Online advertising is booming. The more people click, the more hungry business becomes for the eyeballs (and wallets) of the clickees. Could this be the fattest “cash cow” on the earth?
Web users want to find stuff and business want to be found. Matching these two is the perfect scenario, may be in theory. The truth is that there is still a long way to go before clicks and sales are perfectly in sync. Anyone who has used advertising programs knows that only a small proportion of the original search traffic converts into sales – and when you are bidding for every click, that can get a little scary at times.
So here is a brief glossary of online advertising terms to help you maintain your sense of humour while things evolve:
- Auto-Bidding – Letting two computers – yours and your competitor’s – play poker with your credit cards.
- Click-Through-Rate (CTR) – How many people “accidentally” clicked on your advert.
- Bounce Rate – How many people realised it was an accident and hit their back-button, after you paid for their click.
- Cost-Per-Click (“CPC”) – How desperate you and your competitors are for business. (There was a CPC for search term “mortgage” at $180 – for one click. This is crazy!)
- Return on Investment (“ROI”) – Putting your credit card statement and cheque account statement side by side and seeing which is bigger.
- Page Rank (“PR”) – Discovering how insignificant you are compared to Google or Yahoo.
The reality is that online advertising can work spectacularly well. Inefficient as it might be at times, it is far more targeted than mass media. It is getting ever more sophisticated, especially when you consider sites like Facebook. They know everything about you and can serve you an advert for “getting ripped in 2 weeks without exercise” the moment you update your status to “man, i eat this dinner and was sh’t!”
Maybe it will all get too hard for small or medium business, who simply can not afford the rising click costs of internet advertising or the time to devote to learning the schemes and systems required to capitalize effectively on all this paid traffic. Perhaps it is time to get relevant internet traffic at a reasonable price at BuxUp.com