Part of what makes PPC so difficult to understand are the terms that are used to describe some of the processes (in our humble opinion). So, in this article we’ve pulled together some of the top words and phrases you may come across when you’re working with PPC – it’ll make it far easier to get your head around!
Keyword Relevance
One of the key elements to a successful PPC campaign is selecting relevant keywords for your business. Let’s take our cupcake example from the previous article; your keyword list should be relevant to all things cupcakes, your location, your competitors and the type of cupcake service you offer (takeaway / delivery / collection / celebrations, etc). The more ‘relevant’ these keywords are to your business, the more successful your campaign will be.
Landing Page Quality
A landing page can be a page already on your website, but it’s usually more successful with PPC if you create a one-off page that has been optimised with persuasive language, relevant content to the search and a clear goal or call-to-action. Having a landing page tailored to the campaign not only makes it more relevant in terms of quality, but you can also track campaign results a lot easier (more on that later).
Quality Score
This is all based on Google’s rating of the quality and relevance of your keywords, landing pages and PPC campaigns. So you really need to hit the nail on the head with the above to impress Google, receiving your reward in the form of more ad clicks and lower costs.
Click-Through-Rate (CTR)
In basic terms, this is the percentage of times a user clicks on your PPC advert after seeing it. One of the key measures we would use to judge a successful campaign. The higher the rate, the more times the ad has ‘worked.’
Conversion Rate
Coupled with CTR, this is actually how many times those clickers have converted into a sale or enquiry. So how many users actually make a purchase on the back of the advert.
Impressions
Not to be confused with ‘hits’ which is the number of times a website is viewed even if it’s by the same the user. Impressions is the number of times your PPC advert is displayed on search results pages. It might never get clicked on, but it’s more about the opportunity to be seen. Using this stat can often help you make improvement when it comes to managing your PPC campaign.
Return on Investment
This may sound fairly obvious, particularly to business owners, but it’s key to working out whether or not investing in PPC is worth doing again. The ratio of money gained or lost on the campaign relative to what has been invested will always be something we would measure. Ideally, you want to pay around £3 per click (which sounds like a lot), but convert each of those clicks into a £300 spend from the user. Now that’s really something worth investing in.
We could go on forever when it comes to a glossary of PPC terms, we think we’re highlighted the more crucial ones. If you want to study a little harder, we found this list from PPC Hero quite insightful. Alternatively, our consultants are on hand to support, build and run your campaigns for you – just give us a call.