Have you ever walked into a conversation where the two speaking you could tell were speaking your native tongue, but because they were speaking about their niche industry, nobody else in the conversation had a clue what they were talking about?  I remember as a young boy listening into conversations my dad was having about politics and/or business and hearing lots of words I had never heard before, and none of them were swear words.  And as I am known for never cussing in my circle of friends, I promise to not do so in the following short paragraph, but take a second to read it, and pay close attention to see if you feel like I did as a kid:

After focusing on SEO for a few years now, we have decided to launch our first PPC campaign to see what kind ofconversion rate we can get from paid search in comparison with the organic traffic we are already getting. Once we have done that for a little while and seen some ROI, we are going to code some new landing pages that we have created to do some multivariate testing.  Obviously that is down the road and based on seeing good click-through rates and figuring out which keywords, products, and ad copies are causing the traffic to convert.  But as I was saying about the multivariate testing, we want to do that and watch our analytics and learn from the market research that…

In a room full of Internet marketing experts, hearing this would be just another day at the office (home office in a lot of cases), but for the average businessman, this is a whole new language.  Unfortunately for the average businessman, the above average businessman has already become well-versed in this online lingo.  They may not be doing their own online advertising, but they have at least enough knowlege that they were able feel confident hiring outside help.  If you are like most american businessmen, it is time to get caught up!  To help here is a quick vocab lesson:

SEO is search engine optimization.  Optimizing a website so that it can easily be found on the first page of search engines.

PPC is pay per click advertising on search engines. It is free to show up in the sponsored links of search engine results, unless someone clicks on your ad, then you have to pay per click.

A conversion is when a website visitor does what you wanted them to do on your site.

Paid search are the “sponsored links” or the results on search engines that don’t come naturally.  These are usually the ads seen on the right side of search results.

Organic refers to a website naturally showing up on the left side of search results because the search engine deemed the site to be the most relevant search result. “Organic” clicks to your site are free.

Organic traffic means those visitors to your site that get there by finding you on the left/free/natural side of search results.

Landing pages are new pages designed for a site to either see how they perform in comparison with the old site, or for a specific product/service that doesn’t have it’s own page yet.  Landing pages are also used for testing different offers and web layouts.

Multivariate testing is when you use pay per click advertising to test different landing pages and/or different ads to with multiple variables to see which ones provide the best results.  There is more to learn about, if you care to learn more, check this out.

Click-through-rate (CTR) helps an advertiser determine which ad is the best.  The ad that gets the most clicks for the least amount of times showing up wins.

Ad copy are the words within the ad.  Great online advertisers will tell you that just changing one word can make the difference between whether you get clicks or not.

Analytics is a software that gives you info about how your website and ads are performing.  Google offers a free software called Google Analytics.

A new language, right?  Bookmark this post so you can refer back to this small set of internet marketing vocab the next time you feel like your web developer or IT guy, or marketing guru is speaking a different language!