Pay Per Click Search Engine Marketing For Dummies

From Pay Per Click Search Engine Marketing For Dummies by Peter Kent

Pay per click search engine marketing puts your Web site within reach of anyone who uses the search engines you register with. An offshoot of pay per click search engine marketing is content-placement service. These services match your ad to Web sites that promote similar services. Of course, as you enter this brave new marketing world, you need to know the lingo, so a glossary of terms is a good thing to have handy.

Pay Per Click Marketing Web Sites

If you're marketing on the Internet, you're probably considering pay per click (PPC) search engine marketing. With PPC, you pay only when a potential customer clicks on your ad, so you can estimate how well your ad or the search engine you're paying is working for you.

The big three PPC systems have been around for awhile:

But you can register with plenty of other PPC systems, including those in the following list:

7Search.com	Clicksor	Marchex (includes Enhance and goClick)
AdOn Network	ePilot	Mirago
Ask Sponsored Listings	Findology	Miva
BlowSearch	Kanoodle	Search123
Brainfox	LookSmart	Snap
Business.com	Lycos (includes HotBot and AngelFire)	Turbo10

Using Pay Per Click Content-Placement Services

Increase your pay per click success by using content-placement (or contextual) ads. Google and Yahoo! — as well as some smaller pay per click (PPC) systems — have content-placement ads you can use to increase traffic to your Web site. The following list shows services that offer content-placement ads:

A Glossary of Pay Per Click Terms

The world of pay per click (PPC) search engine marketing uses terms you don't come across in other types of marketing. Understanding pay per click terminology can help you know what you're paying for and what you're getting in the PPC world:

Broad match: A keyword matching method in which an ad is matched with searches that are similar to the specified keywords	Exact match: A keyword matching method in which an ad is matched with searches that include the exact keyword phrase and nothing else	Pay per Call: Similar to PPC, except that the advertiser pays when the searcher calls a phone number
Click fraud: Clicks on your ads that were carried out for fraudulent purposes	Geo-targeting: Targeting ads to particular geographic regions	Phrase match: A keyword matching method in which an ad is matched with searches that include the exact keyword phrase, though with other words before or after
Content placement ad: A PPC ad placed on a content page rather than on a search-results page; also called a contextual ad	Impression: An individual placement of an ad on a Web page	PPA (Pay Per Action): An advertising campaign in which the advertiser pays when a particular action is completed, such as a sale or a form being filled in
Conversion rate: The number of people at any point who carry out a particular action; in particular, who come to your site and buy from you or provide lead information; a visitor is being "converted" into a buyer.	Keyword matching: Refers to different methods for matching keywords associated with your ads, with the search terms entered by people at the search engines; see also Broad match, Exact match, Phrase match, and Negative match.	PPC (Pay Per Click): An advertising campaign in which the advertiser must pay each time someone clicks an ad
CPA: Cost per Acquisition	Landing page: The page the visitor lands on after clicking an ad	ROI (return on investment): A measure of how much profit you make for a particular advertising investment
CPM: Cost per thousand ad impressions (the M is taken from the Roman numeral for 1,000)	Negative match: A form of keyword matching in which ads are never matched with searches that include the specified negative keyword	SEM (search engine marketing): Activities designed to generate business through Web search engines; some people use the term to refer specifically to PPC activities
CTR (click-through rate): The percentage of people seeing an ad who click it	Organic search results: Nonpaid search results	SERP (search engine results page): The page a search engine displays containing your search results