Ad Creative – The ‘Ad Creative’ refers to the words used in a PPC campaign and is actually shown to search engine viewers. This is the stage where the copy writing skills are needed most. Creative that is optimised and well targeted will usually result in improved CTR.
Ad Text – The marketing message displayed to prospective customers. An ad contains a title, description, and URL.
AdWords – Google’s search advertising platform. Ads can be shown on the search engine results pages (SERPs) or on Google Content Network, or both and partner sites .
Agent Name - Synonymous with “User-Agent”. This is the name of a spider or browser as defined by the owner.
Algorithm – A mathematical formulae which is used in order to rank websites and web pages.
Altavista – One of the first large scale search engines.
Auto Bidding – A means by which your bid on a given keyword is automatically changed by 1 cent if your nearest competitor changes their bid. Although you set a maximum bid, you may pay less if auto budding works in your favor.
AVE CPC – Average cost per click. The average price you paid each time your ad was clicked.
Backlink – Backlinks are links found on other websites that will take the user to your website.
Bid - See Keyword Bid.
Bridge Page – Similar to “Doorway Page”, this is a specifically designed entry point for a website.
CPA – Cost Per Action is the cost for a specific action taken by a user who has responded to an ad. An ‘action’ is also referred to as a conversion and can include the downloading of a brochure and successful ordering of a product. CPC – Cost Per Click refers to the cost paid for a single click. CPC is usually looked at on an average basis, then it is the total cost divided by total number of clicks. Formula: Total cost / total clicks.
CPL – Cost per Lead. Where you pay for a lead i.e. is someone does something.
CPM – Cost per Thousand. Where you pay for each 1000 impressions or ad views. It also refers to the average cost paid per thousand impressions for a PPC campaign. Formula: (Total cost / total impressions) x 1,000.
CR (conversion rate) – The total number of conversions divided by total number of clicks. Formula: Total conversions / total clicks.
CSS – Cascading Style Sheets. Used to manipulate and easily manage the design of a website.
CTR – Click Through Rate is expressed as a percentage. CTR represents the percentage of traffic that clicks through to the destination URL from the ad in the search engines. CTR is also a way to measure how relevant a keyword is within a campaign. Formula: Total clicks / total impressions.
Campaign – A campaign contains one or more ad groups sharing the same budget, schedule and geo-targeting criteria. A campaign is typically created to support a particular marketing goal.
Click – Click is the term used in paid search to refer to a user interacting with an ad by clicking on it and being delivered to a web page. So, a click on an ad generates a hit or a visitor to a web site.
Click-Through – A click on a link that leads to another website.
Click-Through Rate (CTR) – The number of clicks received divided by the number of impressions generated. Example: An ad that is displayed 100 times and receives 10 clicks has a click-through rate of 10%.
Click-Tracking – The use of scripts in order to track inbound and outbound links.
Cloaking – Delivering different content to specific crawlers/spiders. This is generally used to trick spiders into seeing optimised content.
Comment Tag – A tag in HTML that is invisible unless viewed through the source code.
Content Placement Targeting – Pay-per-click distribution tactic that displays your ads alongside relevant articles such as product reviews, news articles, etc. on the Yahoo and Google distribution network.
Conversion – A conversion occurs when a user performs a desired action determined by the advertiser. For example, a newsletter sign-up or a purchase.
Conversion Rate – The percentage of visitors who actually are converted into purchasers of your product/service. It is calculated as the number of click-throughs divided by the number of actual conversions, and the higher the conversion rate, the more effective your campaign has been.
Cost Per Click (CPC) – The amount you pay for each click on your ad. Some people use this term interchangeably with the pay-per-click cost.
Counter – A program or script that counts hits/visits to a page.
Crawler – A program that goes through websites and gathers information for the crawler’s creator.
Cross Linking - Multiple sites linking to each other.
Dayparting – Also referred to as Ad Scheduling. Search engines like Google allow SEM campign managers to control the time of day when ads are to be shown. This is a powerful way of honing in on targeted users.
Dead Link – A link that produces a 404 error, page not found.
Directory – A website that list other websites in their various categories.
Domain – The name for a website e.g. teneric.co.uk
Dynamic Page – A page that generates content “on-the-fly” as a user requests the page.
Error Log File – A server log file which records errors encountered.
FFA Free For All – This is a links page with nothing but links added by visitors.
Freshbot – This is the name for the Google crawlers that are known to add pages to the Google index more promptly than others.
Geo-targeting - Targeting a specific geographic region by restricting the ad display to a particular country, state, city, area, etc.
Google – The largest and currently the #1 search engine.
Google Bot – The crawlers which index pages into Google.
Google Everflux - This denotes the continuous changes in the Google search results pages.
HTML - Hyper Text Markup Language. The languages used to format webpages.
HTML Link - A link from one page to another.
Header Tag – An HTML tag which is commonly used for page headers.
Hidden Text - Text which is invisible to the human eye because it is the same color as the background.
Hit – An instance of a graphic or file being loaded on a webpage.
Hits – The number of times a particular web page is viewed. The number of hits is independent of whether or not it is the same user visiting the same page more than once. Sometimes also referred to as visits.
IP Address – A unique number which identifies a computer or system.
IP Spoofing – An illegal process of faking an IP address.
Impression – Also known as ad views. “Impression” is the term used to describe the viewing of an ad by the user’s browser.
Inbound Link - A link from another website to your website.
Inktomi - A database of search results used to power multiple search engines.
JavaScript - An embedded client side scripting language.
KPI – Short for ‘Key Performance Indicator’. Also referred to as a metric.
Keyword - A word or phrase that relates to the products or services you wish to advertise. When prospective customers are looking for information related to what you sell, and they type your keywords into a search box, your ads may be displayed. Keyword can be short one word phrases to long multiple word phrases (Long tail kywords) and may or may not contain numbers.
Keyword Bid – The maximum amount of money you are prepared to pay for every time that a user clicks on your pay-per-click ad on a search engine and thus visits your website.
Keyword Density – The percentage density of a given keyword or phrase.
Keyword Stuffing – Stuffing a page with numerous keywords for the sole purpose of confusing search engines.
Landing Page – The page on a web site where one is taken after clicking on a advertisement. While this can be any page, it is often a page designed to expand on the service or product mentioned in the initial advertisement.
Link Building Campaign – An process of connecting with businesses conducting a type of business comparable to yours in order to exchange links and thus move up both in natural search engine robot crawls as well as in pay-per-click campaigns.
Link Farming – A practice considered unethical by most. It involves a web site linking to others to which it has no connection in terms of the type of business they do, but rather solely for the purpose of increase page ranking in search engines that consider the number of links in their decision on ranking pages.
Meta Search – Searching multiple databases and combining results.
Meta Tags – A tag used for behind the scenes purposes, such as providing content to non human visitors.
Minimum Bid – The minimum amount set up a pay-per-click search engine for either a specific keyword, type of keyword, or the overall minimum bid acceptable for any keyword.
Open Directory Project – A large directory of websites run by volunteers. Their database is used by many website across the internet.
Optimisation - Fine tuning a website or webpage with the ultimate goal being to ascertain a higher position in all or a specific search engine’s results.
Outbound Link – Linking from your website to another website.
PFI – Pay For Inclusion. This is where a site must pay to be listed at all.
PPC – Short for ‘Pay Per Click’. Also referred to as ‘Search’ or ‘Paid Search’ because traffic from the search engines is generated from paid advertisements which appear at the top and right hand side of the SERPs. The beauty of the pay per click pricing model is that the advertiser only pays for clicks from potential customers, not how many times that ad is shown (impressions).
Page Rank (PR) – The position that your website has on a given search engine. Often seen abbreviated, as in “I’ve got a PR6 in Google”, meaning you are ranked as number 6 under Goggle for a certain keyword.
Page Views – The number of times a web page is viewed.
Paid Inclusion – A sales technique currently under review by many search engines, paid inclusion is where an advertiser arranges to pay a search engine a certain amount of money to ensure a ranking in their search results, although most search engines do not guarantee the ranking will be among the highest. Many search engines have either stopped this type of plan or are in the process of considering removing this option for online marketing.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising - A method of marketing where a business pays a certain amount of money each time someone clicks on a small ad on a search engine’s results page or homepage and is then taken to the advertiser’s website.
Pay-Per-Click Search Engine (PPCSE) – A search engine that offers pay-per-click advertising as an option to businesses.
Pop Under – A pop-up that loads under a page so that it is only viewable when the current page is closed.
PopUp - The opening of a new window above the previous window.
Quality Score – Refers to an important component of Google’s Adwords algorithm used for determining what position the ad will be shown at and the cost-per-click (CPC) required.
Query - A search phrase submitted to search engines.
ROAS – Return On Advertising Spend. ROAS is a measure of how effective a PPC campaign has been and is expressed as a percentage. ROAS is calculated by dividing revenue resulting from a PPC campaign by the cost of your advertising investment.
Rate Card – A sheet with pricing information.
Reciprocal Linking – A practice by which one site links to other (and vice versa) because they offer complementary products, are an affiliated site, etc. The more links one has to other sites usually results in a higher page ranking in search engines, as long as the links are not perceived as link farming.
Referrer – The page from which a user has come.
Refresh Tag – A tag which defines when and to where a page will refresh.
Return on Investment (ROI) - The bottom line; that is, the amount of money you make as compared to the amount of money you have spent. Many tools exist to help you calculate your ROI for whatever undertaking, including pay-per-click campaigns.
Robot – Generally the name given to a spider / crawler. Anything that is not a human visitor.
Robots.txt – A file created to direct the search engine spiders in specific directions of the website.
SEM – Search Engine Marketing. Also, referred to as ‘search marketing’. SEM encompasses paid placement, contextual advertising, and paid inclusion in search engines.
SERP – A search engine results page.
Search Engine – A site which searches the web for sites which are relevant for a given search query.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – A variety of techniques whereby you change the content, keywords, meta tags, placement of text versus code, etc., in order to enhance your ranking in a search engine.
Spider - A program that visits and downloads specific information from a webpage.
Split Testing – Split testing refers to the performance testing of ad creatives and webpages. In the instance of ad creatives, split testing runs one ad against a varition of that ad, in order to increase the profitability of an overall campaign.
Sponsored Search – Pay-per-click distribution tactic that displays your ads in the sponsored search results at the top, along the side, and across the bottom of search results pages for searches that relate to your keywords.
Submission – Submitting a site to a search engine or directory.
Traffic – The visitors and page views on a website.
URL - acronym for Uniform Resource Locator. The address at which a specific resource can be found.
Unique Visitor – The number of people who visit a web page. If one person visits the same web page 3 or 4 times, the statistics will list them as 1 unique visitor only. See Hits.
Visits – See Hits.
Yahoo! Sponsored Search – The search marketing platform operated by Yahoo!.