PPC Terms You Should Know: Part 1 of PPC Strategy

This is part 1 of how to successfully create a PPC campaign. In order to make easier for novices we mainly concentrate on Google Adwords. This chapter describes all the PPC terms you should know before diving in to latter chapters.

PPC (pay per click) or CPC (cost per click) –is contextual advertising that is targeted either by a prospect searching for keywords within your campaign or visiting pages with a relevant content to your campaign. Advertiser pays when a prospect clicks on the advertisement.

Click through Rate (CTR) -ratio of clicks on an ad to impressions of the ad. Higher CTR rate means that advertising campaign is highly targeted and can lower your CPC costs within ad networks such as AdWords

Conversion-term used to describe an action needed to be performed by a visitor to achieve website’s final goal. Examples of conversion can be: registration, completed sale, information request. Good SEO companies will use the amount of Conversions as a key performance indicator

Conversion Rate –is a percentage of website’s visitors either paid or organic that perform the action defined as a conversion. Most of the tracking systems like Google Analytics and Google AdWords allow you to track your conversion rate, by setting appropriate goals

Conversion Optimization –set of techniques used to increase conversion rate. Techniques can include: creating more targeted ads, creating more targeted content, creation of customized landing pages, usability tweaks and creation of strong call to action

Cost Per Acquistion (CPA) –also known as Cost Per Action. A ration total cost to bring a traffic to the website to the amount of conversions. For example if you spent $100 on AdWords campaign and two people converted from the campaign, your CPA will be $50

Click Fraud – is illegal technique to manipulate CPC by either competitors or publishers to increase their revenue. It is estimated that at least 5% of any CPC campaign is click fraud. A good SEO company will try to monitor these clicks and file for refund

Quality Score-an arbitrary score from 1-10 given by AdWords to determine the relevancy of your advertising campaign. The higher the score is the lower amount an advertiser pays for a click. All of our advertisers have a Quality Score 7-10

Keyword relevancy – Every campaign starts with keyword research and success of the campaign depends on it. It is a rookie mistake to try and stuff couple of thousand somewhat relevant keywords in one AdGroup. In reality successful campaigns have up to 25 highly relevant and well searched keywords in one AdGroup

Ad Relevancy – Once relevant keywords are found and broken up in small groups a highly targeted ad needs to be attached to every group. Again it is a rookie mistake to use same ads for each group. Successful ad will include keywords inside it and will have a strong call to action

Landing Page- Google goes as far as checking your website in order to determine how relevant your ad campaign is. One of the common mistakes is to point advertising campaign to a home page. Targeted landing page for each AdGroup allows an advertiser not only to optimize their conversion rare, but also to maximize their Quality Score.

Related:

Part 2. Quality Score Factors