What in the World are These Acronyms? -- Ppc, Seo, Cpc, Cpm

It was in 1998 that there was an amazing gold rush to the internet. A lot of companies were spending millions of dollars in online advertising and e-commerce campaigns without any concept of return on investment.

Cost per 1000 impressions or CPM became the standard term. Impressions were the number of times a banner, a button or a text link of a client’s advertisement was shown on a page. To give an example, when you’re on a page and you refreshed it then you will have 2 impressions.

Ad banners were the common way to advertise before drawing 1-2% click thru and proved to be a best tool for advertisers. Impressions in a way gave branding to a company while giving traffic through the use of banners and other interesting and often annoying ad products.

And then there was a turn around and industry click rates began to go down from 1% to ¼ of 1%. Yes that is 0.25%. This was when a new term called CPC emerged, meaning cost per click.

For a time, clients were beginning to get smarter and realized that spending money on inventory placement was useless unless users clicked. In 2000 when the internet bubble exploded, a new online model came into the limelight. The term is PPC which is pay per click. This type of online advertising was really embraced by most internet companies like yahoo and Google.

Pay per click campaigns was pretty much similar to the cost per click campaigns but PPC offered users a chance to earn the top sponsored listings on the Overture and Google network. Overture presented a chance for advertisers to get listed on different portals in its web. Google on the other hand offered its users the opportunity to get top sponsored listing on its search site. At this time PPC gained an enormous popularity among advertisers and online companies.

All along this time, SEO was born which means Search Engine Optimization and also known as SEP or Search Engine Positioning. The goal of SEO in a nutshell is to modify a website to get better natural listings on the search engines. This is very different with pay per click sponsorships in which cost is relatively related to the demand of particular queries.

To add up pay per click sponsorships are short term and your online existence ends as soon as your funding runs out however in Search Engine Optimization it will give you true and natural search result listings that search engines would think important and relevant. It’s very useful to have SEO around since it will get you to the top of the listing or at least in some few pages on major search engines and will eventually lead to a major impact on your online marketing campaign better than the pay per click. SEO is a trick for online marketers and advertisers to make money online for free and without any cost.