Creatives refer to an advertisements text or copy.

Advertising people are funny. They call magazines “books,” television “broadcast,” and advertisements “creative.” While the idea of calling ads “creative” may vary from ludicrously hopeful to woefully inadequate, when someone from the advertising world tells you they’ve been doing some great creative lately, what they really mean is “ads.”

On the Web, direct response usually refers to a clickthrough on an ad banner.

Many advertisers will audit the effectiveness of a campaign based on the number or percentage of direct responses. While this can lead to the hard-bargain, cost-per-click deals that almost entirely ignore the branding value of web advertising, evaluating response is often the best way to an honest audit of the product, advertising message, and ad placement.

The term “eyeballs” is a quaint reference to the number of people who see, or “lay their eyes on,” a certain advertisement. When buying radio time, marketers refer to “ears” instead of “eyeballs.”

If anyone who isn’t a network engineer mentions “hits” to you, they’re probably trying to pull the cyberwool over your eyes. Hits are the individual requests a server answers in order to render a single web page completely. The page document itself, the various images on the page, any other media files embedded there – each of these items represents a separate hit. In other words, the more GIFs used in a page, the higher the hit count – so while hits may be a good indication of poor page design, they won’t tell you much about traffic.

“Impression” is industry parlance for an actual ad viewed.

For example, there’s an ad on this page, so you’ve just accounted for at least one impression. Why thank you! Of course, it’s next to impossible to know if someone actually sees a given advertisement on the Web. After all, a user might not scroll down far enough to see the ad, could be surfing with images turned off, or might press Stop before the ad is fully loaded into the browser window. This can make impression-counting on the web a thorny endeavor, but then the same goes for other media as well (who knows whether people are actually watching the commercial or off in the kitchen getting another beer?). Short of guessing, you’re probably better off slaughtering a goat and examining its entrails.

An Interstitial is a web advertisement that appears on its own page, typically in between “content” pages. Interstitials are typically not clickable (or are linked to the page you’d originally hoped to reach), but are usually buffered by a similar, smaller advertisement on the subsequent content page that allows you to investigate the advertiser’s product. By mid-1997, interstitials were at the top of every advertiser’s want list, but have lost popularity since then.

Banners are a basic unit of advertising on the web.

They were pioneered by GNN and HotWired back in the frontier days of 1994 and are now nearly ubiquitous, appearing in all sorts of shapes, sizes, and locations. You can probably see one right now at the top of the page.

A conversion is a marketing term describing when a perspective client fulfills an intended action.

For example, when you click on an advertisement, you have committed to a trial. If you create an account or share information, you’ve been acquired. If you buy something or commit fully to the product, you’ve made a conversion.

Directly related to trial and acquisition

Have you ever seen an advertisement that implored you to “Call now!”? Of course you have. Call to action is a term for the copy in an ad that implores the viewer to do something specific in response to the advertisement. “Click here” and its variants are the most popular calls to action in online advertising.

A pageview – a single screen of content – refers to the sum total of what a user sees in a browser window. Before frames came along, pageviews were a hell of a lot easier to explain and to track:the page you saw was one simple page of content. But frame-based pages are comprised of a whole mess of documents. The Webmonkey frontdoor brings together three different pages:the frameset itself, the content page in the top frame, and the ad called up in the bottom frame. Yet in the language of pageviews, these three pages add up to a single pageview.