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Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Glossary - A

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Above the Fold

The top portion of a web document that can be viewed without scrolling down.

Acquisition

A desired interaction between a client and a customer. Clicks, specific page views, registrations, sales or any other metrics can be considered an acquisition, as long as they map back to client goals. The term acquisition most often refers to a new registration, subscription or sale.

AdCenter

Microsoft's pay-per-click advertising network, launched in 2006. In addition to offering most of the standard paid search advertising options of competing programs at Google and Yahoo!, Microsoft AdCenter is the only PPC network that offers demographic targeting.

AdGroup

A feature of Google's AdWords product which allows advertisers to group keywords together for organizational and optimization purposes. Also referred to as a "bucket". 

AdSense

Google's contextual ad program for website publishers. By signing up for the program and pasting a few lines of code into their pages, publishers can easily display contextually relevant AdWords ads alongside their content and share a percentage of the revenue generated when their readers click.

AdWords

Google's auction-based pay per click advertising program. Ads are targeted to keyword searches performed on Google.com and across Google's network of partner sites including AOL and Ask. Placement is determined based on a measure called Quality Score - a combination of an advertiser's bid and the relevance of their ad (based on click through rate)

Ad Rank

The specific position an advertising message will occupy on a search engine results page. Search engines typically display top-ranked advertising messages in descending order, showing 10 messages per page.

Affiliate Link

Links between a main company website and affiliate sites (sites selling products from main site, or with referral links to main site). Affiliates typically earn a percentage of the final sale price for directing qualified users to the main site.

Algorithm

An equation used by search engines to determine the ad rank of each listing within the organic search results. Though search engines do not disclose their algorithms to prevent search gaming or spamming, algorithms typically weigh variables such as keyword density, link popularity, website authority, and so on.

AltaVista

One of the first major search engines, later acquired by Overture. See: www.altavista.com

Alternative Text (Alt Text)

The text placed inside graphic image tags in HTML code.  The alt text will show if an image fails to download, or in place of images for text-only browsers and screen readers. Users can also display the alt text by hovering over an image with their mouse.

Alt Attribute

The attribute defining the image text, found inside the img tag.

Anchor Text

See: Link Text.

API – Application Programming Interface

The interface that a computer system, library or application provides in order to allow requests for services to be made of it by other computer programs, and/or to allow data to be exchanged between them.

Ask.com

Popular metasearch engine based on Question/Answer queries and results rather than direct search term queries.  Formerly known as Ask Jeeves.

ASP (Active Server Page)

A scripting language developed by Microsoft to create websites with dynamic content.

Authority

A search engine's measure of the number of links (or citations) pointing to a given site. 

Average Order Size

A metric which indicates the average amount of money spent by each converted customer during the course of a campaign. This metric helps to convey the relative value of each conversion generated through a particular keyword, engine or campaign.

Formula = (total revenue/ # of orders) readers click.

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