Common Names: Search Engine Marketing, PPC (Pay Per Click), CPC (Cost Per Click), Adwords, Overture, Goto (Way back in the day), Paid Search Marketing, Sponsored Search

Definition: Search Engine Marketing (or better-phrased Sponsored Search) Is when you pay for search engines to rank your web page and as a result, you pay for each visitor that comes to your website. You end up showing up in the highlighted area “Sponsored Results” in the search listings and clearly separated from the organic (Search Engine Optimization) results.

How they rank you: In the old days, it was simply based off of how much you are willing to pay. If you paid $.01 sent over your competitor, you would be higher. Its not like that anymore. Now it depends on many factors; Max Spend Threshold, Age of campaign, click through rate of your ad, how long visitor stays on your site, relevancy of landing page (content on it).

Search engines have made it easy (too easy) to start a campaign. You can be live and in the search results in 10 minutes. The problem is, unless you know your stuff, you will probably waste 50% of your budget on bad traffic, poorly optimized ads, ineffective landing pages, etc. We have taken over accounts that were literally wasting $50,000 a month in inefficiencies. Make sure that you start slow, and higher a professional. They will save you way more money than the fee they charge.