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AAA : American Academy of Advertising. An association of educators, students, and former educators in advertising.

AAAA : American Association of Advertising Agencies. An association whose members are ad agencies.

ANA : Association of National Advertisers. An association whose members are advertisers, i.e., companies that advertise their products or services.

Above the fold: Ad placement on the top half of a page before a viewer would need to scroll down.

Access log: An access log is a list of all the requests for individual files that people have requested from a Web site. These files will include the HTML files and their imbedded graphic images and any other associated files that get transmitted. The access log (sometimes referred to as the "raw data") can be analyzed and summarized by another program.

In general, an access log can be analyzed to tell you:

• The number of visitors (unique first-time requests) to a home page
• The origin of the visitors in terms of their associated server's domain name (for example, visitors from .edu, .com, and .gov sites and from the online services)
• How many requests for each page at the site, which can be presented with the pages with most requests listed first
• Usage patterns in terms of time of day, day of week, and seasonally Access log keepers and analyzers can be found as shareware on the Web or may come with a Web server.

Ad: For Web advertising, an ad is almost always a banner, a graphic image of a designated pixel size and byte size limit. It is usually animated GIF. An ad or set of ads for a campaign is often referred to as "the creative." Banners and other special advertising that include an interactive or visual element beyond the usual are known as rich media.

Ad network: Using a combination of state-of-the-art technology and media expertise, ad networks help advertisers and publishers make web advertising work by successfully centralizing the planning, execution, control, tracking and reporting for high-impact, online media campaigns. Ad networks leverage technology to create solutions that help advertisers and publishers unleash the power of the Internet for branding, selling products, and building relationships with customers. A network of sites is usually grouped by vertical-sector and premium-branded sites, with which to serve ads for efficient targeting, reach and reporting.

Ad request: When an ad is requested from the server. This happens when someone visits a Web page that has an advertisement and the surfer's browser asks the server to deliver the ad. For a variety of reason the ad may not always be successfully served.

Ad rotation: Ads are often rotated into ad spaces from a list. This is usually done automatically by software on the Web site or at a central site administered by an ad broker or server facility for a network of Web sites. For example, Latitude90, a leading ad sales firm, provides an ad serving and tracking service, called adMonitor, for the network of independent sites that it sells impressions and sponsorships for.

Ad space: An ad space is a space on a Web page that is reserved for ads. An ad space group is a group of spaces within a Web site that share the same characteristics so that an ad purchase can be made for the group of spaces.

Ad view: An ad view, synonymous with ad impression, is a single ad that appears (usually in full view without scrolling) on a Web page when the page arrives at the viewer's display. Ad views are what most Web sites sell or prefer to sell. A Web page may offer space for a number of ad views. In general, the term impression is more commonly used.

Adnorm: A measure of readership averages for print publications over a two-year period, used as a baseline for comparing specific ads to an average.

Advance premium: A premium provided to a consumer, on the condition of some later purchase.

Advertiser: The manufacturer, service company, retailer, or supplier who advertises their product or service.

Advertising: There are a variety of definitions, with subtle but important distinctions. While the general public frequently views advertising as encompassing all forms of promotional communication, most advertising practitioners limit it to paid communications conveyed by a mass medium. The latter definition distinguishes advertising from other forms of marketing communication, such as Sales Promotion, Public Relations, and Direct Marketing.

Advertising allowance: Money provided by a manufacturer to a distributor for the purpose of advertising a specific product or brand.

Advertising budget: Money set aside by the advertiser to pay for advertising. There are a variety of methods for determining the most desirable size of an advertising budget.

Advertising elasticity: The relationship between a change in advertising budget and the resulting change in product sales.

Advertising plan: An explicit outline of what goals an advertising campaign should achieve, how to accomplish those goals, and how to determine whether or not the campaign was successful in obtaining those goals.

Advertising research: Research conducted to improve the efficacy of advertising. It may focus on a specific ad or campaign, or may be directed at a more general understanding of how advertising works or how consumers use the information in advertising. It can entail a variety of research approaches, including psychological, sociological, economic, and other perspectives.

Advertising specialty: A product imprinted with, or otherwise carrying, a logo or promotional message. Also called a promotional product.

Advocacy advertising: Advertising used to promote a position on a political, controversial or other social issue.

Affiliate: A Web site that partners with an online merchant by including links to promote the merchant's products or service. In exchange, the affiliate receives a commission, flat fee, or other incentive for all valid transactions it refers to its partner that generate a sale, a sales lead, or some other user action.

Affiliate marketing: Affiliate marketing is the use by a Web site that sells products of other Web sites, called affiliates, to help market the products. Amazon.com, the book seller, created the first large-scale affiliate program and hundreds of other companies have followed since.

Affiliate solutions providers: Online companies that provided solutions to merchants seeking to provide affiliate programs. Affiliate solutions provide also enable affiliates to review and join prescreened affiliate programs and manage their participation in such programs.

Affirmative disclosure: A disclosure of information in an advertisement, required by the Federal Trade Commission or other authority, that may not be desired by the advertiser. This information frequently admits to some limitation in the product or the offer made in the advertisement.

Agency commission: The agency's fee for designing and placing advertisements. Historically, this was calculated as 15 percent of the amount spent to purchase space or time in the various media used for the advertising. In recent years the commission has, in many cases, become negotiable, and may even be based on some measure of the campaign's success.

Agent log: A server record that shows which programs have contacted a server.

AIDA: Stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action. This is a historical model of how advertising works, by first getting the consumer's attention, then their interest, etc.

Aided recall: A research method frequently used to determine what consumers remember about an advertisement they have seen or heard.

Ala carte services: Rather than provide all advertising services for one price, an agency may provide only the services that a client wishes to purchase.

Alert: A short, unexpected, e-mail focused on a single topic, typically encouraging the recipient to pick up an incentive located on an unlinked page of you Web site.

ALT tag: Code that tells your browser to show specific text while a graphic is loading. When a banner is downloading, the ALT text can be reinforcing the ad's message with a simple line of text.

AltaVista: AltaVista is the most popular A Tour of the Internet, Where to Go...Search Engine on the Internet. It has indexed the contents of over 31 million Web pages found on 476,000 servers. It has also indexed four million articles from 14,000 Usenet news groups. In early May 1997, AltaVista reported nearly 30 million accesses each weekday. In addition to full-text searches, AltaVista can also search graphic images and tell you who is linked to your own Web pages. AltaVista's search robot, known as Scooter, can look at and collect data from three million Web pages per day. Its indexer, Ni2, indexes one gigabyte of data per hour. In addition to AltaVista's free public search service, its parent company, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) sells AltaVista for individual use (downloaded to your computer, it can search everything on your hard disk) and for enterprise intranet. The AltaVista product offerings are described at DEC's AltaVista Web site.

Algorithm: A formula or model executed by a computer program.

Alias: An alternate e-mail address to which mail is forwarded.

Amaya: Amaya is the Web browser (somewhat similar to the Netscape and Internet Explorer browsers) that was developed by members of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) as a practical tool as well as a testing ground for W3C ideas. Amaya includes an HTML editor as well as a viewer and can be downloaded freely from the W3C Web site for use in either Linux or Windows 95/NT/2000 operating system. Amaya is distributed as open source software, meaning that software developers are free to add to or modify its code and extend its capabilities. According to Web inventor and W3C Director Tim Berners-Lee, Amaya was developed because at the time no commercially available browser included editing capabilities. The idea was to develop the browser as a way to see why such capabilities hadn't been provided and perhaps help solve any problems that were in the way. Amaya also offers a testing platform for other W3C developments such as MathML, a user interface for creating complex mathematical expressions.

Appeal: The advertisement's selling message.

Applets: Small application programs that can be embedded within a Web page. Applets cannot be directly activated from the operating system.

Arachnotaxis: Arachnotaxis is the use of a table or structured list of URLs for Web sites (or words that hyperlink to Web sites) in order to help locate them. A structured bookmark list or a portal directory (such as the ones at Yahoo.com or SearchITServices.com) exemplify arachnotaxis, a term derived from Arachne, the weaver who in Greek legend was turned into a spider, and thence arachnion, a variation that meant the spider's web, and taxis, a Greek word for an orderly or systematic arrangement of items or terms, especially by classification. As a term, arachnotaxis could be considered a "serious" sniglet (a meaning in search of a term) until such time as its use is more widely adopted. Its inventor, Steve Gruenwald, first used the term in mid-1998, when he was searching for something to describe a taxonomy used to guide users to Web sites. (TechTarget.com sites use the term taxonomy to describe our categorized lists of Web sites.)

Archive: A compressed or backed up data file.

ASP: Active Server Page. A Web page created dynamically in response to a user request that uses ActiveX scripting.

Auditor: In Web advertising, this usually means a third-party company that audits the number of visitors to or impression sent from a Web site during some time period. When you try to sell advertising, having a third-party auditor gives the prospect more confidence in your audience numbers.

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