Do you ever wonder why there are ads on your Google searches? The answer is SEM. SEM is Search Engine Marketing and it is used by companies to advertise their website according to your Google search. There are a lot of factores that go into SEM and that’s what we will look at in this blog.
Payment Methods
The first thing to look at with SEM is the payment method. The first one is pay-per-click or PPC. PPC is advertising where the company pays for each click that their website recieves from the ad. PPC is typically used for search engines like Google and Bing. The other is CPM or cost per mille. CPM cost is measured per every thousand impressions or views. Instead of search engines like PPC, CPM is usually used for videos where people are viewing them rather than clicking a link.
Keywords
Keywords are relevant words or terms that are related to the website and hopefully help the searcher find what they are looking for. There are two types of key words; long tail and fat head. Long tail keywords are multi word phrases while a fat head keyword is one core term. When setting up your ad, you can use different matches for what the consumer has searched. There are broad matches that includes misspellings or similar terms that will register under your ad. There are also exact matches where the ad will not pop up unless they search an exact match of the keyword.
Google Rankings
The last factor of SEM is understanding how Google ranks the ads. When having ads on Google, it is important to be near the top and ideally top 3 at the worst. This is why understanding how they rank is very important. Google uses a formula to determine how to rank the ads. The equation is Rank = CPC Bid * Quality of Ad. The CPC bid is the amount that is bidded by a company to pay per click for their website. The quality of the ad uses a quality score. The three factors that affect quality score is the expected click through rate, landing page experience and the relevance of the ad. The final rank is determine by multiplying to two and then the highest ranked ad is put in the #1 spot.
