After yesterday's discussion of free ISPs (Internet Service Providers), I realized that I'm not the only one out there getting lost in the world of the 3-letter words. Webster's defines "acronym"
as an "abbreviation formed from the initial letters of the words in a phrase," but no matter how you define them, media acronyms are downright confusing.
By now we're all familiar with the
basics that come from traditional media, like IO (Insertion order), RFP (Request for Proposal) and CPM (Cost per Thousand impressions). The online-only terms, however, seem to multiply. We started
out with CTR (Click-Through Rate), which is determined by dividing the total number of impressions served by the number of users who actually clicked on an ad and multiplying the result by 100 to
get a percentage.
Then came the CPC (Cost per Click) pricing model craze, which is now giving way to the CPA (Cost per Action) as the newest and hottest pricing model when it comes to
online ads. With CPA, you only pay for "actions" that a website delivers - sales (online and offline), leads, form fill-outs, downloads of software programs, etc. "Subsidiaries" of CPA are CPL
(Cost per Lead) and CPS (Cost per Sale.) The general formula here is the total cost of media divided by total number of actions/leads/sales generated by an ad.
But no matter which of the above
pricing models you use, the most important acronyms to know seem to be ROS (Run of Site) and RON (Run of Network). These are used by both individual websites and ad networks to define a buy where
you, the advertiser, don't specify which pages of a site or sites in a network you want your ads to run on. This approach is widely used by advertisers to test campaigns before the full launch
because it's the least targeted and thus least expensive. If you want to see which of your ads are most effective on which pages in Yahoo or sites on the DoubleClick network - buy a Yahoo ROS or a
DoubleClick RON respectively.
You could, of course, ask you sales rep for what you want in plain English, but what's the fun in that?