Glossary of Advertising, Marketing, and Internet Terms

April 30, 2005

Ad Click :

Number of times a particular ad is clicked.

Ad Views :

Also known as impressions. The number of times an ad is viewed by a browser. If an ad is blocked by a firewall or web filter and not seen by the consumer, but the browser attempted to attain the information, often the ad is considered viewed even though it was not.

Bandwidth :

The amount of information that can be sent at a time through an Internet connection. This is often also referred to by a host ISP as how much total information can be sent in a month from your website to visitors to your website.

B2B - Business-to-Business:

This often refers to a retain business working with an advertising or e-commerce business.

Banner :

An advertisement on a webpage, similar to a yellow page ad, except it usually contains a link to the advertising page.

Broad Keywords:

These are very general keywords that are searched often. Many times are searched for information purposes as much as purchasing reasons. For some sites and keywords, these can convert well enough to have a positive ROI, but in general they don’t have the conversion rate of the other keyword types. (i.e. travel, real estate)

Browser:

The program used to view WebPages. (i.e. Netscape, Internet Explorer, Opera)

Browser Caching :

Often a browser will store WebPages in temporary folders on your computer to aid in surfing speed. When someone revisits your webpage and they have a cached version, they will view the old page instead of the new one (there are some metatags and browser settings that will prevent this) leading to your website being undercounted in total page views and visitors.

Click :

When you right click on a hyperlink or follow a link to another webpage you have “clicked” the link.

Click Through :

Most often referred to as a percentage. The amount of times an ad or link was viewed and then clicked on. If an ad was viewed 100 times and clicked on 10 times its click through rate is 10%.

Cloaking:

Also known as a Cloaked Page or a Stealth Page. This

Cookie:

A small text file placed on your hard drive to store information about the site you visited. They usually have two purposes. One is to track visitors and how often they come back to a webpage or how long they stay on a website. The second is to store your preferences about a website so when you revisit the site your preferences are viewed instead of that websites default view.

CPC - Cost per click:

Often referred to for PPC accounts. It is the amount of money paid each time a visitor clicks on a link.

CPM :

Cost per 1000 impressions. This refers to ad impressions and how much it costs the advertiser every time an ad is displayed 1000 times.

Direct Keywords:

These keywords are directly related to your products or services. They usually include a descriptive term. These keywords make up the bulk of most campaigns, and usually have a positive ROI. They are not searched for as often as broad keywords, so sometimes a campaign can be helped by the increased exposure from broad keywords. (i.e. Mexico travel, Pennsylvania real estate)

Domain Name :

The Internet address of a website. For example, iDjinni’s domain name is www.idjinni.com.

DTC - Direct to Consumer:

is a term often applied to advertising targeted at consumers and not businesses.

Doorway Page:

Also known as a Gateway page, it is a page specifically made to rank high in search engines. There are legitimate ways to use this technique (see FAQ Do we use Doorway Pages). Often pages made with Flash coding or a lot of Java are unindexable by search engines and thus need a corresponding page for search engines to index.

E-mail :

Also known as electronic mail, it is the transmission of a file from one communication network to another. It is the most common form of communication on the Internet.

Flash :

A type of coding generally used for animated graphics.

Short for Google

Hit :

Each time a page is loaded, it receives one hit. If a page contains two images, the server logs will indicate one page and two image hits. This is used to measure the amount of traffic pages receive.

Host:

A machine that is connected to the Internet. It usually refers to a machine that “hosts” or contains code or programs that are accessible by others connected to the Internet, the most common code or program is a webpage.

HTML - Hyper Text Markup Language:

This is the base language used to build WebPages.

Hypertext:

Also known as a Link, it is text or an image that can be clicked on to call up another document or another section within the same document.

Impressions :

This often refers to every time an advertisement is viewed. When one document calls for an ad to be viewed (usually weather is it actually viewed or not) one impression is recorded. See also CPM.

IP Address - Internet Protocol Address:

Each machine connected to the Internet has its own address reflected in numbers. For ease of use, most people use a domain name instead of the IP address. However, over time these terms have been mistakenly interchanged.

ISP - Internet Service Provider:

This refers to a machine that provides people a way to connect to the Internet. When you dial into the net, your modem is connecting to your ISP. Once you are connected, you can access the Internet.

JAVA :

A general programming language, similar to C++ developed by Sun Microsystems. It can be used to add various features to a webpage when viewed through a JAVA enabled browser.

JAVA enabled browser:

Referring to a browser that supports the JAVA language. Some browsers need a special plug-in to allow JAVA to be viewed. Also, when changing the security functions of a browser, you are often changing if JAVA can be viewed by your browser or how the JAVA language is handled.

Keywords:

Words entered into a search engine to form a query.

KW:

Short for keywords

Link :

Refers to Hypertext, it is text or an image that can be clicked on to call up another document or another section within the same document.

Log File:

A file that contains information about past actions. The most commonly referred to Log File is whenever a webpage is viewed the hosting machine logs the documents that are requested.

Meta Tags :

HTML coding that gives information about a webpage.

Negative Keywords:

These are filtering words. If your keywords contain a negative keyword, and that word is included in a search term, your ad will not show. (i.e. If your Google AdWords keyword list looks like:

Blue Widget
-fuzzy (the - sign meaning negative inside an AdWords account)

A search done for blue widget would show your ad, a search for green blue widget would show your ad, but a search for fuzzy blue widget would not show your ad because it contains a negative keyword.

Niche Keywords:

These keywords are highly specific, but have low search rates. They usually have the highest ROI and conversion rates among all keywords in a campaign. Often, there are not enough niche keywords to only rely on these to make up a campaign as there just are not enough searches done in a month for them to sustain a business. They are a nice addition to direct keywords as they usually have a lower bid price. (i.e. Mexico city vacation packages, Philadelphia real estate)

Opt-in:

Usually referring to e-mail, it is when permission is given to send e-mail (often newsletters and email advertisements) to a specific email address.

OV:

Short for Overture (now called Yahoo Search Marketing

Page Views :

The number of times a particular web page was viewed. A website is generally made up of multiple pages.

Portal :

A website that has links to a multitude of links organized by categories.

PPC - Pay-Per-Click:

The amount a website pays another company when someone clicks from one website to the advertising website.

ROI - Return on Investment:

ROI generally stands for the amount of profit made from an advertising campaign versus the amount spent on the campaign.

Search Engine:

A website that indexes other websites and when a search is performed, queries its database about the search and shows the most relevant websites.

Server:

See Host.

Spider:

A program that indexes WebPages and follows links on WebPages to find other WebPages to index. This is the most common way a search engine updates and adds to its database of WebPages.

Sticky:

A term used to describe websites that visitors spend a long time viewing. A website with search capacity or in depth content pages is generally more sticky than one without such features as a visitor may spend time searching the site and reading articles.

Unique Visitors:

The number of different people who visit a site over a given time frame. If three people visit the site, and two of them return later. The site has five hits, but only three unique visitors.

URL - Uniform Resource Locator:

It is the exact address of a webpage. The url www.idjinni.com/index.html and www.idjinni.com/glossary/index.html are two different urls in the same domain (www.idjinni.com). URLs are generally shown as links on WebPages.

Visits:

The total number of hits a particular page, often referred to as visits per month. If three people visit a website, and two come back within the month, that page got five total visits that month.

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AdSense Optimization Heat Map

April 27, 2005

Jen is reporting on a new study Google AdSense just launched that shows publishers the best places to receive more clicks on their website.

Jen’s Article.
AdSense Optimization Tip Page.

Written by Brad Geddes aka eWhisper · Filed Under eWhisper's Notebook | Leave a Comment

Photography Marketing

April 21, 2005

High gloss, sexually charged images bombard us at every turn. Walking in the subway, riding the bus, surfing online—no matter where we turn, photography marketing is there to provoke, amaze, and shock us out of our hum drum travels.

For a recent marketing campaign in Taipei, Taiwan, a sex-ed nonprofit decided to use the image of a nun in one of their photo marketing campaigns. The caption under the photo read, in English and Chinese, “I don’t use them, but I know what they are.” The outcry was mixed. Many people thought the ads were funny and informative, two good things in an age where unprotected sex is spreading AIDS around the world at an alarming rate. Other thought that the ads were in bad taste, and one Catholic group in particular objected to the use of a nun.

Due to the protests of this Catholic group, the ads were pulled from the subways and bus stops where they were running, but it is arguable that this controversy did more to promote the cause of the nonprofit than the ads themselves, as every major Chinese and English language newspaper in the city ran the story as a short news article, complete with their personal take or spin.

When all is said and done, successful photo marketing can be boiled down to two different characteristics. Either A: it is seen by a wide amount of people, or B: it is seen by a smaller group but it exciting enough to get people talking.

For the smaller business, option A may be out of the question. Most of us cannot afford even a 10 second spot on the giant screen in Times Square, and the subway systems around the world are well aware of the lucrative nature of their advertising space.

But with a sexy, provocative photo, you can do much more with just a few low cost locations than many big companies do with all the resources and prime advertising spots in the world.

In fact, one such prime location is sitting right in front of you—the Internet. Mostly still untapped by resourceful entrepreneurs, the Internet remains the most valuable commodity for photography marketing.

American Apparel, and LA based clothing company, knew exactly that when it began flooding the Internet with photographs of young people, sometimes employees of the company, wearing American Apparel clothes. The photographs were cheap to make, as they were mostly taken by the owner of the company, and the combination of amateur models and the high quality, sweatshop free clothing was enough to have people talking from SF to NYC and all the way to London.

By using a search-based advertising system, your photography marketing could be placed directly where it will be seen by the largest possible amount of potential customers. Combining that with a controversial or exciting photo set is enough to market your business beyond the boundaries of your advertising budget, and place you on a plane with the big boys.

Written by Brad Geddes aka eWhisper · Filed Under Vertical Marketing | Comments Off

AOL launches Pay Per Call

April 15, 2005

AOL will feature Ingenio ads on regular search results. This will be the first major distribution deal for Ingenio.

Pay Per Call works very similar to Pay Per Click - a business only pays when a call is in place. Ingenio has informed us that they have quite a few quality control specs in place. For instance, a call won’t be charged if it’s under a certain number of seconds. Also, under some conditions they’ll be able to tell if an answering machine picked up and then not charge the call as well.

However, the business also won’t know by picking up the phone if the call is coming through AOL or just another phone call. Ingenio played with some ‘whisper’ technology to let the business know the phone call was originating from an Ingenio ad, but the added few seconds created a scenario where many callers hung up before the call was connected.

This will lead to advertisers having to login to the Ingenio system to see when they’re receiving phone calls, and then try to correlate reported phone call times with actual calls into the business.

There are quite a few bugs to be worked out as to how measuring the value of this service, but there is a lot of potential in this arena for a small business advertiser.

Related Links:
Ingeno’s Home Page
AOL Search Engine

Written by Brad Geddes aka eWhisper · Filed Under Blog, Local Advertising News, PPCall | Leave a Comment

Yahoo gives away free websites

April 12, 2005

Yahoo Local has added a new functionality to their free and enhanced business profiles, a free five page website.

These websites use very basic templates (four are available) and basic listing information.

It has yet to be seen if these websites will be crawled by Google, and how Yahoo will list them in their local search results. One is allowed to link websites, so it may help local website link popularity, or possibly drive some website traffic to a site. The main purpose of these sites is to create phone call, email, or walk in store traffic.

A Yahoo user ID is required to create a site, however, if you own multiple businesses, all of them can be linked to the same user ID.

Additional Information:
Yahoo Local
Yahoo Free Listings Page

Written by Brad Geddes aka eWhisper · Filed Under Blog, Local Advertising News | Leave a Comment

Lawyer Marketing

April 8, 2005

In today’s world, lawyers have an increasingly more dichotomous personality in the views of the American public. On the one hand, they are reviled as bringing the downfall of human mores, while on the other, they are leaned upon to right the wrongs of that same civilization that they were purported to be destroying.

In fact, lawyers are both and neither of these things. In the majority of cases, we can see that the mass of litigation that is begun each year in the United States is not the fault of the lawyers themselves, but the fault of both a community that is constantly looking for the proverbial “free lunch”, and by a system of laws that allows people to sue indiscriminately, even if the defendant could not have been farther from the action that they are being accused of causing or aiding.

The fact of the matter is that not all lawyers deal in this sort of law-many consider it their task to right the wrongs that are brought about by a legal system that by its very nature contains flaws. In many cases these men and women are the only bulwark that stops injustice from spreading, and from loopholes being exploited by greedy men.

To these lawyers, it is of crucial concern that their services be promoted in the most efficient possible fashion. In many cases good lawyers as well as bad will just sit around waiting for the phone to ring with a potential client.

But with a geo-targeted online marketing campaign, lawyers no longer need to wait for their ad in the phonebook to start having an effect.

Lawyer marketing is a fast growing field, and if your firm is ready to step out of the shadows and into the limelight, advertising online may be the fastest way to reach the clients that are looking for you right now.

By tapping in to the Internet and its most powerful tool, the online search, marketing for a lawyer has never been easier. Focused online advertising guarantees results by placing your ad exactly where it needs to be seen: by the people who need you most.

It is time to let your services be broadcast to the widest possible net. By advertising online, lawyers can step up to the plate with a marketing plan that is right for you, and right for your community.

Search-based advertising is a good thing for you, and the community that you serve. Marketing your firm online will bring in more clientele and more funds for you to spend at your discretion.

Written by Brad Geddes aka eWhisper · Filed Under Vertical Marketing | Comments Off