Building a cross-channel strategy? 7 terms you’ll need to know.

Cross-channel: The experience you create for each individual customer as they journey through life and across devices.

Multi-channel: The buying of inventory across any channel (web, mobile, social, email, etc.) and any format (banners, rich media, video, etc.).

Cross-device: The ability to target the same consumer, from one connected device to another.

Probabilistic Matching: By algorithmically analyzing thousands of different anonymous data points — device type, operating system, location data associated with bid requests, time of day, and a host of others — it’s possible to create statistical matches between devices. Think “best guess.” (Source: 2015 AdExchanger, “A Marketer’s Guide to Cross-Device Identity”)

Deterministic Matching: Personally identifiable information is used to make device matches when a person uses the same email address to login to an app and a website, creating cross-device linkage. As long as a user is logged in across devices, advertisers and publishers can use this unique identifier to target those users on multiple screens with near-perfect precision. (Source: 2015 AdExchanger, “A Marketer’s Guide to Cross-Device Identity”)

Cookie: A string of text sent from a web server to a user’s browser that the browser is expected to send back to the web server in subsequent interactions. In online advertising, cookies generally store a unique identifier, and may contain information like what ads were recently seen (for frequency capping), when the cookie was created (to discover short duration identities), and other simple attributes. Only applicable to desktops, cookies do not translate to mobile devices. (Source: 2013 Internet Advertising Bureau)

Device ID: A distinctive number associated with a smartphone or similar handheld device.

Check out the rest of our Programmatic Advertising Glossary here.