PPC Jargon Buster

Here’s one for those of you who haven’t been too close to digital marketing in the past. There are lots of acronyms and terms that potentially mean nothing outside of the geek-sphere so here’s a quick breakdown of some of the terms I’ve needed to expain a million times.

Metrics-
CTR: The percentage of people who have clicked on your ad after seeing it. The higher the better.

Impression: Someone seeing your ad. If your ad is seen 4 times, that’s 4 impressions.

Click: Not even going to explain this one.

Conversion: This can be whatever you set it as. If your aim is to get sign ups to a newsletter, someone signing up could be a conversion. If you have an e-commerce site, a purchase could be a conversion. It depends what you tell Google (of your tracking provider of choice) to record.

Bounce Rate: The percentage of people who have left your site on the same page they entered on. For example, someone sees your ad on Google and clicks on it. Reads a paragraph on your homepage and realises your website is not what they’re looking for. They leave. Bounce.

CPC: Cost per Click. The Maximum CPC is the most you’re willing to pay for a click. Your average CPC is the average you’re ACTUALLY paying for a click. The lower the better.

Quality score: A mark out of 10 that all the keywords in your account are assigned by Google. The better the management of your account, the higher your quality score. The higher your quality score, the lower your average CPC, as Google rewards good quality management. (Keep your eyes peeledfor a blog on account management and optimisation.)

Tools/Features-
Doubleclick, Marin, Kenshoo, Mediaplex etc: These are all adservers. You can ‘serve’ your ads through these systems in order to receive additional information and more detailed reporting. Usually you will be charged a percentage of your ad spend as a fee by the ad servers. All systems have pros and cons but my personal favourite is Doubleclick (also known as DART or DS3).

AdWords: This is the system that Google uses for advertisers to run their ads.You log into your AdWords account to choose the keywords you want to show up for and the ads you want to display.

Analytics: Google Analytics is a free tool which allows a website owner to see how users are behaving before and during the visit to the website. This tool can only be implemented on your own website, so no chance to sneak a peek at your competitors, I’m afraid.

Display Network: Also known as GDN (previously known as the content network), this is a network of websites that have allowed Google to show ads on their pages. The Daily Mail is an awful newspaper, but a great example of display advertising (generally at the top of the screen on the health pages).

Channels –
Paid search: Adverts on search engines which you pay for when they are clicked or seen (depending on your bidding model).

Direct: Traffic which has come directly to your site by the user typing your web address into their browser.

Organic: Users who have visited your site by clicking a link provided on a search engine which you are NOT paying for. (If you are paying for an SEO service,this is still a non-paid channel as you are not paying Google/Yahoo etc for the traffic.)

Referral: Traffic which has reached your site via another website (excluding search engines). For example, if I put a link to the John Lewis website here and you clicked on it, the guys at John Lewis will see they received a referral visit from PeaPeaSea.Wordpress.com.

This is just a small sample of the terms we use every day (not including the long winded, complicated, or downright ridiculous ones). If there are any others you’d like to understand or would like to add, please comment below.