Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Also see: Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Terminology

• Click-Through Rate (CTR): Percentage of ad impressions that result in clicks. If a 100 people see your ads and three of them click on them, that's 3% CTR (3/100).
• Cost per Click (CPC): How much it costs you to buy a click. The maximum you're willing to pay to get a potential customer on your site.
• Cost per Acquisition (CPA): How much it costs you to gain a paying customer (not just a click).

Workflow

Basic workflow: find keywords, group them into ad groups, test different ads and landing pages for each group. Remove underperforming ads, make tweaks to better-performing ones.

• Short-tail term example: "census data"
• Long-tail term example: "1990 census data"

Long-tail keywords are less competitive, combine them to reach a bigger audience than using short tail keywords.

The average CTR is around 2%. Google assigns low-quality score to ads with a CTR of <1.5%. Rewrite them, target a different audience, or ditch them.

CTR is the biggest factor in quality scores.