Online Marketing 101 - Learn the abcs

Online advertising has a language all its own and if it sounds like a foreign language to you you're not alone. But it's important to get comfortable with the terms so that you can make the most out of your AdWords investment. To help make sense of it all, here's a scenario: Owen is planning a wedding and Brenda is a photographer. Brenda uses AdWords to advertise online to people who are looking for a photographer. This is one of her ads. Brenda takes three types of photos: Babies, real estate, and weddings. She uses different ads for each area of her business. Each collection of ads makes up an ad group. Brenda assigns to each ad group the words and phrases that are relevant to that part of her business. These are keywords. AdWords uses keywords to help decide which ads to show to people searching for things online. Brenda's three ad groups make up a campaign. The campaign is where Brenda decides big picture things, like her preferences for the devices her ads will show up on, and how much she spends. Owen types "experienced wedding photographer" into Google.com. The phrase "experienced wedding photographer" is his search term. He sees two types of search results: organic search results located in the middle of the page are the websites that match Owen's search term. No one can pay to appear in these results. The second type of results, paid results, are usually located at the top, bottom, or right side of the page. These are ads from businesses that are using AdWords. In most cases, an advertiser is charged when someone like Owen clicks one of these ads. Does Brenda's ad appear when Owen makes his search? That depends. Whenever someone uses Google to search there's an auction that determines which ads appear and in which order. Two main factors determine the outcome: How much an advertiser is willing to pay for a click, which is a bid, and something called "Quality Score." Quality Score is an estimate of how relevant and useful your ad and the page on your website it links to are to someone seeing your ad. Together, bid and Quality Score determine where and if Brenda's ad appears on Owen's search results page. Bids and budget are different. Your bids affect how much you'll spend each time someone clicks one of your ads. Your budget affects how much you'll spend each day on your entire campaign, which influences how often your ads are shown. As it turns out, Brenda's ad appears on Owen's search results page. This is an impression. Owen clicks Brenda's ad to find out more on her website. This is a click. Owen likes what he sees on Brenda's website and hires her to photograph his wedding. Brenda's ad has gotten Owen to do something valuable. Hire her for an event. This is a conversion. Owen is a satisfied customer. Brenda is a happy advertiser. These are results.