Digital Marketing Vocab Quiz 3

Paid social

Sponsored content or ads on a social platform that a brand pays to distribute beyond its organic reach, usually with targeting controls.

Organic social

Unpaid content a brand posts to its own social accounts, distributed based on the platform's algorithm rather than ad spend.

Reach

The number of unique people who saw a piece of content, as distinct from impressions, which count repeat views.

Frequency

The average number of times each person in your reach saw the ad. Too low and nothing registers; too high and you are paying to annoy people.

Creative testing

Systematically running variations of hook, format, message, and offer to find what works. As platforms automate targeting, creative becomes the main lever a marketer still controls.

Creative fatigue ★

The decline in performance when the same audience has seen an ad too many times, visible as rising CPMs and falling click-through on unchanged creative.

Social search ★

The growing behavior of using TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, or Reddit as a primary search engine, particularly for product research, restaurants, and how-to queries.

Influencer marketing

Engaging individuals with established audiences to promote a product through endorsements and mentions, typically for payment, product, or commission.

Creator tiers ★

The rough size bands used in planning — nano, micro, macro, and mega — which trade reach against engagement rate, cost, and audience trust.

Micro-influencer

A creator with a following larger than an average person's but well short of a celebrity's, often outperforming larger accounts on engagement and trust per dollar.

UGC (user-generated content)

Content — photos, videos, reviews — created by real customers or by creators specifically for a brand's own use, rather than produced by the brand itself.

Creator whitelisting ★

Running paid media through a creator's own handle so the ad appears to come from them rather than the brand. TikTok calls its version Spark Ads; Meta calls them partnership ads.

Usage rights ★

The contractual terms defining how long, where, and in what ways a brand may use creator-produced content, separate from the right to simply post it organically. The most commonly missed line in a creator contract.

Material connection disclosure

The FTC requirement that creators clearly disclose a paid or gifted relationship with a brand (e.g., #ad) whenever it could affect how audiences view their endorsement.

Programmatic advertising★

The automated buying and selling of ad inventory through software, with placement decided per impression rather than negotiated in advance.

DSP (demand-side platform) ★

The system a buyer uses to purchase inventory across many publishers and exchanges from one interface, applying audience and budget rules.

SSP (supply-side platform) ★

The system a publisher uses to make its inventory available to buyers and maximize what each impression earns.

Real-time bidding (RTB) ★

The auction running in the milliseconds a page loads, deciding which buyer's ad is served to that specific user on that specific impression.

Private marketplace (PMP) ★

An invitation-only programmatic auction where a publisher offers selected inventory to selected buyers, trading some scale for quality and control.

CTV (connected TV) ★

Streaming television inventory bought programmatically, with digital targeting and measurement applied to a screen that behaves like traditional TV.

Viewability ★

Whether an ad actually had the opportunity to be seen — enough pixels on screen for enough time — as opposed to merely being served.

Walled garden ★

A platform that keeps its data, inventory, and measurement inside its own ecosystem, so performance cannot be independently verified or compared against other buys.

Campaign brief

The document telling everyone building a campaign what the objective is, who it targets, what it must say, what it cannot say, and how success will be judged.

UTM parameters

Tags added to a URL identifying the source, medium, and campaign that

drove a visit, so traffic can be attributed correctly in analytics. Only

useful if named consistently from the start.

Social commerce

A subset of e-commerce involving social platforms, where discovery, recommendation, and often checkout all happen inside the social experience.

Digital shelf ★

The complete set of a product's online presence at retail — search placement, imagery, ratings, pricing, and availability across every retailer where it's sold.

Buy Box ★

The default purchase option on a marketplace listing with multiple sellers. Losing it effectively removes you from the sale even though your listing still exists.

Agentic commerce ★

Purchases researched, compared, and increasingly completed by AI agents acting on a shopper's behalf. It shifts part of the job from persuading a person to being legible and transactable to a machine.

Retail media network (RMN) ★

An advertising platform run by a retailer (Walmart Connect, Amazon Ads,

Target Roundel) that sells ad placements using the retailer's own first-

party shopper data.

Sponsored products ★

The dominant on-site retail media format: paid product listings appearing alongside or above organic results in a retailer's search and category pages.

On-site retail media ★

Ads running on the retailer's own site or app, reaching shoppers at the moment of active purchase intent. Tends to harvest demand that already existed.

Off-site retail media ★

Ads using the retailer's shopper data to reach the same audience elsewhere — CTV, social, the open web. Weaker on last-click return, stronger at finding buyers new to the brand.

Closed-loop attribution ★

Measurement made possible when the same company controls both the ad exposure and the purchase data, allowing exposure to be tied directly to a sale without cookies.

New-to-brand (NTB) ★

The share of attributed sales coming from shoppers who had not bought the brand in a defined prior window. The metric separating real growth from harvesting demand you already had.

Incremental ROAS (iROAS)★

Return measured against a holdout group rather than against attributed sales, isolating revenue that would not have happened without the ad. Almost always lower than the number on the dashboard