Essential Online Advertising Terminology
The world of advertising has been revolutionised by the internet and all that comes with it. The fastest growing market in advertising is easily online and companies are struggling to get to terms with it. There is a load of jargon involved with online advertising sales that you need to be comfortable with when buying or selling advertising. Below we have a list of what we think to be the essential terms you need to know in order to hold your ground.
Impressions – The number of page views.
Visits – The number of people who have visited your site
Unique Visitors – The number of unique visitors adjusts the total number of visitors for repeat visitors.
CPM (Cost Per Thousand Impressions) – Rarely used any more. This is a pricing system where adverts where sold at a fixed price per thousand impressions. Only profitable if your site creates a very large amount of impressions.
PPC (Pay Per Click) – This is a pricing system in which the advertiser is charged for each click. It is preferred to CPM was you are only paying when someone actually clicks on your advert as opposed to whenever it is displayed.
CPC (Cost Per Click) – This is the amount which an advertiser is charged for each click on their advert.
PPA (Pay Per Action) – This is a pricing system whereby the publisher is paid only when a certain action is completed. This could be the submission of an email address, the completion of a registration form or a sale. If the person does not complete the action, the publisher earns nothing from that click.
CPA (Cost Per Action) – This is the amount paid to the publisher upon completion of a specified action.
ROI (Return On Investment) – This is simply the return made on each dollar spent.
CTR (Click Through Ratio) – The % of people who click on adverts. This is calculated by dividing clicks by impressions and multiplying by 100.
eCPM (Estimated Earnings Per Thousand Impressions) – A way of forecasting how much revenue is generated per thousand impressions. This is the best way of comparing different revenue models.
Ad server – A piece of software used to serve ads to your website. Typically it will also be capable of tracking many of the statistics mentioned above. It allows you to manage campaigns, and often have extra features. Ad servers can be hosted locally or by a third party.
Ad network – a brokering service used to connect advertisers and publishers. They take a commission of all ad sales.
Affiliate marketing – An agreement between two sites in which the affiliate agrees to feature adverts for the others products or services in return for some form of compensation typically a commission. This is typically a PPA system.
Affiliate network – Similar to an ad network, but dealing with companies offering affiliate programs. These companies take a commission from all sales. The affiliate managers often give affiliates tips and rewards for performance.
There will of course be a follow up to this post containing slightly more advanced terminology. If you have any suggestions for more advanced terms mention them below or drop me an email. Can you see any other basic terms which you consider to be essential?
Curation – The latest in internet buzz
by Tom on February 29, 2008
in Internet Marketing, Jargon
I unfortunately was not able to attend Affiliate Summit West (ASW). I did however watch a lot of the videos, see the pictures and read the blog posts. Thanks so much to those who provided coverage of the event. It seems like a great event!
ASW all kicked off with a somewhat controversial keynote speech by Jason Calacanis on Affiliate Spam. Pretty brave at an affiliate marketing conference.
The gist of it
His major point was that most affiliate marketers were creating low quality but very high SEO value websites which were dominating search results. These sites were merely funnels pushing people towards buying products in order for the marketer to earn a commission. Jason essentially called affiliate marketers out for spamming search results pages reducing their quality and value for the end user. This is short sighted. The phrases Jason used to describe this practice were poisoning the well and polluting the river where the well and the river are the internet that we all need and use on such a regular basis.
This is a very good point and the industry’s lack of a governing body or any real guidelines have let marketers to plague search engines with their landing pages. In an ideal world, marketers would all focus on creating quality resources which add value. At the minute the focus of many is on so called thin affiliate sites which are simple the aforementioned landing pages funneling people towards the point of sale.
The problem
The problem is that this is not an ideal world. Much like the paid back link situation, if you don’t do it, someone else will. If you stop creating thin affiliate sites and start working on larger quality projects, someone else will be cashing in on those affiliate offers.
The result of the continued growth in affiliates pushing low quality sites with no goal other than to convert paid traffic into sales into search engine results pages will be of ever decreasing value. Affiliate marketers are some of the cleverest and hardest working people out there. Their knowledge of SEO is pretty much unbeatable. Eventually a Google search of something will yield nothing but affiliate landing pages. This makes it useless. Jason makes this point, and compares it to the decline of Usenet and sites such as Squidoo which suffered from being spammed to death.
The solution can be summarised into one word: Curation.
What is curation?
Curation essentially means maintaining, curing, healing and that type of thing. How does this apply to search engines? Well in the case of Mahalo – a new search engines owned by Calacanis, it means human processing of every page. This is the only true way of filtering out all spammy websites and making sure only the most important and relevant websites rank. This way when you search for hotels in Paris you will get great resources regarding hotels in Paris, as opposed to hundreds of travel sites packed with spammy offers and not giving you any real information such as contact numbers.
Other examples include the move from MySpace where loads of profiles can be created and it is full of spam to the likes of Facebook (though the rapid increase in numbers of applications has made it more spammy) and LinkedIn, where only real profiles are allowed. Here spam is reduced as people are held accountable.
Does this digital curation make business sense?
Well we shall have to see. It looks to me like it will. Jason Calacanis made a direct comparison to the move in food production from almost industrial mass production techniques to the free range and organic methods. In this case it has been proven, people are willing to pay the premium for a better quality product and a clearer conscience.
My conclusion
As bloggers we always talk about “adding value”. There is no reason why business should not be done with a clear conscience. The emphasis on being social is evolving into doing things for the greater good. There will always be someone out for a quick buck though.
Unless Google can find a way to keep on top of things then I can see the likes of Mahalo increasing in popularity. A human powered search engine is going to severely struggle to process the sheer volume of content the internet produces, so their functionality is going to be very limited for the majority of users for the foreseeable future.
Accountability for ones actions is something I can see developing very strongly. Anonymity affects peoples judgements, and when money is involved, the effects are rarely positive. At the same time, this will be countered by those who want privacy and are totally against a big brother type society.
Links and credits
Listen to Jason’s keynote speech at WebmasterRadio.FM or download it
Photo by affiliatesummit (From left to right, Missy Ward, Jason Calacanis, Shawn Collins)
Your thoughts
There is no doubt there is a lot of food for thought there. How do you feel about curation? Is it the direction we are heading in?
What is SEO?
The world has gone SEO crazy. SEO consultants are popping up everywhere. Web design companies are re branding as SEO companies and marketing companies are offering SEO services too. This is much more than a fad though, it is common sense mixed in with a load of jargon and hype. It is the latest in marketing strategy.
What does SEO stand for?
In short, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation (the process) or Search Engine Optimisers (those who carry out the process). It does pretty much what it says on the can. They work to optimise your web presence for search engines. This is achieved by understanding the algorithms search engines use in order to index websites and display them as search results. A SEO specialist will work on your site in order to achieve good rankings for the search terms you want your business to show up under. For example, if you are a wetsuit retailer, you would like your site to come top of the list when someone searches for “wetsuits”. The value of this is obvious – increased traffic, leading to increased sales.
What does a SEO company do?
They may do a variety of things, from re coding sites and fixing problems related to the search engines ability to crawl/spider the site to changing the structure. A big part of effort goes into the content. Search engines value relevant, regularly updated content. A SEO will make sure there is relevant content, containing relevant keywords that the company wants to rank well for, and that new content is regularly added.
Why do I need a SEO?
These consultants or companies specialise in this field, and are therefore able to offer expert advise. Unfortunately many web designers are not up to date with the latest industry standards and produce websites which are not totally search engine friendly. Here an SEO can help. SEOs are also generally more aware of marketing strategy than web designers.
What are White hat and Black hat?
White hat quite simply refers to SEO techniques recommended by search engines. There is no deception. Wikipedia sums it up as “creating content for users, not for search engines, and then making that content easily accessible to the spiders, rather than attempting to trick the algorithm from its intended purpose”.
Black hat techniques try to game the search engines algorithms and if discovered using these techniques, your website will be penalised. There are many techniques that can be used but Google is pretty good at catching people out. This approach does not offer the long term results of White hat SEO.
Sources of confusion
As the search engines do not publish guidelines but often hint towards things there are many grey areas. The search engines algorithms are top secret. SEOs therefore have to test and make assumptions. For example, it is commonly agreed that search engines read from top to bottom and left to right. Therefore it would be beneficial to have as little as possible between the top of your source code, and your content. Mark from 45n5.com made a report on this recently.
There is no formal recognised industry body or qualification for SEO. This pretty much allows anyone to call themselves a SEO expert so when it comes to picking one to work for you it is important to do your homework. Ask for references and contact them. Any good company should have no problem supplying references. This problem is highlighted by Jeremy Schoemaker who says:
This is why SEO’s are like used car salesman…
- They can always sell you something.
- They can never guarantee results.
- They can not be held accountable.
- They have a answer for everything.
- All the magic happens behind the curtains – they cant tell you what they are actual doing because that would be getting to much into the secret sauce.
- Anyone can be a SEO.
SEO is an ongoing process. It is not a one off thing. In order to rank well new content has to be created regularly. This is the reason that company blogs are increasingly popular. Blogs rank very well with search engines and typically produce new content on a regular basis.
Can I do SEO?
The truth is that yes, you can quite easily do some SEO. If you designed your web site yourself and know some html you can make some changes. Start by cleaning up your code. Make sure all CSS and Javascript is linked to in a separate file. Next look at your content. Do your titles contain the keywords that relate to what you have written? Does your content contain the keywords and variations of them? Have you used ALT tags for your images? These are all things you can start to do yourself.
UPDATE: I have just found out about this free ebook showing you some easy SEO techniques. If you are ready to take the next step and find out more about SEO this is ideal. Download The Easy SEO Report.
Have you hired a SEO expert? What criteria did you use for selecting them? Does your business have a blog? Is it for SEO purposes?