If you’ve got someone managing your Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign, then you probably are hearing a lot of jargon and acronyms. The world of PPC is similar to search engine optimization when it comes to abbreviations and tech-speak, but it is still important for a customer to understand what is being referenced in a conversation, since your PPC agency is using your money to make the best possible purchases. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) agencies generally use a whole raft of terms in their internal reporting, and unfortunately they don’t always tone down the jargon when speaking to customers.
Here is a by-no-means-definitive list of common PPC phrases that are used in the world of search engine marketing:
Adcenter – MSN’s PPC marketing platform, which shows ads on Bing and Microsoft properties.
Ad Group – A specific set of keywords associated with a related ad or group of ads. It is possible to have multiple ad groups in a campaign.
Adwords – Google’s Pay-Per-Click platform, which shows ads on Google, AOL, Ask.com, and multiple custom search engines.
Average Position – The average placement position of your ad over all its impressions. It normally takes several weeks for your average position to rise to the top in Adwords, even with high bids.
Bid – How much you are willing to spend on a click. A bid can be a “default” bid on a group of keywords, or a specific bid on a single keyword.
Broad Match – A type of keyword matching that will show your ad for the widest variety of terms deemed relevant by the search engine. In general, broad match keywords give a higher volume with a lower conversion rate.
Campaign – A set of ad groups. Even though each ad group can contain different keywords and ads, the campaign has a daily budget, geographic targeting, and other settings which will be effective for all the ads in the campaign. Once the campaign’s daily budget is exhausted, all the ads in the campaign stop appearing for their relevant keywords.
Channel – In content match, one of the websites where your ad is showing. You can choose specific channels or sets of channels, so you can choose to be on Facebook, or on certain sections or demographics where your ad is likely to get better results.
Click Fraud – Clicks from fraudulent activity. Some fraud comes from competitors intentionally clicking on your ad. Other fraud involves using automated tools to collect commissions for clicks (via channels like Google Adsense) or to exhaust your daily budget.
Content Bid – The default bid for a set of keywords on the content network. Note that this should be a fraction of your search bid.
Content Matching – The placement of PPC ads on websites. Ideally, these sites should have content that is relevant to the service offering of the company running the ad. Google runs content matching on its “content network.”
Contextual Advertising – Essentially the same thing as Content Matching, given that your ad is triggered by keywords in context on a news, article, blog, or content page.
Conversion – A desired action taken by a website visitor. With PPC, it is relatively easy to measure conversions on form fill-outs and purchases, but it is more difficult to quantify dollars earned from phone calls triggered by online ads. Search engines track visitors for up to 30 days, so your conversion may not happen until a subsequent visit several days later.
Conversion Rate – The percentage of times your ad resulted in a form fill-out, sale, or action. To calculate conversion rate, you take the number of actions divided by the number of clicks. A typical e-commerce conversion rate may be 2.5%, but a form fill-out conversion rate could be 10-20%. A very low conversion rate indicates problems.
Cost Per Conversion – The dollar cost associated with the conversion rate. If you had 100 clicks for one dollar each, and had a 5% conversion rate (5 conversions), your cost per conversion is $20. The formula is essentially the dollar cost divided by the number of conversions.
CPC – Cost Per Click. How much each click cost you. Because bidding is based on many factors, this amount is generally expressed as an average of multiple clicks. When applied to “advertising” it is synonymous with Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
Creative – The text of a PPC Ad. In Google, the first line of your creative is 25 characters, the second and third lines are 35 characters.
CTR – Click Through Rate. The actual number of clicks on your ad divided by the number of impressions.
Day Parting – Setting your ads to appear at certain times of day, or certain days of the week. Many B2B customers will day part so their ads run during business hours when they can answer the phone.
Dynamic Keyword Insertion – The placement of a variable field in ad text that will show a searcher’s actual search phrase (within limits) in the body of the ad.
Exact Match – A keyword setting that only lets your ad show up when a precise keyword is searched upon. In Google Adwords, brackets are used for an exact match, so a keyword like [vegetable man] would only trigger an ad when that phrase is typed in with no words before, after, or between those two words.
Geotargeting – In a campaign, setting your ads to appear in a certain city, state, or country. Also called Local Matching.
Keyword – A word or phrase that triggers an advertisement. Keyword matches can be based on broad match, phrase match, or exact match. Negative Keywords can be used to keep ads from showing for the wrong searches.
Impressions – Number of times your ad is served up, either as a search match or through content placement.
Landing Page – The web page that the display ad or keyword “lands” on when an ad is clicked. If there is not a specific page assigned to an individual keyword, the landing page is determined by the “default URL” in the ad.
Negative Keyword – A keyword that is used to determine when an ad should not be shown. For example, if you have a campaign about computer keyboards, but don’t sell wireless keyboards, then you would add “-wireless” to your list of keywords. Anyone typing in “wireless keyboards” would not see your ad because the negative keyword excludes it.
Phrase Match – A keyword matching type that only shows your keyword when someone types in the specified phrase in a search query. With phrase match in Google Adwords, quotes are used around the keyword, so a phrase match designation for “dog food” would trigger an ad when someone typed in a search for “best dog food recipe.”
Position Preference – A setting that specifies the desired position of your PPC ads. Note that this can sometimes keep your ad from showing.
PPC – Pay-Per-Click. A model of serving ads where you only pay when someone actually clicks on the ad.
Quality Score – A somewhat complex formula used by search engines to decide whether your keywords are relevant to the landing page, how much trust your campaign has, and the click through rate on your ads. Changing an ad can change its quality score, so it is usually best to copy the ad and edit it, then pause the old one when the new one has gained its own quality level. There are also geograph
ic and bidding factors.
ROI – Return On Investment. There are various ways to calculate the value of a PPC campaign. Normally it takes at least a month to ramp up a campaign and gain a quality score, and more time to determine buying patterns and seasonality. PPC ROI can be tough to track beyond the simple cost/benefit analysis, but if clicks are not resulting in profitable sales, then improvement is called for on the site and in the campaigns.
Yahoo! Search Marketing – Yahoo’s PPC platform, previously known as Overture, previously known as GoTo. It shows ads on Yahoo! and Altavista.com.
Some of the more advanced features of PPC management have not been touched on in this glossary, given that a tutorial would be a better spot for showing people all of the features available in Pay-Per-Click. Google offers video tutorials for its Adwords product which are highly recommended for any DIY PPC enthusiasts. The world of PPC management can be very expensive, and anyone who is in charge of an account (or a liaison to an agency) should be cognizant of the different aspects of pay-per-click, and their relative advantages or pitfalls.
