Understanding the Lingo of PPC

Connectica • October 2, 2015 • Branding

South Florida PPC

Read Time: 2 minutes

South Florida PPC Jargon Explained Simply

PPC can be a daunting experience for any business owner trying to get more traffic to their webpage. In our previous post, we covered the basics of PPC marketing and how it works. But there’s still a lot to understand, especially when it comes to the terminology surrounding PPC. In this post, we’ll give you a crash course in some PPC lingo that could help your online business practices, whether you’re based here in South Florida or further abroad.

PPC: A Quick Recap
PPC stands for ‘Pay per Click’, and refers to the auction process by which businesses bid on keywords in order to have their advertisements seen by more Internet users. The reason it’s called ‘Pay per Click’ is because the advertiser pays for each ‘click’ thereafter. When a user clicks on the advertisement and is redirected to the business’s webpage, the business pays a nominal fee for that redirected traffic. With enough clicks, that fee can build up and become quite costly. However, it can also lead to increased revenue for the company and so the cost of PPC can be worth it.

Now that we’ve recapped the essentials, let’s dive in and look at some important PPC lingo.

Quality Score
Search engines determine the eligibility of your advertisement based on a number of factors: the relevance of the selected keyword, click-through rates, and the quality of your landing page. In other words, PPC is not just about being the highest bidder. Search engines don’t want to redirect users to useless or uninformative web pages, and the quality score helps them determine which advertisements are worth the user’s time. The quality score can also determine where your ad is shown in the sponsored ad space, and how much you’ll pay per click (this is known as CPC, or ‘Cost per Click’).

Click-Through Rates
The click-through rate (CTR) is a ratio determined by the number of clicks an advertisement receives, as compared to the total number of users who saw the advertisement. So, if 100 people search a specific keyword and see your advertisement, but only 2 people actually click on it, that’s a poor CTR. But if 60 or more people click on your ad, then clearly it’s targeting the right audience and is relevant to users. This is why CTR can also be used to measure the efficacy of an online marketing campaign.

Landing Page
When the user – your intended customer – clicks on the advertisement, they are redirected to the landing page. This is really important, as an inappropriate landing page can result in no sales and actually cost you more money than the PPC marketing is worth! In this case, it’s best not to use your homepage as a landing page. Where a homepage is more generalized and has multiple links the user could click on, the landing page focuses on a specific action you want the user to follow. For example, the landing page could advertise a special offer that requires the user to subscribe to your site. This helps you capture important marketing information from the user and encourage them to sign up for your services.

These are just three central terms in the world of PPC. From ‘long tail keywords’ to ‘qualified leads’, there are an inexhaustible number of things to be aware of when opting for PPC marketing. Contact Connectica Inc. for more information or help with creating a successful PPC campaign.

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