Pay-per-click advertising can be a critical — and highly successful — component of your industrial marketing strategy. However, many manufacturers remain mystified by the discipline, confused by the terminology, and unsure how to measure their efforts.
To help clear things up, and to give you a foundation for success, we’ve gathered some of the most commonly used PPC- related terms and acronyms that you need to understand in order to succeed in PPC advertising. Here they are:
Commonly Used PPC Acronyms
- PPC: Pay-Per-Click. Also referred to as Cost-Per-Click (CPC)
Let’s start with the basics. Pay-Per-Click is a form of paid advertising that is used to direct traffic to your site. An advertiser will pay a publisher when their ad is clicked. Commonly associated with search engines like Google AdWords and Bing Ads, advertisers typically bid on keywords or phrases that are most relevant to their target audience. However, at times sites will often be charged a fixed price for a click rather than using the bidding system.
These kinds of advertisements usually appear as display ads which show up on websites with related content.
- CPA: Cost-Per-Acquisition. Also referred to as Cost-Per-Action (CPA)
This is an online pricing where you are billed based upon a specific acquisition or action, like filling out a form, watching a video, or generating a sale. It measures the total combined cost to acquire one paying customer or qualified lead for a campaign.
Sounds simple enough, but many industrial marketers struggle to keep track of those acquisitions. The simplest way to do that is through Cookie Tracking:
A “cookie” is a small file that is installed on your computer when you visit certain websites. Cookies allow websites to provide a customized experience by storing and displaying personal information — names, locations, phone numbers, etc. As an industrial marketer, you can use cookies to determine when individual visitors interact with specific pages or content on your site. For example, after a person fills out a form and is brought to a thank you page, you can use cookie tracking to register that as a conversion.
A common way to measure the success of an online advertising campaign, the click-through-rate is the percentage of people who click on an advertisement after viewing it.
Search engines like Google and Bing are software systems that are designed to search for information across the World Wide Web. Results vary and can be a mix of web pages, images and other types of files. In terms of PPC advertising, search engines allow advertisers to pay a fee to have their listings ranked higher in search results. The search engines make money every time someone clicks on these advertisements in search results.
- SEM: Search Engine Marketing
Whether free or paid, SEM is the umbrella term that encompasses all the ways you can influence your company’s search results. The goal of SEM is to enhance the visibility of your company’s website through search engines. Both search engine optimization (SEO) and PPC fall under this category of marketing.
- SERP: Search Engine Results Page
These are the web pages served to users when they search for something using a search engine. In digital marketing, this is precious real-estate. Each SERP is unique and customized based on the experience for the user entering the search terms. Factors include a user’s physical location, browsing history, and more.
A Search Query Report, sometimes referred to as a “Search Terms Report” is a report generated by different advertising networks that will show you how well your ads are performing when triggered by searches on a search engine, as well as actual search queries that match to your keywords.
Learn More
PPC can be an extremely effective tool for boosting website traffic and engaging with buyers, but if you don’t know the basics it can be difficult to create a paid search strategy. If you need some help, the Thomas Marketing Services team is here to help you get the most bang out of your budget.
For more of the terms you need to understand in order to be a successful industrial marketer, download our free eBook, The Ultimate Dictionary Of Marketing Terms You Should Know.
