The purpose of this glossary is to serve as a useful reference for individuals who are seeking clarification on the definition of specific terms related to Google Ads. No information has been left out in this guide.
Account
A Google Ads Account is the panel that you log into in order to manage your Google Ads campaigns.
Ad Campaign
A Google Ads Account is made up of campaigns, ad groups, keywords and adverts. The campaigns are usually relevant to the first tier taxonomy found on your website. Eg. Men’s Clothes, Women’s Clothes.
Ad Group
An ad group is found within the campaign and has a relevance to the campaign it is within. Eg. If the campaign is called ‘Men’s Clothes’ then you can expect to have ad groups within the campaign called ‘Men’s trousers’, ‘Men’s shirts’, etc.
Ad Extensions
These are extras added to the adverts. They include sitelink extensions, callout extensions and review extensions.
Ad Preview and Diagnosis
View your adverts within Google Ads under different views, such as location or device.
Ad Rank
The advert position which is determined by your keyword bid and quality score.
Advert
This can take the form of a text ad, responsive ad, gallery ad or call only ad.
Average Position
The average position (now retired) used to show you the average position in which your advert was shown, to 1 decimal place.
Audiences
Used for remarketing purposes, audiences are groups of people based on their particular interests or demographics.
Automated Rules
These are rules that are set up to be carried out at a later date. For example, you may automate a group of adverts to go live at 1.00am when you are sleeping.
Automated Bidding
Bidding rules can be applied so you can achieve a certain ROI. There is a learning process that takes time before the automation can be successfully applied.
Bid
The amount of money you are willing to pay to achieve a click on your advert.
Bing Adverts
This is almost exactly the same as Google Ads but is for the Bing search engine.
Bounce rate
The % of visitors who click on an advert and then leave the website without clicking on another page. Can be measured through the Google Analytics plugin.
Broad Match Modifier
A broad match modifier is a type of keyword match and has a + in front of each keyword. For example, if your keyword term is +mens +clothing +blue then whenever a search contains at least any of these words, then your advert is likely to show.
Budget
The amount of money you are willing to spend on a daily basis on a PPC campaign.
Call Extension
A call extension is applied to a mobile advert and by clicking on it will be directed straight to a phone number. Eg ‘Need Local Plumber? – Call now!’
Callout Extension
Callout extensions are applied to adverts and are simply small snippets of text (upto 25 characters long) that highlight benefits or features for your products or services you are advertising.
Click
The action of clicking on an advert. Clicks are recorded so you know how popular your adverts are to users.
Conversion
A conversion can be a purchase or a lead that occurs from directly clicking on a PPC advert
Conversion Rate
This is the rate at which your adverts convert to become leads or sales. The formula for this is (clicks/impressions)*conversions.
CPA
Cost Per Acquisition is the amount it costs for each sales or lead you get.
CPC
CPC stands for cost per click. It is useful to know the average cost per click when doing your PPC analysis so you can be careful not to overspend.
CPM
CPM is the cost paid per 1,000 advert impressions.
CTR
Click through rate is the number of clicks your advert receives divided by the number of times the advert is shown. This is displayed as a percentage.
C:R
C:R or cost:revenue is a spend against revenue model. If for every pound spent, five pounds was generated then the C:R would be shown as 20%.
Display Advertising
Advertising on the display network is having adverts shown on websites or apps through banners or text adverts. The display network is usually used for brand awareness.
Dynamic ads
If you use dynamic keyword insertion in your adverts, Google will automatically insert text into your advert based on the keywords that fired your advert
Description (1 and 2)
The descriptions come after the advert headlines and can each consist of up to 35 characters.
Enhanced Bidding
This involves setting a manual bid for ad groups or keywords and then Google will take learnings for those who click on the adverts and increase or decrease the bid depending on the chance of a conversion.
Exact Match
Exact match is the description given for a search term that will only show adverts for the exact keyword or a slight variation. The exact match keyword is shown within []. Eg. [keyword]
Expanded Text Ads
Expanded text ads are the standard and most popular format of advert used for the search element of Google Ads
Google Analytics
This is an analytics reporting program that is part of Google Suite and will report on most aspects of your website and website users. It is very handy that it can link up with Google Ads so you can get even more efficient reporting.
Google Ads
This is the main PPC advertising platform that was developed by Google in the year 2000.
Gross Profit
The gross profit (or GP) is the revenue profit that is usually determined by overall revenue generated less the cost of the products.
Headline (1, 2 and 3)
You can assign up to 3 headlines to expanded text ads, each consisting of up to 30 characters.
Impression
When your advert is shown by the advertiser, that then counts as an impression.
Impression Share
The impression share is the number of impressions your advert received divided by the total number of impressions you could have received.
Keyword
The keyword is the search term that triggers the advert
Keyword Match Type
The keyword match type is the format of the keyword. There are 4 types of keyword match type – [exact], “phrase”, +bmm, broad.
Keyword Planner
This is the section in Google Ads where you can do keyword research and find out historical data and well as predict forecasts for the future.
KPI
KPIs exist in all forms of business. This stands for key performance indicator and is used to help the business reach set goals and targets.
Landing Page
This is the page that the user will be sent to after clicking on one of your adverts.
Location Targeting
If you wish for your advert to appear in a particular country, county, city, town or postcode area, then you will need to use location targeting for your adverts.
Low Search Volume
This is when there is not enough historical data available to determine how many searches there generally are per month for a specific keyword search term.
Manual Bidding
This is when you decide on what level to set the base bids at. Usually Google Ads keyword planner will give a forecast recommendation for what starting bid to use. After this your bid will be determined by regular statistical analysis of the keywords and ad groups.
Negative Keywords
A negative keyword is a keyword that is attached to an ad group should you not wish your keyword term to pick up a particular word. For example. If you were advertising curtains and you were being very general and just using the keyword phrase match term “curtains” then you would need to add as negatives all types of curtains you didn’t want to show for. If you weren’t selling any blue curtains then you’d add “blue” as a negative keyword term.
Net Profit
This is the total profit after all internal and external costs have been take off the gross profit.
PPC
PPC stands for pay-per-click advertising of which Google Ads is a variant of.
Quality Score
The keyword quality score is determined by a number of factors including click through rate of the advert, advert relevance to the keyword, and the relevance of the landing page.
ROI
ROI stands for return on investment and is simply the formula (ROI)% = (revenue-cost)/cost
Search Network
The search network is a group of search engines, websites and apps that will show your adverts.
Shopping Campaigns
These campaigns connect with Google Merchant Center to advertise your products across Google. Shopping ads are different from other ads because they don’t contain any ad copy and focus solely on the product itself. In 2022 standard shopping campaigns were upgraded to become PMax Campaigns, also known as Performance Max Campaigns.