• Ad network A technology platform that serves as a broker between a group of publishers and a group of advertisers. They help advertisers buy available ad space/inventory across multiple publishers.
• Ad exchange A digital marketplace that enables advertisers and publishers to buy and sell advertising space, often through real-time auctions. They're most often used to sell display, video and mobile ad inventory.
• Ad server Ad tech that is used by publishers, advertisers, agencies and ad networks to manage and run online advertising campaigns. Ad servers are responsible for making instantaneous decisions about what ads to show on a website, then serving them. On top of that, an ad server collects and reports data (such as impressions, clicks, etc.) for advertisers to gain insights from and monitor the performance of their ads.
• Bidstream The broader data set generated by real-time bidding (RTB) auctions — won, lost or passed over — across vast swathes of biddable online audiences.
• Consent management A process that allows a website to meet privacy regulations such as GDPR or CCPA by obtaining a visitor’s consent to collect their data through cookies.
• Customer data platform Known by its abbreviation CDP, this type of platform collects real-time data from across a variety of touchpoints and structures it into individual, centralised customer profiles.
• Data clean rooms An instance that lets a company connect data with partners without having to send the data around.
• Data lakes A centralised repository allowing the storage and analysis of all structured and unstructured data at any scale.
• Data-management platform A DMP stores, organises and analyses customer segment and ad campaign data from a variety of sources to improve targeting.
• Data marketplace An online transactional location or store that facilitates the buying and selling of data. As many businesses seek to augment or enrich internal data sets with external data, cloud-based data marketplaces are appearing at a growing rate to match data consumers with the right data sellers.

• Demand-side platform A piece of software brands/agencies use to purchase advertising in an automated fashion. DSPs are most often used to help them buy display, video, mobile and search ads.
• Direct advertising Advertisers working directly with a publisher to purchase advertising space on a website or app. They negotiate the price and pick the placing, the date the ad will run and for how long the ad will be shown to the publisher’s readers.
• First-party data Behavioural data collected by observing customers as they browse your website or app or visit your ecommerce store.
• FLoC data FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts) is a method that uses machine learning and relies on the browser to generate cohorts or groups of thousands of people for targeting. An algorithmic process inside the browser builds cohorts based on the sites people have visited in recent days, the content of pages they viewed or other factors. This is exclusive to Google Chrome, but makes up ~75% of browser usage.
• Header bidding Header bidding is the process by which multiple advertisers participate simultaneously in a digital auction to win ad space on your website. This auction occurs on every page load, as well as any time an ad unit refreshes.
• IAB TCF 2.0 data IAB Europe, in partnership with IAB Tech Lab, launched the TCF (Transparency and Consent Framework) 2.0. TCF v2.0 seeks to increase consumer transparency and choice, digital property management based on consent and compliance and industry collaboration that centers on standardisation.
• Identity graph A database that stores all identifiers that correlate to individual customers. You could have the same customer in your eCommerce software, CRM, email marketing tool and ad platform. An ID graph will process the data from all tools and stitch it into one profile.
• Identity resolution The practice of creating a unified customer profile by incorporating data from across devices and touchpoints.
• Lookalike modeling The process of identifying users who look and behave like your audiences to expand your pool of targetable users.

• PII (Personally Identifiable Information) PIII is any data that can be used to identify a specific individual. Mailing or email addresses and phone numbers have most commonly been considered PII, but technology has expanded the scope of PII considerably. It can include an IP address, login IDs, social media posts or digital images. Geolocation, biometric and behavioural data can also be classified as PII.
• Programmatic advertising “Programmatic” ad buying typically refers to the use of software to purchase digital advertising, as opposed to the traditional process that involves RFPs, human negotiations and manual insertion orders.
• Second-party data First-party data that passes through a second set of hands — essentially, someone else’s first-party data.
• Segment A grouping of users based on shared characteristics across any number of criteria.
• SSP (Supply-Side Platform) A piece of software publishers use to sell advertising in an automated fashion. SSPs are most often used to help them sell display, video and mobile ads.
• Third-party data Data bought from outside sources that did not originally collect the data.
• Universal ID A user identifier created by an adtech consortium/company to provide a shared identity to identify the user across the supply chain without syncing cookies. Most importantly, it isn’t restricted to third-party cookies. Unlike cookies that are based on probabilistic matching, many Universal IDs are created on the basis of deterministic matching.
• User profiles Unique profiles created from the combination of individual behaviour patterns and data around interests, intent and context.
• Zero-party data Data a customer intentionally shares with you via registration forms, surveys, preference selections and other explicit data-capture tactics.