PPC = Pay per click. You pay when somebody clicks on your ad! Yes! Basically, every time your ad appears it is free. When somebody clicks to see your website, you pay. Simple, right? Try using Google Keyword Tools. Check out the Keyword List Expansion + Negative Keywords.
SEO = Search engine optimization. The marketing behind a website’s natural organic/natural ranking ability. SEO is NOT PPC and PPC is NOT SEO. Please do not confuse the two.
SEM = Search engine marketing. Search engine marketing is any marketing on the search engines. It is not just PPC and not just SEO. It can be both… Don’t give up, get all the experience you can.
CPC = Cost per click. The amount you pay for a single click. I listed this here because there are several iterations of this metric out there. You might see eCPC which means effective cost per click. eCPC simply divides your total cost for the run of the ad divided by the number of clicks you received. Example: You buy a flat fee ad on a local chamber of commerce website for $250. The ad was live for 30 days. You received 78 clicks from that ad; therefore, $250 divided by 78 clicks gives us your eCPC of $3.21. Avoid bad results.
CPM = Cost per thousand impressions. An impression is simply a single instance of your ad being displayed on a website. There are several banner ad networks out there that still charge based on impressions. Or you get the choice: you can buy based on impressions or clicks. The industry standard is to price or bid based on a per one thousand impressions basis. You may run into CPMM which is cost per thousand thousand impressions – or cost per 1 million impressions. Pick good products.
CPA = Cost per action. Advertisers pay a publisher or a company based on a desired outcome. This can be for a lead, a page view, a sale, etc. The most common CPA model is the affiliate marketing model. Google ‘affiliate marketing’, you’ll learn a lot.
Study the writing, the placement and the style of the ads you find in the search engines, on regular websites or on social media platforms.
Natural/Organic vs Sponsored/Paid
Investigate the search results at a variety of search engines. Learn how to spot the paid vs the organic results. Some of these aren’t obvious believe it or not! Dogpile comes to mind…do you think a normal user can tell the difference there? Yahoo has paid inclusions scattered throughout their ‘organic’ results too. Go check it out!
Content Networks, Image ads & Social Network Ads
Explore a variety of websites and pay attention to the banner ads, text ads and their locations in the website. The publishers (the people that own and operate the website) typically put ads in the most visible, highly trafficked areas on their websites. You can learn a lot from these placements…here are a few very popular places that host content ads, image ads and/or social network ads: Facebook (duh!), MySpace, Gizmodo, New York Times, Digg and MSN.
