Google AdWords Terminology – 2018

There are lot of terms to know when it comes to Google AdWords – from the basics right through to advanced settings, tools, features and optimizing your campaigns. Even for the power-user it can become confusing!

I’m here to help you understand the most important terminology you’ll find inside Google AdWords. This is your Google AdWords guide, your go-to guide for all things CPC, PPC, CPM, CPA and all the important terms you’ll find in your Google Adwords account.

If you’re like most small business owners/marketers, you’ve got a lot of things on your to-do list – and figuring out this puzzle of Clicks, PPC, CTR and Impressions doesn’t rank high on your priorities.

Setting Up Google AdWords Terms

Campaign – An ad campaign on Google AdWords is made up of your ad groups, and has the same budget, campaign type and your other ad settings. It’s generally what you first set-up when you advertise, and it helps you organize your different paid advertising efforts. You can run multiple campaigns at any time from your Google account.

The structure within AdWords that holds your keywords and ad groups. All ad groups within a Campaign share a budget and similar settings around targeting. You can have one or many campaigns as part of your AdWords account.

Ad groups – An ad group is your set of keywords, budgets and targeting methods for a particular objective, within the same campaign. For example, if you are running an ad campaign for a shoe sale, you could set up ad groups to target for online sales, women’s shoes and men’s shoes. You can have multiple ads in each ad group.

Campaign Type – Your campaign type is where you want your ads to be seen. Google has:

• “Search Network only” (which means Google search only)
• “Display Network only” (which means your ad shows up in Google’s Display network of websites, videos, YouTube, Blogger and more. This is also known as AdSense)
• “Search Network with Display Select” (which is a combo of search and display)
• Shopping Ads (e-commerce ads)
• Video Ads
• Universal App campaign

Search Network: One of the 6 AdWords ad networks. It consists of Google’s Search Network & Google Search Partners Search Partners: The sites within the Search Network that partner with Google to show ads. Including Search Partners is a default setting for Search Ads that you may want to reconsider when setting up Search Ads

If you have a Google Merchant Center account and want to use Product Listing Ads, you can also choose “Shopping” as a campaign type.

Display Network: One of two networks (the other is Search Network, see below) on which you can show your ads. You can create text, image, animated and video ads that will appear on millions of websites, videos and apps.

• Text ads: The ads are identical in format to the text ads on the search network, but are displayed across the network of partner websites. You can kill two birds with one stone and publish the same advert on both the search and display networks by creating a “Search network with display select” campaign.
• Image ads: This is a more eye-catching ad type, allowing you to use images on the display network to get people to click through to your website.
• Rich media ads: Rich media ads are similar to image ads, but have interactive elements and animations that make it more eye-catching and interactive.
• Video ads: This is similar to a rich media ad, but a video can be embedded to play directly within it.

Whilst on the search network, advertisers bid on keywords to choose where their adverts appear. The display network works differently, with advertisers having a choice of placement and targeting type:

• Contextual targeting: By selecting keywords, contextual targeting aims to get adverts onto websites that are relevant to the business, meaning people will see your advert while reading about the product/service you offer.
• Placement targeting: This allows advertisers to choose specific sites they want their adverts to appear on.
• Remarketing: This doesn’t apply only to the display network, but on display, you can advertise your business to people who have already visited your website.
• Topic targeting: This enables you to choose a category of website, that will be relevant to your business advert, to display your ads on.
• Demographic/Geographic & Language targeting: If your adverts require a specific audience, the campaign can be set up to target people based on age, gender, location and language.

Google Shopping

Google Shopping is a great tool for advertisers who have an e-commerce website. Although a search campaign can be used to advertise a website and its special offers, a shopping campaign can advertise every single product individually, without having to set bids on all of the products’ keywords.

By submitting a feed of all of your products to Google Merchant Centre, and setting a daily budget and CPC bid, your items will appear on the Google Shopping platform. As well as appearing on the Google Shopping page, some items may appear on the search results page, as below:

Video Advertising

YouTube opened up more huge opportunities for advertisers, with the website currently offering a variety of advert formats, including:

• TrueView in-stream ads: This is the type of video ad that appears before, during and after other YouTube videos, and is skippable after five seconds of viewing. The adverts can also appear on videos on Google partner sites, and advertisers are only charged when a viewer watches a full 30 seconds (or maximum duration of video if less) of the video advert.
• TrueView video discovery ads: Rather than automatically playing your video advert to users, you can set up a discovery ad, aimed at getting site visitors to watch your clip. The advert appears on YouTube search results, next to related YouTube videos and on the mobile YouTube homepage, with advertisers charged only when viewers click through to watch.
• Bumper ads: Similar to the in-stream ad format, bumper ads appear before, during or after other videos on YouTube and partner sites, but are a maximum of six seconds in duration and cannot be skipped by viewers. The format is perfect for distributing a short, punchy message, and advertisers are charged via cost-per-thousand impressions bidding.

Universal App campaigns:  Universal App campaigns became the only way to advertise mobile apps through Google AdWords. The new format allows ads that encourage viewers to download and install apps to appear on the search network, Google Play store, YouTube and across the display network. The ad campaign can be created to drive more installations, or encourage more in-app actions, and the process of setting it up is more automated than other types of AdWords advertisement. All the advertiser has to do is supply some text, a bid and assets, and Google does the rest, creating multiple ad combinations and running with the ones that are most effective.

Keywords – Keywords are very important in your Google Ads. They are the words or word phrases you choose for your ads, and will help to determine where and when your ad will appear. When choosing your keywords, think like your customer and what they would be searching for when they want your product, service or offer. Though you can include as many as you like, I suggest a maximum of twenty keywords.

Keyword Matching Options: Also known as Keyword Match Types, these are the different setting for each keyword to control how closely the search term must be to the keyword in order to trigger your ad. Here’s a description of the 4 types of keyword match types

Here’s Google’s explanation on how to build the best keyword list:

Broad Match: The keyword setting that allows your ads to be triggered when any type of similar variation, synonym, or phrase is searched. It will have the largest reach (impressions) compared to all other match types but will be far less targeted.

Let’s say you sell women’s hats and only women’s hats. If you selected “women’s hats” as a broad match keyword, your ad could trigger anytime someone searches for women’s hats, men’s hats, baby hats, dog hats, and more. Broad match keywords typically cause advertisers to spend money on irrelevant traffic.

Broad Match Modifier: The keyword setting that will give you reach (impressions) similar to broad match keywords, but also give you more control over who you’re serving your ads to. They tell Google certain words in your keywords phrase need to be present in the search term of your customers. Broad match keywords are indicated by a ‘ ‘ sign.

The broad match modified keyword ” women’s hats” will only cause your ads to trigger if the term “women’s” is in the search phrase. The order of the words does not matter.

Exact Match: A keyword setting that makes it so your customers have to enter in the exact keyword phrase in order for your ad to show.

Negative Match: A keyword match type that prevents your ad from firing for a certain word or phrase.

Phrase Match: A keyword match type that uses quotations to allow your ad to appear only when a search query includes the exact keyword phrase, or close variations of the exact phrase of your keyword, and possibly additional words as well.

Quality Score – A quality score is a measurement from Google based on the relevancy of your ad headline, description, keywords and destination URL to your potential customer seeing your ad. A higher Quality Score can get you better ad placement and lower costs. The 1-10 quality score Google gives each one of your keywords to represent how relevant the keyword, ad, and landing page are for those customers looking at your ad. Many have used a document this size to describe and define Google’s Ad Quality Score. In reality, there are 3 things you need to know to understand the Quality Score:

• It is 1 of 3 components that influence your Ad Rank/Position on the Search & Display network.
• Higher Quality Scores lead to lower CPC.
• To achieve a high a Quality Score, you want your keyword to be present multiple times in the ad text and on the landing page the customer reaches after clicking your ad.

Impressions – An impression is the measurement of how many times your ad is shown.

Ad Rank – Your Ad Rank is the value that’s used to determine where your ad shows up on a page. It’s based on your Quality Score and your bid amount.

Mobile ad – Mobile ads are what your mobile searchers see on their devices. Google AdWords has WAP mobile ads and “ads for high-end mobile devices”.

Ad extensions – Ad extensions are extra information about your business, such as your local address, phone number, and even coupons or additional websites. They’re what shows up in blue below your ad descriptions.

Ad Delivery: how quickly Google serves your ads. Or, another way of looking at it, how quickly you spend your daily allocated budget. AdWords offers two choices for Ad Delivery — Accelerated and Standard. Your campaign is set to Standard Delivery by Default.

Ad Delivery (Accelerated): A form of Ad Delivery that serves your ads as quickly as possible. This method rapidly spends your daily allocated budget.

Ad Delivery (Standard): The default form of Ad Delivery that spaces out the serving of your ads throughout the course of the day to balance your daily budget. We recommend this option if you want to create an even distribution of your ads throughout the day.

Display URL: The webpage that is tied to your ad, typically shown in green text. For each ad you create, you will specify a destination URL, the page someone will land on after clicking on your ad.

Impression: The number of times your ad is shown. An impression is counted every time your ad is shown on a SERP or other Google Network site.

Impression Share: Or (IS), this is the number of impressions your ads have received divided by the estimated number of impressions you were eligible to receive.

KPI: Key performance indicators are metrics used to help a company define and measure its progress toward certain goals.

Landing Page: The webpage where people who click your ad will be taken after clicking on your ad. This page is typically the same one entered into your destination URL.

Conversion: The action of your customer taking the desired action as a result of your marketing/advertising. Conversions are defined by the advertiser, but often include sales on your website, sign-ups on a lead gen form, or phone call to your business.

Display Partners: The websites that partner will Google to serve Display ads.

Display Planner: A tool that helps you determine which display placements would be the best fit for your business goals.

Placements: The different locations on the Display Network where your ads show. See Managed Placements and Automatic Placements for additional information on the options available. 

Product Feed: the file containing all the details and attributes about the products in your Google Shopping store. Google has a number of specific requirements that you must follow to keep your store in good standing.

General Adwords Terms

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Call to Action (CTA) – A CTA is literally the action you want your searcher to take. Good CTAs in your ads are short, action-oriented words such as “Buy”, “Get”, “Act Now”, etc.

Click Through Rate (CTR) – Your CTR is an important metric in your account settings. It measures how many people who have seen your ad click through to your link destination.

Landing Page – Your landing page is the page on your website to which you’re driving traffic from your ad.

Optimization – Optimization in Google AdWords is like optimization elsewhere in marketing. It means making the changes in your ad that get you higher results for your objectives.

A/B Testing: an ad optimization strategy that compares the performance of multiple variations of a single ad. Some important variants to test are:

• Different Landing Page (Final URL)
• Ad Text Variations (something as simple as using an exclamation point or not)

Ad Extensions: An AdWords feature that shows additional information in your ads like your business location, phone number, business ratings, and links to your webpage.

• Manual Extensions:
• App Extension
• Call Extension
• Location Extension
• Review Extension
• Sitelinks Extension
• Callout Extension
• Structured Snippets
• Price Extensions
• Automated Extensions (automatically added by Google)
• Consumer Ratings
• Previous Visits
• Seller Ratings
• Dynamic Sitelink extensions
• Dynamic Structured Snippets

Call Extensions: An AdWords feature that allows you to include your phone number in the ad text to increase phone calls to your business.

Call Only Campaigns: A campaign feature that allows you to make calling your business the only action your customers can take from viewing your ad. Call Only campaigns will not direct clicks to your website. If a customer calls you through your Call Only campaign, youCall to Action:

Call to Action: A word or phrase to promote an immediate response from your customers. “Call Now!”, “Shop Today”, and “Subscribe” are all example of calls to action.

Call Tracking: The ability to track how many calls your business received as a result of your AdWords campaigns. You need to enable a Google Forwarding Phone Number in order to effectively leverage Call Tracking.

Ad Group Default Bids: A specified bid that applies to all keywords and placements within a given Ad Group that do not have individual custom bids at a keyword or placement level.

Ad Position: The order in which your ad appears in Google’s search results. Ads 1-3 will appear on the top of the search results page, while ads 4-11 appear on the right.

Ad Preview and Diagnosis Tool: A tool Google created to help you test what your ads look like and troubleshoot issues without artificially increasing the number of impressions your ads see (so you don’t have to go type your keywords into Google search to see what your ad looks like).

Ad Rank: The formula Google created to determine your ad’s position in the search results.

[Formula] Ad Rank = Your Max CPC Bid x Your Quality Score.

Sitelinks and use of other extensions are also factored into this equation.

Ad Relevance: An indicator that lets Google know how closely related your keywords are to your ads and website landing page. Google’s Quality Score values Ad Relevance above anything else. Make sure your keyword is featured in your ad text and is somewhere on your website landing page to increase Ad relevance and thus Quality score.

Ad Scheduling: A setting within AdWords that allows you to select the time of day and day of the week to serve your ads. This is a great option for businesses that only want to serve ads during their hours of operation.

Ad Status: A description that will inform you if your ads are eligible to run. If your ads are not eligible to run, the Ad Status will give you some information about the policy restrictions you violated. Ad Status can be found in the “Status” column in your AdWords campaign or ad group.

AdSense: The tool Google built to give publishers of all shapes and sizes the ability to host ads on their site to make money off ads. If you’re serving ads on Google’s Display Network, your ads are likely to show up as AdSense ads.

Advertising Policies: Rules that determine what your ads can say and advertise. Ads that violate these policies will be marked as “Disapproved” or “Suspended”, meaning they are not allowed to run. See the full list of policies and prohibited content

Ad Variations: The different combinations of text and imagery you create as part of your “ad”. Multiple variations are a good way to test which photos, text elements, and designs resonate most with your customers.

AdWords API: The piece of technology that lets advanced AdWords users build software applications to interact and make changes to their campaigns. To use the AdWords API, you will need a My Client Center account and a developer token. API stands for Application Program Interface.

AdWords Editor: A free tool from Google that allows advertisers to make bulk changes to their account (bids, keywords, ads, and other settings changes).

All Conversions: The total number of conversions AdWords drives for your business. All Conversions take into account the data in your Conversion column, all “conversion” actions you may not have included in your Conversion column, and “advanced conversion sources” like specific types of phone calls, store visits, cross-device conversions and more.

Location Targeting: target audiences based on where they are in the world. You can also choose areas to avoid.

• Search: simply type in the locations you would like to include or exclude
• Radius Targeting: Target an area on the map around a certain point, landmark, city, or area.

Remarketing: Is a feature that allows you to reach people who have previously been on your site. It relies heavily on a user’s cookie data and shows them ads relevant to the last session they had on your site.

Cost Related Adwords Terms

Bid Strategy – Your bid strategy is basically how you set your bid type to pay for viewer interaction with your ads.

Daily budget – Your daily budget is what you’re willing to spend per day per ad. Your daily cost is based on a daily average per month, so don’t be alarmed if yours varies from day to day.

CPC – Cost-Per-Click is the most common bid type on Google AdWords. It means you pay every time a person actually clicks on your ad. You set your “maximum CPC” in the bidding process, which means that dollar amount is the most you’ll pay for a click on your ad.

PPC – Pay-Per-Click is the same as CPC.

CPM – Cost-Per-thousand impressions is a bidding method that bases your costs on how many times your ads are shown (impressions).

CTR: Clickthrough rate is calculated by dividing an ad’s impressions by the number of clicks your ad receives.

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): A prediction of the net profit a company will receive over the entire future relationship with a customer.

Billing Threshold – Your billing threshold is the level of spending that triggers a charge to you for the ad costs. It applies to automatic payments, and the threshold level starts at $50. It you reach that within 30 days, you’ll be billed, and your threshold then raises to $100 and so on.

Learn more about Google AdWords billing.

Automatic Bidding: The bidding strategy that lets Google automatically adjust your maximum bids across keywords. This is a good option for advertisers that are willing to give up a little control to free up some time.

Automatic Placements: The website placements that Google will serve your ads on based on the targeting you set in your Display campaign. You can find these placements by drilling into the “Dimensions” tab in your display campaign.

Average Cost-Per-Click (Avg. CPC): The average amount you are charged after a potential customer clicks on your ad. Average CPC is calculated by dividing the total cost of your clicks by the total number of clicks.

For example, if you saw 1,000 clicks and it cost you $100, the Avg. CPC would be $0.10.

Average Position (Avg. Pos.): This statistic will show you the position your ad ranks compared to other ads on average. The highest position is #1, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s showing on the top of the page, just that your ad is the first ad to show. Note: Google used to display ads on the right side of the SERP but has since changed and now ads only show at the top and the bottom of the results page.

Bid Management: Managing bids in an attempt to lower your minimum bid through effective keyword grouping and optimization.

Bid Adjustment: A specific percentage increase or decrease on your bids across keywords, locations, devices, schedules, and more. They give you more control over the circumstances in which your ads are served by Google.

For example, if you are advertising a mobile app it would make sense to serve more ads on mobile than on desktop. You can set up to a 300% bid adjustment on mobile devices, which will let Google know you want your ads to be served more on mobile than any other device.

Manual Bidding: Select the maximum cost-per-click bid amount for your ad group’s default bid. When you identify certain placements, keywords, audiences, and times of day that have the best returns, you can use manual bidding to increase returns.

Enhanced CPC (ECPC): A bidding feature that allows Google to automatically bid up 30% when it thinks a click will lead to a conversion. You want between 50-100 conversion before you enable eCPC.

Flexible Bid Strategy: One of the core bid strategies that automate your budget allocation across multiple campaigns, ad groups and keywords. Google allocates your budget to maximize performance. You can create and store a flexible strategy in the Shared Library. You can then apply your strategy from the Campaign, Ad group, or Keyword level.

Maximum CPC Bid (Max CPC): The highest amount that you’re willing to pay for a click on your ad. This is specific to your business and marketing strategy. For example, if you are trying to drive sales, we recommend determining the profit margin of each good or service first. Generally, you want to make sure CPA < Profit margin. You can work backward as such: Determine Profit margin = Max CPA. Multiply that by your average conversion rate (% of clicks that result in sales), which will give you a rough estimate of a good Maximum CPC bid.

Conversion Rate: The average number of conversions you will see per click on your ad.

Conversion Tracking: The method of tracking the important actions your customers make (sales, sign-ups, etc.) that come as a result of Google AdWords ads.

Conversion Window: The number of days after a click that a conversion can still be recorded. You can set the conversion window to be more or less than the default (30 days).

Cost-per-view (CPV): The price you pay Google every time someone views one of your video ads.

Customer ID: The unique number that’s assigned to your Google Adwords account. It’s a 3-part number that can be found on the top right corner of your AdWords dashboard.

Daily Budget: The maximum amount of money you tell Google you want to spend across your campaigns per day. It’s important to note that Google can spend up to 20% over your daily budget on some days, so long as the average number of dollars spent over 30 days does not exceed your daily budget.

Frequency Capping: A feature that lets you control the number of times your ad appears to the same person on the Display Network.

Return on Ad Spend (ROAS): average conversion value you receive in return for every dollar you spend on your ads. Advertisers on AdWords may use the Target ROAS automated bid strategy to optimize their campaigns to maximize ROAS.

Formula: Return on Ad Spend = Revenue / Ad Spend x 100

Return on Investment (ROI): The total profits made relative to your ad spend.

Formula: ROI = (Revenue – Cost of goods sold) / Cost of goods sold

Target CPA (Cost-per-acquisition) Bidding: Formerly known as the Conversion Optimizer, Target CPA is a bidding method that sets a maximum on how much you would pay for a conversion. 

Target Outranking Share: A portfolio bid strategy where Google will automatically adjust your bids to help your ads outrank a specific domain.

Target Search Page Location: A bidding strategy where Google automatically adjusts your bids to push your ad either to the top of the SERP or onto the first page.

Ad Creative Terms

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Headline – Your ad headline is the header of your ad copy. It generally shows up in blue when your ad is live.

Destination URL – Your destination URL is the landing page your ad is directed to when it’s clicked. Your destination site can be a specific page. You can change it for differing ads within ad groups. Your audience does not see it in the ad.

Display URL – Your display URL is what shows up in your ad copy. You can keep this simple and clean to increase your brand recognition, trust, and conversions.

Side ad – A side ad is the ad that show up on the right hand side of a search engine results page (SERP).

Top ad – A top ad is the ad that shows up in a shaded box above the organic search results. Note: Your ad will likely show up as both a side ad and a top ad – so write your ad copy to optimize for both.

Deep Link: A specific type of URL that takes your customers to a specific page in your app.

Interactions: A core performance metric that tells you how many times users performed the main action for the specific ad format. More simply, an interaction can be:

• Click for Text Ads
• Click for Image Ads
• Video Views for TrueView video ads
• Engagements for Lightbox ads

TrueView Video Formats: A type of video ad that allows viewers the choice of which ad they want to see. TrueView Ads use cost-per-view (CPV) bidding. They appear on YouTube and other videos on the Google Display Network. There are two types:

• In-stream: video ads that place before, mid-roll, or after another YouTube video or display network video. The viewer is required to watch 5 seconds of the in-stream ads before they can skip.
• In-display: video ads that appear on the side of the YouTube stream and as an optional video to play on the Display Network.

URL: The location of a website, web page, or file on the internet. It stands for Uniform Resource Locators.

URL Parameter: Tags on a URL that pass certain information. This can direct users to a certain page, tell you something about their browsing actions in analytics, and much more.

Conclusion

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There you have it – all the basic terms you need to get started with Google AdWords. You can talk like a pro! It wasn’t that hard, right?

read more at https://mskumardigital.com/google-adwords-terminology-2018/