Glossary
Affiliate Program — Software that enables a business to pay affiliates a percentage or specific amount per sale. This is an effective way of obtaining incoming links.Budget — The amount of money that an advertiser sets aside for an advertising campaign. Different publishers allow for advertisers to set daily, weekly or monthly budgets.
Clickthrough Rate (CTR) — The percentage of clicks on a link. This is usually a percentage based on the total number of clicks divided by the number of impressions that an advertisement has received.
Conversion Rate — The relationship between visitors to a web site and actions considered to be a "conversion", such as a sale or request to receive more information: the percentage of people whose clicks have resulted in a sale or desired action in relation to the total number of clicks on an advertisement.
Cost Per Click (CPC) — The cost or cost-equivalent paid per click-through to an advertiser's website.
Cost Per Thousand (CPM) — The amount an advertiser pays for one thousand advertisement impressions, regardless of the consumer's subsequent actions.
Crawler — Component of search engine that gather listings by automatically "crawling" the web. A search engine's crawler (also called a spider or robot), follows links to web pages. It makes copies of the web pages found and stores these in the search engine's index.
Dynamic Content — Content on a page from a database which is called based on the query parameters. This content is generally not able to be indexed by the search engines.
GeoTargetting — An advertisement targeted at a specific geographical region, area or location.
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.
Impressions — The number of times an advertisement is viewed by web surfers.
Indexing — The act of a search engine spider listing your site in its database so it will show up in search results
Keyword (Search Term) — Keywords are the terms that users enter into the search box of a search engine. Consequently, these are the word(s) you should choose to use in your pay-per-click campaign. Depending upon the company and the size of the campaign, the number of keywords used can range from a few to thousands.
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.
Landing Page — The specific web page that a visitor ultimately reaches after clicking a search engine listing. Marketers attempt to improve conversion rates by testing various landing page creative, which encompasses the entire user experience including navigation, layout and copy.
Listings — The information that appears on a search engine's results page in response to a search.
Meta Search Engine — A search engine that gets listings from two or more other search engines, rather than through its own efforts.
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.
Organic Listings — Listings that search engines do not sell (unlike paid listings). Instead, sites appear solely because a search engine has deemed it editorially important for them to be included, regardless of payment. Paid inclusion content is also often considered "organic" even though it is paid for. This is because that content usually appears intermixed with unpaid organic results.
Paid Listings — Listings that search engines sell to advertisers, usually through paid placement or paid inclusion programs.
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.
Results Page — After a user enters a search query, the page that is displayed, is call the results page. Sometimes it may be called SERPs, for "search engine results page."
Search Engine — Any service generally designed to allow users to search the web or a specialized database of information. Web search engines generally have paid listings and organic listings. Organic listings typically come from crawling the web, though often human-powered directory listings are also optionally offered.
Static Content — Content on a web site that is hard coded onto the page and does not come from a database. Search engines have no problems indexing this content, unlike dynamic content.
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.
XML Feeds — A form of paid inclusion where a search engine is "fed" information about pages via XML, rather than gathering that information through crawling actual pages. Marketers can pay to have their pages included in a spider based search index either annually per URL or on a CPC basis based on an XML document representing each page on the client site. New media types are being introduced into paid inclusion, including graphics, video, audio, and rich media.