Publishers earning from their ad inventories must be aware of the technical terms of AdSense and AdX. In this blog, we will explain few terms to help publishers in understanding the monetization process.

Ad Request

An ad request is essentially when your website requests a server to display an ad. For example, if you have a leaderboard (728x90) on your homepage, if this page has 5000 visitors a day, then the ad unit sends ad requests 5000 times to the ad server or ad exchange. Google reports an ad request every time a request was made but it is not necessary that every request will convert into an ad impression.

Matched Request

Matched requests are those ad requests that are successfully responded to by the ad exchange or ad server. But if there are rendering issues or the ad is not seen by a user, the impression will not be count. For example, if your ad request is successfully responded by an ad exchange, but the ad doesn’t render successfully, you may have 1 matched request and 0 ad impressions.

Ad Impression

Matched requests that are successfully rendered and viewed by the users are called ad impressions. Ad impression metric is the industry standard metric for evaluating floors since the majority of cost models are performed on cost per thousand impressions (CPM).