intent) and the data can be used to target these sets of users through an RTB or DSP to serve ads.
Types of Outbound Marketing & Advertising Programs
Site Retargeting – Serve ads to people who have already visited your site and left without filling out a form. You would set a cap on how many ads are shown per user per month, and how mny ads are shown in any specific time period (e.g. each day / week)
Email Retargeting – Serve display ads to the advertiser’s own database of email addresses. Ads are served to users whose emails are matched via 3rd party cookies by an onboarding partner.
Email Retargeting with 3rd Party Lists – Serve display ads to a list of users from an email list bought or rented from a 3rd party vendor. Ads are still served to those matched via 3rd party cookies to these 3rd party (or rented) emails by an onboarding partner.
CRM Retargeting – Serve display ads to prospects on a list of physical addresses. Think of this as a direct mail campaign, except it’s online (digital) delivery.
Account-based (ABM) Advertising – Serve ads to users at specific target B2B accounts. Uses IP-address matching to identify target accounts, and users at those accounts, who are served ads.
Display & mobile Prospecting – Display and mobile campaigns specifically designed for prospecting or sourcing new leads. May include audience targeting using data segments defined inside a DSP, with the targeting data coming from a data management platform (DMP) such as BlueKai. Such prospecting programs can involve either real-time bidding (RTB) across the web, or a direct buy on a specific 3rd party publisher website.
Persona-based ads – Target specific ad creative to an individual user based on past behavior, a specific target B2B company, or to a group of prospects based on their company’s industry, IP domains (e.g. hp.com, ibm.com), employee size, company revenues.
Personalized display (Off & On Website) – Marketers typically only think of personalizing the experience on their own website. This broadens it out to think of personalized interactive content (ads) both on and off the website.
Publisher lead programs – Marketing programs in which leads are bought from a publisher at a fixed price. Also often called “Content Syndication Program”. You would hand out a landing page URL or link to a white paper, an e-book, an analyst report. Your partner drives traffic to get forms filled on your landing page. Or alternately you send over an content asset, and they send back to you an excel file with leads.
Video & Content Marketing – Serving video ads and content offers, such as offers for whitepapers or ebooks. Get prospects to engage with the video, and then complete an action such as a form fill.
Planning Your Outbound Programs and Campaigns
In-House (Email or CRM) List – Your own in-house list, or specific segments of your in-house list, of just emails, or emails + physical address data (First Name, Last Name, Address Line1, City, State, Zip)
3rd Party List – List of email or direct mail addresses purchased or rented from a 3rd party organization, and used in an email or CRM retargeting program.
Target Account Lists – List of target accounts. Typically broken up into mid-market and enterprise segments. For each target account, you will want to track the account’s IP Domain and the geo location – city, state, country. This way you can deploy ABM advertising programs that are more effective.
Ad Serving Duration (Campaign Duration) – Length of the ad serving portion of your program, in months. Your program as a whole may take longer, since it also requires up-front planning, building out ad creative, and post-campaign review and reporting.
In-Email Engagement – Often measured by clickthrough rate, but includes any tactics used to increase user engagement with your emails, such as running rich media polls inside emails to improve nurture campaigns.
Lead Staging – Staging leads generated from display or retargeting on another platform before posting to your MAP/CRM to eliminate test and junk leads.
Lead Enrichment – Enriching leads with additional data fields such as IP, geo or business data from 3rd party data providers such as D&B/Netprospex, ZoomInfo, Neustar, and others.
Outbound Marketing Programs (or Programs) – A specific program (e.g. site retargeting, email retargeting) will result in multiple ad campaigns being deployed. In the Ad Tech world, a campaign generally maps to a specific ad size (e.g. 728×90 size leaderboard ads served across the top of web pages). Each program will have an associated ad (serving) platform and an RTB/DSP platform used to buy the media and secure the ad placement where the ad is shown to the prospect or user. The content within the ad comes from the ad (serving) platform.
Campaign Budgeting
CPM – Cost per thousand ad impressions served.
Impression Fee – Fees charged by Kwanzoo to serve ad impressions, which are a component of your overall media costs.
Media Buying – Buying ad impressions through a real-time bidding (RTB) platform or 3rd party publisher to serve ads.
Media Fees – Fees to be paid by you the advertiser, to third party publisher websites who show your ads. They are paid through RTB platforms and ad exchanges.
Performance Metrics
Ad Engagement – First click on an ad (banner ad) or front screen click on an in-banner form ad.
Cost per lead (CPL) – Average cost of media fees per lead generated by your campaign.
Campaign ROI – Return on investment from your campaign, as a percentage of spend or as the net $value realized in new leads, increased site visits & nurture touches.
Direct Leads – Leads captured directly due to your campaign, when prospects fill out a form either in the ad (in-banner forms) or on the landing page after clicking on your ad.
In-Banner Form Leads – Leads captured from prospects directly filling out in-banner form ads. Also called Direct Leads.
Marketing qualified lead (MQL) – A lead that has been qualified as a valid lead by the marketing department based on lead quality, expressed interest or lead score. Considered more likely to convert/more valuable to sales than an unqualified lead.
Nurture touches through display – Interactions on ads by known prospects in your marketing automation database or anon users. Each nurture touch reveals insights re: the prospect to your sales team, helps close more deals.
View Through Leads (or VT conversions) – Leads from users who view your ad, and then later visit your site and convert within 30 to 90 days (typically).
View Through Site Visits – Tracks users who view your ad, and then later visit your site. They may or may not fill out a form, but you’d at least know how many came as a result of a display program.
We hope you found our Glossary useful. Did we forget something? Or is there a different term you have heard for what’s on our list? Please write to us in the Comments section below. We will try to keep this post updated!