It’s easy for Search Engine Marketers to get wrapped up in the tactical side of things: from managing down CPAs and CPCs to monitoring bounce rates and crawl equity, there’s quite a bit that goes into SEM. Sometimes it’s helpful to take step back and make sure we’re all on the same page. This week’s post will cover acronyms that you’ll hear thrown around a lot in the SEM world.

CTR: Click-through rate
This metric compares the number of times an ad is shown to the number of times the ad is clicked. Higher CTR=better ad.

CPA: Cost-per-acquisition
CPA totals the media spend required for one conversion action (booking a hotel room, selling a pair of shoes, whitepaper download triggered, etc)

CPC: Cost-per-click
CPC is a method of online marketing where the advertiser pays a fee each time an ad is clicked.

PPC: Pay-per-click
Same as CPC. PPC and CPC are often used interchangeably.

CMS: Content Management System
A CMS is a software platform that allows for easy (theoretically) website creation and maintenance. Back in the day, websites were built by coding individual webpages and stringing them together with a series of links. Today, platforms like WordPress, Concrete5, and Drupal allow for more powerful websites and blogs to be dynamically created and managed by themes and templates at a high level.

CPM: Cost-per-Thousand
The “M” is Latin for thousand. Rather than paying for clicks, an advertiser pays for eyeballs on ads, or the total number of views in this model of online advertising.

That’s all for this round of acronyms. Check back for more “What the Heck is my SEM Vendor Talking About?!” soon!