Digital Encyclopedia

Ad Rank is the order in which your ad appears on a search engine results page (SERP).  There are two variables: the first is your bid (how much are you willing to pay), and the second is your quality score.

Google will recalculate your ad rank every time someone searches on the terms that trigger your ad, and so you can never simply say that you want your ad to appear at #1 all the time.  Rather, it is a constantly moving target, and you need to analyze which ad position seems to drive the best ROI for your budget and goals.  Typically, the most desirable ad positions are not simply a top 10 result, but whatever top positioning allows your ad to show most prominently on the page. 

Usually, the premium real estate on a search engine results page is reserved for the top three ads.

A/B Testing (or Split Testing) is a method of testing which of two content options (usually an ad) converts better.  An easy example is when you create one ad campaign but have two different versions of ads that randomly show in the first phase of the campaign.  This type of A/B test is easy to conduct in AdWords, and you can quickly see which version (version A or B) performs better in terms of click through rate (CTR).

A/B Testing is important for all of your web content, including different versions of ads, your website, email campaigns, and other marketing assets.

A conversion is simply getting someone to respond to your call-to-action. Getting someone to open an email is a conversion. Having them click on the call-to-action link inside that email is another conversion. Going to the landing page and filling out a registration form to read your content is a conversion. And, of course, buying your product is the ultimate conversion.

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the process of increasing the percentage of website visitors who take a desired action — be that filling out a form, becoming customers, or otherwise. The CRO process involves understanding how users move through your site, what actions they take, and what’s stopping them from completing a desired action.

Your site’s conversion rate is the number of times a user completes a goal divided by your site traffic. If a user can convert in each visit (such as by buying a product), divide the number of conversions by the number of sessions (the number of unique times a user came to your site). If you sell a subscription, divide the number of conversions by the number of users.

Cost per impression (CPI) refers to the rate that an advertiser has agreed to pay per 1,000 views of a particular advertisement. A website that serves ads based on CPI doesn’t need the user to click on the ad – each appearance of the ad in front of a user counts as one impression. The advertiser agrees to pay a certain price for every 1,000 impressions the ad receives.

Cost per click (CPC) is a paid advertising term where an advertiser pays a cost to a publisher for every click on an ad. CPC is used to determine costs of showing users ads on search engines, Google Display Network for AdWords, social media platforms and other publishers. CPC is a significant factor in choosing bidding strategies and conversion bidding types to maximize clicks relative to budget size and target keywords.

CPC is a factor in ad types including:

• Text ads
• Shopping ads
• Image ads
• Video ads
• Twitter promoted tweets
• Facebook ads
• Instagram ads
• LinkedIn ads

CPC is often used when advertisers have a set daily budget. When the advertiser’s budget is hit, the ad is removed from the rotation for the remainder of the billing period.

Display Ads are image ads that appear on websites, and are used to target users more broadly to amplify awareness for your product or brand. The primary difference between Search and Display advertising is user intent. Where Search Ads target someone looking for something specific; display ads appear across various websites, even when viewers may not necessarily be in “shopping mode.” For most of our clients, especially non-E-Commerce, Display Ads are primarily used in retargeting campaigns.

Retargeting focuses on getting relevant ads back in front of users who visited your website, landing page, or competitors’ sites, but did not convert to a sale or lead. When someone clicks on your search ad, for example, we will then “follow” them across relevant sites in the Google Display Network, as well as Facebook and Instagram, and get your content back in front of the user until they convert.

Google AdWords is the advertising system that drives over 80% of Google’s revenue every year.  The name AdWords is a portmanteau that comes from the combination of two word segments: “Advertising” and “Keywords.”  AdWords is a highly complex system that consists of two main parts: search advertising (your ad is shown when someone searches for a specific sequence of keywords) and display advertising (your ad is shown when someone is browsing a website that is a member of the vast Google network of partners).

A group of more than 2 million websites, videos, and apps where your ads can appear.

Google’s Display Network allows you to define your audience in a way search engines can’t. You are able to target more than just keywords and you aren’t limited to the Google results page. Instead, GDN allows you to target websites by audience affinities, in-market segments, and custom intent keywords. You can even hand-pick website placements that fit your target audience.

In simple terms, KPIs provide a way to measure how well companies, business units, projects or individuals are performing in relation to their strategic goals and objectives. KPIs provide the most important performance information that enables organizations to understand whether or not the organisation is on track toward its stated objectives. KPIs are vital navigational instruments, giving a clear picture of current levels of performance and whether the business is where it needs to be.

Keywords are the keywords and phrases in your web content that make it possible for people to find your site via search engines. A website that is well optimized for search engines “speaks the same language” as its potential visitor base with keywords for SEO that help connect searchers to your site. In other words, you need to know how people are looking for the products, services or information that you offer, in order to make it easy for them to find you—otherwise, they’ll land on one of the many other pages in the Google results page. Implementing keywords in effective SEO strategy will help your site rank organically above your competitors.

A landing page is the first page you “land on” after clicking a link. It could be almost anything: your home page, a blog post, a product page, a lead capture page. However, as simple as it sounds, when we talk about “landing pages” in online marketing, we usually mean a page that is specifically designed to receive and convert traffic from an online marketing campaign ad. Using this alternate definition, a home page wouldn’t qualify as a “landing page“—it isn’t designed to convert traffic from a specific marketing campaign.

Link bait is content that’s specifically formulated to attract links, and is an important part of your SEO strategy. It’s so unique that, given the opportunity, any visitor would be hard-pressed not to link to it. These links then help to improve the site’s rankings in search engines. Links not only help boost the overall authority of your website—thus helping the site as a whole to attract more traffic from organic search—but most pieces of linkbait also rank very well for many related terms.

Link building is the process of getting other websites to link back to your website. All marketers and business owners should be interested in building links to drive referral traffic and increase their site’s authority.

Why build links? Google’s algorithms are always evolving, but backlinks remain an important factor in how every search engine determines which sites rank for which keywords. Building links is one of the many tactics used in search engine optimization (SEO) because links are a signal to Google that your site is a quality resource worthy of citation. Therefore, sites with more backlinks tend to earn higher organic rankings.

Local SEO is an effective way to market your local business online, it helps businesses promote their products and services to local customers at the exact time they’re looking for them online. 46% of all google searches are local. Local search has been around for years, but it was limited due to people only using their desktop computers. With the recent growth in mobile internet access, mobile search has exploded, so local SEO has become hugely important for the success of any business offering products or services to a community within a close geographic range to them.

Describes traffic that comes in from markets where the brand is present and is crucial for businesses that have multiple locations. If a business has multiple locations or services multiple areas, Multi-Location SEO is important in order to maximize both your search traffic and user experience. 

You should consider doing the following:

1. Build out unique pages for each location
2. Optimize each location page for SEO
3. Optimize the content for each location
4. Create a Google My Business profile for each location
5. Build local business listings for each location
6. Get reviews for each location

Off-site SEO refers to all aspects of search engine optimization that relate to how your website is perceived by the outside world.  This is the fun part of SEO, because you can constantly improve, and the upside is incredibly high.  Examples of off-site SEO include things like:

1. Link building campaigns
2. Creating link bait
3. Directory submissions
4. Digital public relations
5. Citations
6. Social media campaigns

On-site SEO refers to all the things you do on your own website to optimize it for search engine discovery.  On-site SEO includes things like writing page title tags, meta description tags, and updating H1 tags.  It also includes things like creating interesting on-site content (daily blogging, or landing page content) that contains your specific keywords.  Finally, it includes all the technical aspects of SEO, such as making sure that you have a clean sitemap, making sure you have the proper 301 re-directs in place, and anything else that is behind the scenes on your website, but that helps you get noticed by search engines.

Some people think of on-site SEO as a more foundational side of search engine optimization.  Once your on-site SEO is taken care of, you need to focus on off-site SEO, which is the side of SEO that helps you rise significantly in the rankings.

Organic traffic refers to the “free” traffic that Google sends to your website.  (It’s important to remember that Google is in the business of “organizing the world’s information, and so if someone is searching for your business, Google wants to send them to you for free.)  Search engine optimization is the field of optimizing your website so that Google and other search engines can see it, and knows when to include it on a search engine results page (SERP).

PageRank is an algorithm used by the Google search engine to measure the authority of a webpage. While the details of PageRank are proprietary, it is generally believed that the number and importance of inbound links to that page are a significant factor.

PageRank was the original concept behind the creation of Google. It is based loosely on the system of citation, where a paper referenced by many other papers is considered to be more authoritative/important than a paper with few citations. Given this line of thinking, a link to a site is similar to a citation in that it implies authority. PageRank is just one of many factors that Google uses to decide where a site appears in search rankings for a particular query.

ROAS stands for return on ad spend—a marketing metric that measures the amount of revenue your business earns for each dollar it spends on advertising. For all intents and purposes, ROAS is practically the same as another metric you’re probably familiar with: return on investment, or ROI. In this case, the money you’re spending on digital advertising is the investment on which you’re tracking returns.

At the most basic level, ROAS measures the effectiveness of your advertising efforts; the more effectively your advertising messages connect with your prospects, the more revenue you’ll earn from each dollar of ad spend. The higher your ROAS, the better.

A way to reconnect with specific types of users who have previously interacted with your website through targeted ads or email campaigns.

When looking at a user’s initial interaction within your website you are able to use that information to “retarget” them with specific ads based on how they engaged with your content. 

Because you are able to target people based on actions they have taken, retargeting is a highly effective and mandatory aspect of any successful sales funnel.  For example, you can show an ad to someone who has started to register for an event, and your ad can specifically prompt the person to finish their registration.

This type of traffic is generated by visitors who access your site through paid advertising promotions. When a user clicks on a banner, advertisement, pop-up, or a video that leads to your website it is considered paid traffic.

PPC stands for pay-per-click, a model of internet marketing in which advertisers pay a fee each time one of their ads is clicked. Essentially, it’s a way of buying visits to your site, rather than attempting to “earn” those visits organically.

Once active, PPC ads allow your business to appear in search engines’ results pages based on specific keywords and phrases your potential buyer is searching for. Because you only pay for the ad only when users click on it, search engines are incentivized to show it to the most relevant audiences.

Every time your ad is clicked, sending a visitor to your website, you have to pay the search engine a small fee. When PPC is working correctly, the fee is minor, because the visit is worth more than what you pay for it. In other words, if we pay $3 for a click, but the click results in a $300 sale, we are likely generating a healthy profit.

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Mea facilisis urbanitas moderatius id. Vis detraxit periculis ex, nihil expetendis in mei. Vis ei rationibus definiebas. Mei an pericula euripidis, hinc partem ei est. Eos ei nisl graecis, vix aperiri consequat an. Eius lorem tincidunt vix at, alienum phaedrum torquatos nec eu. Vel pertinax sensibus id, error epicurei mea et.

Mea facilisis urbanitas moderatius id. Vis detraxit periculis ex, nihil expetendis in mei. Vis ei rationibus definiebas. Mei an pericula euripidis, hinc partem ei est. Eos ei nisl graecis, vix aperiri consequat an. Eius lorem tincidunt vix at, alienum phaedrum torquatos nec eu. Vel pertinax sensibus id, error epicurei mea et.

Mea facilisis urbanitas moderatius id. Vis detraxit periculis ex, nihil expetendis in mei. Vis ei rationibus definiebas. Mei an pericula euripidis, hinc partem ei est. Eos ei nisl graecis, vix aperiri consequat an. Eius lorem tincidunt vix at, alienum phaedrum torquatos nec eu. Vel pertinax sensibus id, error epicurei mea et.

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A strategy used to increase the visibility of a website in search engines and gain traffic through paid advertisements. It is one of the best ways to grow your business and promote your products in a competitive marketplace. Advertisers will bid on keywords that users will search for online when looking for specific products or services. These keywords give businesses the opportunity to show up in the search results.

A strategy used to increase organic and unpaid traffic on your website from search engines results page. This process is about maximizing the number of visitors your website will receive by ensuring that the site includes unique, engaging and relevant information in order to appear high on the list of results on the search engine.

The page that users receive when they search for something online using a search engine such as Google. These pages supply the user with both paid results (top of the page) and organic (under the paid) results. When your website is displayed on a search engines result page it is important that it has a high ranking in order to receive higher volumes of qualified traffic compared to competitors.

The King of E-Commerce. Shopify, like WordPress, is a website builder that allows developers to utilize custom themes – foundations of websites, and plugins – tools for websites. While WordPress is like a blank canvas, Shopify is a more closed ecosystem where everything is purposefully designed for building, growing and managing online stores. Long story short, we build on Shopify for clients that are selling high volumes of products online, and everything else is on WordPress.

Almost 40% of websites online are built using WordPress. It is an open source website building platform that enables developers to use millions of custom themes as the foundations, or templates, for new sites. WordPress plugins (web tools) are used to improve quality of life for the customer, the business owner – you – and the development team to make cost-effective future edits, manage SEO and Ads insights, etc.

Search Ads are text ads that are displayed on Google results pages when a user searches for a product or service. They are extremely effective because they are designed to target an active searcher who is on a mission to find something specific; and the ads are matched to designated keywords – such as “Real Estate Agent Toronto.”