Internet Marketing Acronyms & Definitions

Internet marketing acronyms are about as over-used as government acronyms, and sometimes even more puzzling to an outsider.

The following are a few of the most common internet marketing acronyms used in the industry today and what they mean for your website’s success.

CPC

CPC is short for Cost Per Click. Online advertisement providers use CPC to refer to the amount charged to the advertiser for each click by a site visitor their advertisement image and link. This is different than Cost Per Impression, which is much harder to track and qualify.

CRO

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is a metric to determine the effectiveness of a website call-to-action. In internet marketing, the goal of CRO can be to convert site visitors to buy a product, download a game, sign up for a newsletter, or request an estimate.

CTR

CTR stands for Click-Through Rate and is used to measure advertising. It is calculated by dividing the number of clicks by the number of impressions from a website visitor. A high CTR means that the ad attracts attention and get clicks often. A low CTR means the ad is under-performing CTR also can measure the effectiveness of marketing elements on a website. It can be used for example, to determine whether an image placed horizontally on a webpage versus vertically, makes an improvement to visitor conversions and sales.

PPC

PPC is a form of online advertising where the advertiser bids on a Price Per Click they agree to pay when a search engine user clicks on their ad. The most popular PPC advertising platform is Google AdWords which displays PPC ads in Google results pages. Other search engines also provide similar services.

PR

Not to be confused with a subset of traditional marketing’s Public Relations, PR in internet marketing terms stands for Page Rank. It was actually developed by Google as a way of scoring a website’s quality. Page Rank is based on a scale from 0 to 10 and most internet marketing efforts are focused on improving this score for a website.

SEM

Search Engine Marketing is a subset of internet marketing that focuses on techniques that can help increase a website’s visibility to search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. It includes both SEO and PPC tactics.

SEO

SEO is an acronym thrown around a lot in the internet marketing industry and stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is a tactic used in SEM that focuses on optimizing web properties and building web links with the ultimate goal of increasing a website’s visibility in search results.

SERPs

SERPs is shorthand for Search Engine Results Pages. These are the pages of suggested websites that show up when a search engine runs your search query. So for example, an internet marketing consultant could say “Our SEO tactics have helped your website show up on the first page of the Google and Bing SERPs for x, y, z keywords.”