visible-strategies

Advertising Network: A service where ads are bought centrally through one company, and displayed on multiple websites that contract with that company for a share of revenue generated by ads served on their site.

 

Algorithm: The technology a search engine uses to deliver results to a query. Search engines utilize several algorithms in tandem to deliver a page of search results or keyword-targeted search ads.

 

Anchor Text: The clickable text part of a hyperlink. The text usually gives visitors or search engines important information on what the page being linked to is about.

 

Click Through Rate (CTR): The rate (expressed in a percentage) at which users click on an ad. This is calculated by dividing the total number of clicks by the total number of ad impressions. CTR is an important metric for Internet marketers to measure the performance of an ad campaign.

 

Content Network: A group of websites that agree to show ads on their site, served by an ad network, in exchange for a share of the revenue generated by those ads. For example: Google AdSense or the Yahoo Publisher Network.

 

Contextual Advertising: Advertising that is targeted to a website based on the page's content, keywords, or category. Ads in most content networks are targeted contextually.

 

Cost Per Action (CPA): A form of advertising where payment is dependent upon an action that a user performs as a result of the ad. The action could be making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or asking for a follow-up call. An advertiser pays a set fee to the publisher based on the number of visitors who take action. Many affiliate programs use the CPA model.

 

Cost Per Click (CPC): A performance-based advertising model where the advertiser pays a set fee for every click on an ad. The majority of text ads sold by search engines are billed under the CPC model. The accepted term for this advertising is PPC or pay-per-click.

 

Cost Per Thousand (CPM): An ad model that charges advertisers every time an ad is displayed to a user, whether the user clicks on the ad or not. The fee is based on every 1,000 ad impressions (M is the Roman numeral for 1,000). Most display ads, such as banner ads, are sold by CPM.

Geo-Targeting: Delivery of ads specific to the geographic location of the searcher. Geo-targeting allows the advertiser to specify where ads will or won't be shown based on the searcher's location, enabling more localized and personalized results.

Facebook: Facebook is a global social networking microblogging website that is operated. It is privately owned by Facebook, Inc. 2009 was its first break even year, supporting itself with advertising revenue.

Googlebot: Google uses several user-agents to crawl and index content in the Google.com search engine. Googlebot describes all Google spiders. All Googlebots begin with "Googlebot"; for example, Googlebot-Mobile: crawls pages for Google’s mobile index; Googlebot-Image: crawls pages for Google’s image index.

 

Inbound Link: An inbound link is a hyperlink to a particular website from an outside site, bringing traffic to that website. Inbound links are an important element that most search engine algorithms use to measure the popularity of a website.

 

Invisible Web: A term that refers to the vast amount of information on the web that isn't indexed by search engines. Coined in 1994 by Dr. Jill Ellsworth.

 

Keyword: A word or phrase entered into a search engine in an effort to get the search engine to return matching and relevant results. Many websites offer advertising targeted by keywords, so an ad will only show when a specific keyword is entered.

 

Link Bait: Editorial content, often sensational in nature, posted on a website and submitted to social media sites in hopes of building inbound links from other sites. Or, as Matt Cutts of Google says, "something interesting enough to catch people's attention."

 

Link Building: The process of getting quality websites to link to your website, in order to improve search engine rankings. Link building techniques can include buying links, reciprocal linking, or entering barter arrangements.

 

Meta Tags: Information placed in the HTML header of a website, providing information that is not visible to browsers, but can be used in varying degrees by search engines to index a page. Common meta tags used in search engine marketing are title, description, and keyword tags.

 

Microblogging:  A web service that allows the subscriber to broadcast short messages to other subscribers of the service. Two example of microblogging platforms are Facebook and Twitter.

 

Quality Score: A score assigned by search engines that is calculated by measuring an ad's clickthrough rate, analyzing the relevance of the landing page, and considering other factors used to determine the quality of a site and reward those of higher quality with top placement and lower bid requirements. Some factors that make up a quality score are historical keyword performance, the quality of an ad's landing page, and other undisclosed attributes. All of the major search engines now use some form of quality score in their search ad algorithm.

 

Real Time Search: Term introduced in 2009. Its definition and use is still in flux. Some are defining it as items with no delay. With this definition a blog post wouldn’t qualify because it takes time to write and to become part of search. A Tweet might qualify.

 

Return On Investment (ROI): The amount of money an advertiser earns from their ads compared to the amount of money the advertiser spends on their ads.

 

Search Advertising: Also called Paid Search. An advertiser bids for the chance to have their ad display when a user searches for a given keyword. These are usually text ads, which are displayed above or to the right of the algorithmic (organic) search results. Most search ads are sold by the PPC model, where the advertiser pays only when the user clicks on the ad or text link.