PPC Glossary

A/B Testing – The process of comparing two variations of a single variable to determine which performs best, which helps to improve marketing efforts.

AdGroup – An ad group contains one or more ads which target a set of keywords. You set a bid to be used when your ad is triggered by the keywords in the ad group. This is called a cost per click (CPC) bid. You can also set prices for individual keywords within the ad group.

Average Position – This refers to the average position on a search result page that an ad appears in when it’s triggered by that keyword.

Campaign – (Ads) These contain your ad groups and give structure to the products and services you wish to advertise to your customers. Ads in the campaign share the same campaign budget.

Clicks – When a potential customer clicks on your advert in Google search results leading them to your website (also associated with CTR).

CPC – Cost Per Click. This is the highest amount that you are willing to pay for a click on your ad. You can set a maximum CPC at the keyword or ad group level. This is not always the amount you pay, the average cost-per-click is a better indication of how much you are being charged.

Crawlers – also known as web crawlers. This is where a Google bot discovers your website and its pages and helps to rank it in the SERPs.

CTR – Click Through Rate. This is the metric to show how many people click on an ad, worked out by dividing the number of clicks on an ad by the number of impressions.

Daily Budget – Your daily budget is the amount that you’re willing to spend on a specific AdWords campaign each day. The daily budget is never exceeded over the period of a month.

Engagement Rate – This is the amount of interaction a piece of content receives – such as likes, comments and shares.

Google AdWords – A Google programme that is used by advertisers that places ads on the Google search results page, YouTube and google ad network sites.

Google Analytics – A Google service that allows advertisers to collect statistics and data about website visitors, allowing them to track and report site traffic.

Impressions – This is the number of times your advert is shown to potential new customers in Google search results.

Keyword – A word or phrase of the theme in a piece of content. This is what is typed into the search engine, to give you results based on that specific keyword.

Keyword Match Types – Keyword match types determine which searches will cause your ad to appear. Each keyword will have a match type within Adwords which controls how loosely or restrictively you want to match your ads to keyword searches.

KPI – Key Performance Indicator. This is a performance measurement to evaluate an activity’s success.

Landing Page – The destination webpage that a user lands on after clicking a link or ad.

Negative Keyword – A negative keyword is a type of keyword that prevents your ad from being shown by a certain word or phrase.

Optimisation – This is the process of working on and modifying your ad campaigns to improve the quality and performance of your campaigns.

Organic – A source of traffic that comes to a website through clicking on a non paid search engine result.

Quality Score – the relevancy and quality of keywords used in PPC campaigns rated by Google AdWords.

PPC – Pay Per Click. An advertising model for when advertisers pay for their ad once it is clicked.

Remarketing – Remarketing is the practise of serving targeted ads across the internet to people that have already been to your website.

ROI – Return on Investment. This is a ratio of the net profit and cost of investment resulting from a campaign or investment of a resource.