FAQs about Advertising Networks

An Advertising Network (also called an online advertising network or ad network) is a company that usually serves as a broker between web site publishers and advertisers. Larger ad networks aggregate sites into general categories so that they can offer advertisers targeted buys. Google Adsense, Tyroo are some of the leading ad-networks.

An ad-network is a collection of online advertising inventory. Ad networks serve advertising on your website and share advertiser revenue for qualified clicks each time your site visitors clicks on ads.
Inventory is the creative space acquired on a website. It comes in various dimensions such as 728*90, 120*240, 468*60, 300*250 and many more. These are measured in pixels.
Online advertising inventory comes in many different forms. This inventory can be found on websites, in RSS feeds, on blogs, in instant messaging applications, in adware, in e-mails, and on other sources. Some examples of advertising inventory include: banner ads, rich media, text links, and e-mails.

Click through rate (CTR) means the percentage of impressions that resulted in a click through. It’s calculated by dividing the number of clicks by the number of impressions.

Cost per click (CPC) - is the online payment models by which advertisers pays for each click through made on their advertisement.

Creative - The technology used to create a banner or other type of advertising material. Common creative types include GIF, JPEG, Java, HTML, Flash or streaming audio/video.

Page View - Occurs when a user’s browser requests a web page.

Cookies - A process by which a small file is sent from a web server to the local user’s computer to store information unique to that browser. Often used by advertisers to keep track of the number and frequency of advertisements that has been shown to a visitor or by sites to help them determine the number of unique visitors.