SEO Tutorial: SEP, SEO, SEM, CPM, CPC, PPC: The New Acronyms For ROI
Bill
Weylman
Director of Marketing & Sales -- July
3, 2003
http://www.topsitelistings.com/
In 1998 while working at Lycos.com, I witnessed
an amazing gold rush to the Internet. Companies
were spending millions of dollars in online
advertising and e-commerce campaigns with
initially no concept of return
on investment.
Acronyms such as CPM (cost
per 1000 impressions) became the standard
term. Impressions were the number of times
a client's advertising banner, button or text
link was shown on a page. If you refreshed
a page twice and had one ad placement on that
page, you just exhausted two impressions.
Basically, adbanners were big ticket items
drawing over 1-2% click-thru and were a primary
tool online for advertisers. Impressions were
a way for companies to get branding while
being able to drive traffic through the use
of banners and other interesting (and often
annoying) ad products on the "Lycos Network."
But then the tide began to turn and industry
click rates began to tumble from 1% to 1/4
of 1%. (Yes that is 0.25% or 0.0025 for those
mathematically inclined.) A new term emerged
- CPC (cost per click).
Obviously, clients were beginning to get smarter
in realizing that spending a lot of money
on inventory placement was virtually useless,
unless users clicked. Lycos's general position
was to avoid all CPC campaign guarantees for
the very reason that its own site inventory
and self-worth would become devalued through
trying to achieve contracted clicks.
Soon after, in 2000 when the internet bubble
exploded, a new online model came into the
limelight - PPC (pay per
click). This type of online advertising was
most evident on the portals, Overture.com
and Google.com.
PPC campaigns were similar to CPC deals, but
offered users a chance to achieve a top "sponsored"
listing on the Overture network and on Google.com.
Overture presented a chance for advertisers
to get listed on a variety of portals in its
web (including Lycos.com). Google offered
users the opportunity to get top sponsored
listing on its site, a rising giant that was
gaining popularity by the millions. Google,
to uphold its high standards of content, reviewed
each site and copy before allowing advertisers
to be accepted into its PPC program. Still,
even while more targeted to relevancy, sponsored
PPC links showed better performance than CPC
deals and some CPM deals, but did not deliver
the results comparable to a true search results
listing.
All along this time, an important term that
was not well-known at the start of the internet
revolution became suddenly very common amidst
slashing corporate marketing budgets. The
concept was known as SEO
(search engine optimization). Alternatively
known as SEP (search engine
positioning) or SEMSEM (search
engine marketing), the goal of SEO in a nutshell
is to modify a website to get better natural
listings on the search engines. This is entirely
separate from the PPC sponsorships in which
cost is linked directly to the demand of particular
queries.
Additionally, PPC sponsorships are short term
and your online existence ends once your funding
runs out. SEO, however, achieves true search
result listings that the search engines themselves
think are important. It is worth noting that
getting a top natural listing, or at least
in the top few pages on a major search engine
can have an amazing impact on your online
marketing campaign - often several factors
better than your PPC campaigns. At a cost
that can often be far less to the client,
the bottom line is that SEO provides the best
ROI.
This is not only the new acronym to add to
your vocabulary, but one to add to your online
marketing war chest (and budget) as well.
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