As a search marketing professional, misspelled search terms are not surprising to us, but our readers may find it comical that a large percentage of searches performed are misspelled. For example take a look at Yahoo’s list of some of the more common misspelled searches.

Recent Misspelled Yahoo Searches

• Swan Flu (for Swine Flu)
• Susan Boil (for “Britain’s Got Talent” contender Susan Boyle)
• Brack Obama (for U.S. President Barack Obama)
• Sonia Sotomeyer (for Supreme Court justice nominee Sonia Sotomayor)
• Rachel Ray (for Food Network host Rachael Ray)
• Paperview boxing (for cable programming pay-per-view boxing)
• Amtrack (for train system Amtrak)
• Wallmart (for retailer Wal-Mart)
• Farrah Faucet (for actress Farrah Fawcett)
• Rod Steward (for singer Rod Stewart)
• Arlene Specter (for Senator Arlen Specter)
• “Dancing With the Starts” (for ABC reality competition Dancing With the Stars)
• Bea Author” (for the late comedian Bea Arthur)
• Brittany Spears (for singer Britney Spears)
• Chris Allen (for “American Idol” winner Kris Allen)
• Configure worm (for computer virus Conficker worm)
• Mysapce (for MySpace)

While it is entertaining to think that people are searching for “paperview boxing”, targeting commonly misspelled keywords in your search campaign is key to successful search engine marketing. The majority of your clicks will be from the correct spelling, but for the few people that misspell a keyword you, as an advertiser, will be able to show them a relevant ad while the other competitors’ ads will not show because they are only advertising on the correct spelling.

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Shortly after posting our explanation on Cost Per Click and Clickthrough Rate, Google posted a video of their chief economist, Hal Varian, explaining the AdWords Ad Auction and how your max CPC bid and quality score determine how much you pay for a click on Google.com.

Hal Varian makes some very interesting points about the basics of the AdWords advertising, but one little pie chart spoke volumes!

Take a good look at that pie chart. CTR is well over half the calculation in determining your ad quality (which directly effects how much you pay). Hal goes on to say that when a user clicks on an ad they are contributing feedback on the quality of the ads. Users vote by using their clicks. Making up the rest of the pie chart is relevancy, which is followed by the landing page.

So there you have it straight from Google themselves. Your clickthrough rate is extremely important to your campaign. And take note, your clickthrough rate is directly related to your keyword competitors, no advertisers’ CTR outside of your industry are going to effect your quality score. So don’t worry if you hear other industries boasting about high clickthrough rates. It has nothing to do with your ads.

Watch the video on YouTube

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Do you know the search marketing language?

Previous posts:
What is Search Engine Marketing?
What is Social Media Marketing?

CTR, CPC, PPC, ROI, DKI… It’s all pretty confusing when those crazy internet guys start talking in their foreign language. Let’s define (in plain English) two common terms in search marketing, Clickthrough Rate and Cost Per Click.

Clickthrough Rate (CTR) is obtained taking the number of people who clicked on an ad and dividing it by the number of times the ad was delivered (impressions). For example, if your ad had 2,500 impressions in one month and it received 194 clicks, it would have a CTR of 7.8% for that month.

It is important to know that different industries will have varying levels of successful CTR. What may be a high clickthrough rate in one industry may be considered low in another. So, it’s difficult to determine an average CTR for everyone. For large volume industries that get millions of nationwide searches a day, you may find that 2% is a great CTR. However some campaigns may find a CTR of 14% to be their benchmark.

The reason it’s important to strive for the best clickthrough rate is because the more people that find your ad to be relevant, the lower your cost per click will be (specifically citing Google Adwords ranking formula).

Cost Per Click (CPC) is the amount of money an advertiser pays search engines or other Internet publishers for a single click on its ad that brings one visitor to its website. This term is much easier to understand since it’s so straight forward. No formulas needed. Well… Let’s do one, just for fun.

Pretty simple, right? Cost per click is just how much you pay per visitor that comes to your site through an ad that you place on a search engine. You want this number to be as low as possible so you won’t be spending a fortune on your search engine marketing.

Still confused? Yell at us by leaving a comment below. We’ll answer your toughest questions or delete the comment.

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