Online behavioural advertising jargon buster

All the important behavioural advertising terms explained

Advertising Network - A company that connects websites and media owners with relevant advertisers.

Contextual advertising - Advertising targeted at a specific individual when visiting a website. Automated systems serve adverts depending on the page content. For instance, when viewing a film review website, the user could be served new cinema releases, latest DVDs or film merchandise advertising. Contextual advertising is also used by search engines to display advertisements on their search results pages based on the keywords in the user’s query.

Cookie - A cookie is a small file of letters and numbers downloaded on to your computer when you access certain websites. Cookies allow a website to recognise a user’s computer. A cookie itself does not contain or collect information. Cookies are used in behavioural advertising to identify users who share a particular interest so that they can be served more relevant adverts.

Display advertising - Graphical adverts displayed when users visit a
particular website. These are usually in the form of ‘banners’ or a video.

Online Behavioural Advertising - A technique used to make use of information about web-browsing behaviour to deliver advertisements tailored to individuals’ interests.

Opt-out - Opting out enables individuals to decline, stop or avoid receiving unsolicited product and service information. In this case, it is advertising aimed at them based upon previous web browsing activity. Click here to opt out of behavioural advertising by those companies complying with the IAB Good Practice Principles for behavioural advertising.

Personally identifiable information (PII) - This is information that, either by itself or in conjunction with other information, can uniquely identify an individual. Examples of personally identifiable information include a name, street address, email address or telephone number. PII is defined in EU directive 95/46/EC.

Web browser - Software that retrieves and collects information resources and arranges and displays the results in a standardized form on a computer. Examples include Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera.

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