Search Engine Marketing

Even if you’ve used AdWords for a while, and even if you’ve studied for, and/or taken the Advertising Professional exam, the ranking system AdWords uses to determine your ad’s position remains a bit of mystery. The team at Google found that to be the case often enough that they created a video to explain.

“When we go to conferences or read posts in forums, we find that advertisers sometimes know more about advanced features than about the basics of how AdWords works. So, we’ve decided to take some time to get back to basics and talk about how the AdWords auction actually works. To help you, we’ve brought along our Chief Economist, Hal Varian, to walk you through the auction and explain how your maximum cost-per-click (CPC) bid and Quality Score determine how much you actually pay for an ad click on Google’s search results pages.” http://adwords.blogspot.com/introduction-to-ad-auction.html

I’m not the only one who’s excited to learn about the basics of the system behind the ranking and placement of my PPC ads. Take a look at this two part tutorial by ROI Revolution.

“In this two part blog series, I will explain what Quality Score actually is, how the ad auction works, and how Quality Score determines your ads’ positioning and costs per click.”

“Towards the end of 2008 and even more in Q1 of this year, Google has been slowly revealing what is included in Quality Score. The video explains that Quality Score consists of clickthrough rate (CTR), relevancy, and landing page quality.” read this article…

“Some of this post may make you feel like you’re back in high school math class, but bear with me. These formulas really do reveal Quality Score’s crucial role in the AdWords system and how you can spend less to get more.” read this article…

To the unitiated the difference between Search Engine Optimisation [SEO] and Search Engine Marketing [SEM] must seem invisible or confusing. Not to mention the alphabet soup of other terms and acronymns such as PPC, CTR, etc. I’ll quote and link to a couple of fairly simple explanations.

“Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) are Two different things altogether. The two things go hand in hand but are often thought of as one thing. Search Engine Optimization is what is done to your site to ensure that the end users have a friendly easy to use web site with SEF Menus and SEF URLS that Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask.com crawl through and find your content. Search Engine Marketing is doing the advertising and marketing of your site. Ironical this is all done “offsite” whereas SEO is mostly done “onsite”.
http://thedudeoforkut.blogspot.com/2007/07/difference-between-seo-and-sem.html

“Many people misunderstand the goal of search engine optimization as distinct from search engine marketing. Applying SEM expectations to SEO can lead to significant frustration and disappointment.”
http://www.newfangled.com/difference_between_sem_and_seo

A definition of search engine marketing would be useful, the following from Wikipedia:

“Search engine marketing, or SEM, is a form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs). According to the Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization, SEM methods include: search engine optimization (or SEO), paid placement, and paid inclusion.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_marketing