This is our weekly Question Of The Week piece. Every week we will take a question we have been asked by a client, a prospect, a friend or even just some nice stranger when we try to explain what we do every day!
Have a question to submit? Awesome! Tweet at us at @5Tales_aus or leave it in the comments below.
This weeks question was answered by one of our PPC specialists, Alex.
Search Engine Marketing – or SEM for short – refers to paid appearances within search results on different search engines (think Google, Bing, Yahoo etc.). The most common appearance of SEM is through Google Adwords.
That said, SEM in every search engine and is a primary form of income for many of these large corporations. Although Google will provide the largest audience and likely the largest impact, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines have value and likely at a lower cost. As a general rule though, maximise what you can do on AdWords and spend your budget there. Once you reach a large campaign that is committing thousands of dollars per month, then look at investing in other search engines.
SEM is unbelievably valuable for businesses due to its low cost model, and for many businesses, high value return. That said there are so many terms out there to describe different parts of SEM, some of the common ones are below:
- Paid search ads
- Paid search advertising
- PPC (pay-per-click) – meaning ads which charge on a per-click basis
- PPC (pay-per-call) – meaning ads which charge on a per-phone call model. Generally this is mobile specific
- CPC – meaning cost-per-click or cost-per-click advertising
- CPM – meaning cost-per-thousand impressions
Quick Explanation Of AdWords:
Adwords from Google was the original founder in a lot of ways for search advertising and they use an auction process, as well as a few other systems, to decide whether your ad is shown and where. This video from Google in 2014 is a great explanation of the AdWords auction process:
Quick Summary:
Search Engine Marketing in one sentence is: Paying for advertisements to appear within search engine results for certain keywords.
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