Common Pay-per-Click Search Engine Terms

Impression – This is the equivalent of how many searches that were performed where your listing was displayed. For instance if you advertise under “sales training” and there are 10,000 searches per month and you were listed for the entire month, your listing would have been seen 10,000 times.

Click Through Rate (CTR) – Your CTR is how many of those impressions resulted in visitors to your website. If 1,000 of your total 10,000 searches resulted in visits to your website you would have a 10% CTR.

Average Click Cost – This is the average amount that each click through cost in a given period of time.

Total Cost – This is the cost of all your clicks for a given period of time.

Premium Listings – These listing are usually the top 1-5 listings depending on the engine. They are premium because they are distributed to all the partner sites for that engine.

Google Terms

To Visit the Google AdWords Glossary Click Here

Broad Match – This is a feature in Google that allows your ads to be displayed no matter what order the terms are in and what words accompany the terms. It gives you the most exposure on searches. The downfall of this is that you may be listed under “software” but your results will come up if someone searches on “free software”, if you are selling software this will attract the wrong type of visitors. Beware of your use of this.

Phrase Match – This feature will show your ad when searches are performed on your keywords as long as the phrase is not broken. For example, let’s say you have the term “Florida vacation”, your listing will show is someone searches on “summer Florida vacation” but not on “Florida summer vacation.” As long as the phrase is the same it can have terms added to the beginning and end of the main phrase.

Exact Match – This is when the term matches your listed term exactly.

Negative Match – This is used to specify words or phrases that you know you do not want to be listed under. If you enter “free” as a negative match and your normal keyword is “vacation” you will no show up when someone types in “free vacation.”

Geo-target – This is when you specify your country and language you want your search listings to appear in.

Overture Terms

Content Match – Content Match allows your Overture listings to be displayed on non-search pages that are relevant to your terms. Suppose someone is on MSN reading an article about classical music, if you keywords are relative to the ad then your listing will be displayed in the page.

Match Type – There are three different type of Match Types on Overture, Standard, Phrase and Broad. Overture automatically uses Standard which included plurals and misspellings. Phrase Match and Broad Match work in the same way that Google’s does.

For more information on search engine terms please visit The Search Engine Dictionary.