We know that pay-per-click advertising can get confusing so we’ve made a useful list of words used to describe all parts of it.
Pay-per-click (PPC)
PPC is now a broad term covering all pay-per-click advertising – where you advertise to your target audience and only pay for clicks through to your website or app.
Google Ads
This is the Google PPC dashboard and encompasses all PPC advertising across Google platforms. Including search, display, shopping and video. All campaigns, budgets, ad text and keywords are all managed here.
Google Shopping
This is the ideal pay-per-click platform for most eCommerce sites. If you sell consumer products you can advertise alongside both similar products and other websites selling the exact same product. The ads are triggered by relevant keyword searches.
Display Network
Using Google Ads you can place ads on websites that have signed up to the Display Network. The result is you can place text and image ads on a variety of news sites, blogs or relevant websites in your industry to reach potential customers.
Cost-per-click (CPC)
This is how much an advertiser has paid for a click. For individual keywords or ad placements this is usually shown as an avg cost.
Impressions
The number of impressions reported is the number of times your ad has been seen or shown in search results.
Remarketing
Through a host of paid advertising platforms (such as the Google Display Network & Facebook) you can deliver ad impressions to targeted people who have visited your website. If you have a high enough audience you can target this right down to individuals who have viewed a particular product or service on your website and not purchased.
Max CPC
Maximum cost-per-click. If using manual bidding, this is what you declare as being the maximum cost you are prepared to pay for a click in any keyword auction.
Click-through-rate (CTR)
Your click through rate is a key performance indicator of any paid advertising. The CTR is the percentage of impressions you’ve delivered that resulted in a click.
Ad Group
Each campaign with your Google Ads dashboard should be split down by Ad Group, which separates each target area. Each Ad Group has its own set of keywords and ads meaning you can make highly effective campaigns using targeted keywords, ad text and landing pages.
Keyword
A keyword is the term used to describe what people search for. This could be a single word or phrase.
Keyword Match Types
Using Google Ads you can decide to target a keyword in different ways and each one can be highly effective depending on what you want to achieve.
Broad Match
This type of keyword will result in your ads showing for range of related searches. This can ensure you’re not missing out on targeting customers that use a range of searches that have the same intent.
Phrase Match
This type of keyword will result in your ad showing for keywords that include a certain phrase, or very close variations. This will include additional words that appear before or after your target phrase.
Exact Match
This type of match type means you can target an exact keyword or very close variation. Close variants include keywords with the same meaning regardless of spelling or grammar differences.
Keyword Research
In order to spend your budget wisely you need to ensure you’re targeting the search terms (keywords) that your audience use when researching your products or services. There are a series of tools available to do this but in the case of Google Ads there is a great built in tool for advertisers to use.
Quality Score
In simple terms the higher your Quality Score the more cost effective your ad spend can become. You can even save money by improving your score by increasing the relevancy of your campaigns.
When you run a standard paid search campaign in Google Ads each keyword is given a Quality Score out of 10. This score changes over time based on a variety of factors.
Ad Text
This the wording you use within your search ads. It includes a headline, description and ad extensions which are extra highlights and links to your business.
Ad Extensions
With Google Search Ads there are a series of ad extensions you can add to your ads which highlight parts of your business and boost click through rates.
Ad Extensions include:
Sitelinks – Using Sitelinks you can show additional links to specific pages on your website. These could be related products or services or perhaps a link to an About Us or Contact page.
Callout – Using callouts you can show additional descriptive text which promotes your business. These are short phrases such as ‘Free Delivery’ or ‘20 Years Experience’.
Call – Add a “click to call” extension which displays your phone number which is especially useful on mobiles as it allows users to quickly call your business.
Ad Scheduling
Within each Google Ads campaign you can create custom scheduling so that your ads only deliver impressions when your business is open, or perhaps to maximise the time of day when you’ve seen the best conversion rate.
Conversion
This the ultimate goal that you want to achieve with your PPC ads. All platforms will include some kind of conversion tracking which is what you can use to accurate judge the return on your spend.
A conversion could be as simple as a view of a certain page, through to a contact form submission or eCommerce transaction. In the case of eCommerce you can view the the value of orders your paid advertising has generated.
Conversion Tracking
This is the method of tracking what enquiries or orders your paid advertising has generated. Without any kind of conversion tracking it’s impossible to know what return on investment you’ve generated.
Cost-Per-Acquisition (CPA)
The CPA or cost-per-conversion is the amount you’ve paid for each conversion. Ensuring this amount is as low as possible ensures your spend is full optimised and generated the maximum return.
Landing Page
This is the page your ads link to. Your landing page should be as relevant as possible to the keyword that generated the click to optimise your Quality Score. It’s often effective to treat paid visitors differently to everyone and creating specific landing pages for your PPC visitors can boost your conversions. Your landing pages can include more sales focussed content such as contact forms and special offers that you perhaps wouldn’t include on your main website pages.
Call-To-Action (CTA)
This is a type of content that encourages a visitor to do an action which usually leads to them completing a conversion. Examples include prompts to call, contact forms and “buy now” buttons.
Negative Keywords
In virtually all cases your keyword targeting will generate impressions and clicks for keywords that are not relevant or something you’d prefer not to be paying for clicks on. This might be a slightly different service or a search that is meant for a competitor.
For example, if you’re an eCommerce business that sells ladies shoes and you have a phrase match keyword of “black shoes” – this will deliver impressions for someone searching for “black shoes for men”.
In Google Ads you add “men” to your negative keywords so none of your ads will show for any search that includes it.
Daily Budget
A Google Ads campaign needs a daily budget that the advertiser declares. This is the maximum amount you want to pay per day. It can also be easily changed.
Return On Investment (ROI)
Using accurate conversion tracking your can judge how much revenue you’ve generated from your daily budget / total click spend.
A/B Testing
This is usually associated with landing pages. Using an A/B test means you test the performance of 2 different pages alongside each other. There are tools available such as Google Optimize where you can compare user engagement metrics.
Reach
This the total amount of of people who have seen your ads and is often associated with social media advertising rather than PPC on Google.
Display URL
Regardless of what landing page link you use on your Google Ads you can select to show specific text. This usually shortens the link to make your ad look more attractive.
