Golden Bulls and Foot in Mouth: Jargon Free Pay-per-click

One thing you should know: After years of working in blue-chip corporations, I’ve developed an allergy to the jargon and acronyms that persist in those environments. As such, I’m looking forward to reading the entries for the 2009 “Golden Bull” and “Foot in Mouth” awards handed out annually by www.plainenglish.co.uk to “reward” the perpetrators of gobbledegook and jargon, but I digress….

Google rarely raises my hackles through overuse of jargon, but I’ve noticed that some PPC clients, especially those who haven’t really had any AdWords or Analytics experience, do struggle with a few of their terms, so I’ve highlighted a few of the offenders below with what I hope are plain English explanations.

Keyword Match Type: Matching options determine which Google searches can trigger your ads.

Broad Match allows your ad to show on similar phrases and relevant variations e.g. if the keyword is “red roses”, your Ad would show for “order red roses”, “I like roses that are red” and “single pink rose”.

Phrase Match allows your ad to show for searches that match the exact phrase e.g. if the keyword is “red roses”, your Ad would show for “order red roses” and “red roses for me” but not for “I like roses that are red”.

Exact Match allows your ad to show for searches that match the exact phrase exclusively e.g. if the keyword is “red roses”, your Ad will show for “red roses” only.

Est. First Page Bid: The lowest bid you can enter to get your Ad on the first page.

Impressions: How many times an Ad has shown for that keyword.

Clicks: How many times your Ad has been clicked.

CTR: Click Through Rate (%) e.g. Clicks/Impressions x 100. So if you get 5 clicks for every 100 impressions, the CTR is 5%.

Avg CPC: Average Cost Per Click.

Conversions: How many people have taken the desired action on your website e.g. how many people have bought or subscribed.

Conv Rate: Conversion rate (%) e.g. Conversions/Clicks x 100.

Cost/Conv: Cost per conversion e.g. how much money you spend to make that sale.

I hope that helps explain some of the terms that are bandied about on Google.  And I feel better for having done my little bit to keep things simple!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 15th, 2009 at 10:10 am and is filed under Marketing Services, Online Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.