01: Ad Basics

Advertising Fundamentals

The building blocks: these ideas apply no matter which channel or platform you're using.

Buying Models

CPM (Cost Per Mille, "mille" is Latin for thousand): You pay a set price for every 1,000 times your ad shows up, whether or not anyone actually looked at it. It's the standard way display, video, and streaming TV ads are priced.

CPC (Cost Per Click): You only pay when someone clicks. No click, no charge. Most search ads work this way.

CPA (Cost Per Acquisition): You pay per result (a purchase, a lead, a sign-up), not per ad shown or clicked. It's calculated after the campaign runs (total spend ÷ number of results), and it's usually the number a campaign gets judged by.

CPV (Cost Per View): You pay per video view, mostly on YouTube and similar platforms. A "view" is defined by the platform, usually someone watching 30 seconds, or clicking, whichever happens first.

CPCV (Cost Per Completed View): Same idea as CPV, but you only pay if someone watches the whole thing, start to finish. Common with streaming TV and higher-end video ads.

vCPM (Viewable CPM): A stricter version of CPM. It only counts impressions that actually had a real chance of being seen (see Viewability, below), not just every ad that technically loaded on a page.

Flat-Rate / Fixed Placement: One price for one spot (like renting a billboard for a month), no matter how many people actually see or click it.

PMP (Private Marketplace): An invite-only version of the ad auction. Instead of every advertiser competing for a spot, a website or app opens it up to a smaller, hand-picked group first, usually at an agreed price.

Programmatic Guaranteed: You and the publisher agree on price and volume ahead of time, just like a traditional ad buy; it just still runs through the same automated buying systems as everything else.

Core Metrics

Impressions: The number of times your ad was shown.

Reach: The number of different people who saw your ad at least once.

Frequency: On average, how many times each of those people saw it. (Reach × Frequency ≈ total impressions.)

CTR (Click-Through Rate): Clicks ÷ impressions: a rough read on how many people who saw the ad actually clicked it.

Conversion Rate: Of the people who clicked (or sometimes just saw the ad), how many went on to do the thing you wanted: buy, sign up, whatever the goal was.

Viewability: Whether your ad had a real chance to be seen, not just loaded somewhere off-screen. Industry standard: at least half the ad visible for one full second (two seconds for video).

VCR (Video Completion Rate): The percentage of people who watched a video ad all the way to the end.

Engagement Rate: Likes, comments, and shares, divided by how many people saw the post. Mostly a social-platform measure.

Share of Voice (SOV): Out of all the ad space bought in your category, how much of it is yours versus your competitors'.

Targeting Concepts

A lot of these are standard digital-advertising concepts, but several are restricted or banned outright for political ads on specific platforms (Google's election ads policy, for instance, blocks most audience-based targeting). Treat the definitions below strictly as "what this means." Check the Social and Search pages, or your Punch contact, for what's actually usable on a given platform.

First-Party Data: Information you already have because it's yours: a voter file, a donor list, your own website visitors and email subscribers.

Third-Party Data: Information collected by someone else and licensed to you. Getting harder to come by as privacy rules tighten industry-wide, and unavailable for use in several political-ad targeting scenarios regardless.

Contextual Targeting: Placing your ad based on the content around it (a news ad next to a current-events article) rather than based on who's looking at it. Generally the safest targeting method for political ads, since it doesn't depend on audience data.

Behavioral Targeting: Placing your ad based on what a person has done before (pages visited, past donations).

Lookalike / Similar Audiences: A new group of people a platform builds because they resemble an audience you already have, like your donor list. Currently disabled for political ads on Meta specifically.

Retargeting / Remarketing: Showing ads to people who already showed interest (visited your site, started a donation) but didn't follow through. Not available for Google election ads, where remarketing is explicitly excluded.

Frequency Capping: A limit on how many times one person can see the same ad in a given stretch of time, so it doesn't wear out its welcome.

Funnel & Strategy Language

Upper / Mid / Lower Funnel: Shorthand for where an ad sits in someone's decision-making journey: upper funnel introduces a candidate or issue, mid builds support, lower pushes toward a specific action like voting or donating.

Awareness / Consideration / Conversion: The three broad stages most campaigns are planned around: get noticed, get considered, get someone to act (vote, donate, volunteer).

Brand Lift: In a commercial context this measures brand awareness; in a political one, the same survey-based method is generally used to measure candidate or issue awareness and favorability instead.

Incrementality: The results that only happened because of your campaign, separate from results that would've happened anyway.

Attribution: The method used to decide which ad gets "credit" for an action: a donation, a sign-up. Last-click gives all the credit to the final ad someone saw; multi-touch spreads credit across everything they saw along the way.

A/B Testing: Running two versions of something (an image, a headline, a message) against each other to see which performs better.

Creative Rotation / Fatigue: Cycling through different ad creative so the same audience doesn't see the exact same ad so many times it stops working (that decline is called "fatigue").