Internet Technology Consultant Lingo Definitions
Advertising Acronyms
If you have placed ads on your website to generate income for your site, or if you have placed your ads on another company’s website then you may run across the following acronyms:
CPA (Cost per action): If you utilize this type of ad program then you will either be charged for specific actions that page viewers take, or you will be paid when page viewers take specific actions. For example if you host another company’s advertisement with a CPA agreement, then every time a viewer requests information or places an order you will be paid a commission based on your agreement.
CPC (Cost per click): If you agreed to be paid by company’s who advertise on your site based on CPC statistics, then you will be paid based on how many clicks their ad receives from your website. In order to reduce the chances that a person will implement fraud in order to generate higher click counts, software is often used in conjunction with CPC programs in order to identify original or authentic clicks.
CPL (Cost per lead): If the purpose of an advertisement is to generate sales leads for another company, then you only get paid based on the number of leads that are generated from your site. Again tracking software and advertisement codes are used to keep track of where leads are generated.
CPM (Cost per one thousand impressions): Another popular advertising purchasing strategy is to pay based on the cost of displaying an ad on 1,000 website views. This means that every time a website is brought up on a person’s computer, ads are posted by software on that website. The ads are drawn from a database and they are rotated and placed on specific websites based on the website’s content and target audience. An advertiser pays a base rate, say $10 for every 1,000 views that their ad receives. For the host website this breaks down to about 1 cent per time that this particular ad appears on their website. The viewer doesn’t have to click on the ad or take any action in order for the commission to be charged and paid, so this is the easiest type of advertisement to track and use to generate income for a website.
PPC (Pay per click): Pay per click is an advertiser paying a certain amount for each click on their advertisement that is generated from a particular website.
CRM (Customer relationship management): CRM programs help to establish lines of communication between the service provider and the customer. They may take on the form of feedback forms, live chats with customer service, or integrated databases that allow customers to directly access their accounts online.
CTR (Click through rate): The click through rate is the average number of webpage visitors that click on an advertisement.
Sound and Graphics Acronyms
BPM (Bitmap) a digital graphic file, often times it has better resolution than other formats.
MIDI (musical instrument digital interface) is a commonly used music file format. It has a tendency to sound very mechanical or electronic.
MPEG (moving picture experts group) is a commonly used digital video format for the Internet. It comes in a number of types. MPEG1 is the original format and provides lower quality and resolution moving pictures for the Internet. Most contemporary digital video cameras now use MPEG4, which produces higher resolution videos.
DV (digital video) is basically any moving picture file that has been transferred to digital format.
DVR (digital video recorder) is a digital video-recording device.
GIF (graphic interchange format) is a lower resolution graphic file format that is commonly used on the Internet.
GPU (graphic processing unit) is a device that is used to process digital graphics.
HDV (high definition video) is a super high-resolution digital video image.
RGB (red green blue) color definition for programming.
Miscellaneous Internet Acronyms
CD-R (compact disc recordable): these discs allow you to record and erase as many times as you want, however, once you finalize the disc you can’t alter it any more.
CD-RW (compact disc re-writable): this storage device is just like the CD-R except it allows you to write and rewrite without having to finalize the disc.
DBMS (database management system) is just what the name suggests. It is a management system that has been applied to a database program. It may look for outdated entries, mistakes, or double entries depending on what the programmer specifies.
DVD (digital versatile disc) a high capacity data storage device. Great for digital video, music, and data files.
FAQ (frequently asked questions) is a common section on websites. The FAQ page provides answers to commonly asked questions such as location of a company, how to return an item, etc.
HTML (hyper-text markup language) is a programming language for the Internet and webpages.
HTTP (hyper-text transfer protocol) is basically the digital address of a specific website.
IM (instant message) is a real time online digital conversation program. Several companies have their own IM programs including AOL and Netscape.
ISP (Internet service provider) is the digital code for your Internet service.
PDF (portable document format) is a file format that preserves a document as a graphic file. Some PDF applications even allow it to calculate formulas and to allow direct input of information in fields without altering instructions and lines of data.
RTF (rich text format) is a basic word processing file type.
