SEO Blog

15 need to know PPC terms – a beginners guide - October 24th, 2008

If you’re looking at expanding your sphere of knowledge and want to get into PPC, then there are a few bits of lingo you should be familiar with. So to help you get on the right track, we have created a list with the top 15 terms used in the industry.

1. Bounce rate - this is the percentage of people who enter a website but leave without going to any other page.
2. Clicks - this is when people click on your PPC ad in a search engine. The action they complete is called a click.
3. Click through rate – this is a success metric within a PPC campaign. Click through rate is worked out by dividing the number of clicks by the number of times the ad was displayed.
4. Conversion – This is when someone has completed a set action on your website. This could be buying something or filling in a form.
5. Cost per click – this is the amount of money that is paid to the search engines for a click on an ad, this cost varies greatly across different search engines and industries.
6. Google checkout – Google Checkout is a service that makes buying easy and fast. Usually a percentage of the sale is taken from Google. The upside is that the Google Checkout logo is displayed on the ad and this logo is brilliant at building trust and sales.
7. Impressions – This is simply the number of times an ad has been displayed.
8. Keyword – This is a phrase that has been included in a PPC campaign and is associated with an ad.
9. Long tail keywords – A keyword longer than one phrase. Typically 2 or 3 phrases long and these are typically cheaper and are used by people at the buying stage of their search journey.
10. Match types –There are three different match types, Broad, Phrase and Exact and this model is in Google and MSN. Yahoo is a different breed and uses standard and advanced match types.
11. My client centre– This is really for people who handle more than one account. Typically agencies would have a My Client Centre.
12. Negative keywords – These are added to a PPC account so that ad text does not show when a search query contains one of the negatives. Negative keywords help in targeting customers more effectively and can seriously help the quality score of the account.
13. Quality score – Used in Adwords, this is a metric based on relevancy and is used to calculate bid prices for keywords. This has become more advanced over the years.
14. Return on investment – This looks at the amount of money spent with the amount of money generated.
15. Website optimiser – this little tool from Google allows you to test various aspects of your landing pages in order to find out what changes have the greatest effect on conversions.

Adam
PPC Consultant

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Adwords Position Preference: Beware - October 15th, 2008

There are always new features to help manage PPC campaigns and often they look like they will make life easier. That said, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it will actually manage your campaign any more effectively than you can. Adwords position preference is an application that definitely isn’t all it’s cracked up to be!

Just Search does not advise PPC ads to be positioned in 1st or 2nd place; often these positions pickup more surfers and researchers than buyers and can result in higher costs and few (expensive) conversions. People often flick through the top few ads before actually deciding where to buy what they were looking for. In most industries position three and four result in the most effective PPC campaigns.

As I would normally like my ads to be positioned in specific places on the page the positioning preference tool seemed like a great tool to use. The results however were not just disappointing but in many cases ads totally stopped showing!

What happened is that CPC’s had increased so that the bid was no longer enough to get the position I had elected. The main thing to note when using position preference is not to put a bottom limit on as you cannot predict changes in the average CPC and therefore at least even if your position drops your ads will show somewhere on the page.

What the position preference does is instruct Adwords to show your ad in the positions that you have elected. If your ad cannot be shown in those positions e.g. 4-6 then it will not show at all. Other factors that may affect positioning preference are that your bid may be too high or low and another that your quality score is too low to gain the position that you wish to achieve.

If you do wish to use the position preference application make sure you open up the number of positions so that there is room for movement in case you do not meet the criteria for a couple of positions. If in doubt always bid higher to have more chance of gaining the position. Also ensure that your keywords have already developed a good quality score as this will increase the likely hood of gaining the position.

Tanase Rivers

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