Pay Per Click Glossary

Our pay per click glossary explains some of the more commonly used terminology when discussing pay per click advertising.

Also consider reading our Frequently Asked Questions.

• Click Through Rate (CTR)
  This refers to the percentage of clicks you receive measured against the number of times your ad is shown (impressions). For example:
  1000 impressions / 10 clicks = 1% CTR
• Conversion
  This represents a visitor to your site that has completed a sale, visited a page you wanted them to reach, registered for your newsletter or reached any other goal. You have 'converted' them by getting them to complete a process on your site.
• Cost Per Click (CPC)
  This is the amount you pay each time someone clicks on your ad. This is most often displayed is the current average cost per click.
• Cost Per Conversion
  This is the average cost your pay to convert a user. This is important when the conversion represents a sales process as you are able to work out how much it costs you, on average, to sell a product or service using pay per click advertising.
• Cost Per Thousand (CPM)
  CPM stands for Cost Per Thousand - M representing the Roman numeral for 1000. It refers to the cost of your ad for every thousand times it is viewed.
• Hits
  One of the most misunderstood terms on the internet. 'Hits' does not represent the number of visitors to your site. Slightly technical, it means the number of 'file headers' returned to the browser from your site. Put simply, if your web page has four images on it then everytime that page is viewed it generates 5 hits. One hit for the page itself being sent back to the browser and four hits for the images - one each. An irrelevant metric in regards to web advertising success.
• Impression
  Sometimes known as 'ad views', this means the number of times your ad is viewed in a browser.
• Keyword
  These are the individual words used to indicate which searches your ad should be displayed along side of.
• Keyphrase
  A combination of keywords used to form a phrase commonly entered into search engines when users are searching.
• Pay Per Click (PPC)
  This is interchangeable with Search Engine Marketing (SEM) advertising. Both refer to advertising on search engines such as Google.
• Return On Investment (ROI)
  This important metric tells you how much money you have made compared to what you have spent.
• Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
  This is interchangeable with Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising. Both refer to advertising on search engines such as Google.
• Unique Visitors
  This measurement counts the number of separate individuals who visited your site. If one person visits your site 8 times they still only count as one unique visit.
• Visits
  The number of times users visited your website. In this case if one user visits your website 8 times, they count as 8 visits. Vists are not the same as 'hits' (see 'hits' above).