Google Ad Terms Flashcards
A/B Split Testing
The comparison of two versions of a landing or web page, app, ad, etc., against each other to see which results in better performance. Both versions of what you’re testing are used equally, and (typically) the change is minor
Ad Auction
The ad auction determines the bid you’ll pay for a click and is used to select the ads that will appear on Google’s search engine results pages, search partner sites, or Display Network sites.
Ad Copy
This is the advertising copy of any ad. Google Ads comprises three elements: headlines display path, and descriptions.
Ad Delivery
Determines the rate at which your ads will be served and how long your daily budget will last. There used to be two options: (1) standard delivery, which would deliver your budget evenly over the day, and (2) accelerated delivery, which would try to frontload all spending early in the day.
Ad Extension
Additional features you can add to your ads that show more information about your brand or business, including phone number, hyperlinks to relevant pages, etc.
Ad Group
An ad group is a group that contains one or more ads. The ad group controls the keywords for which the ads within it will appear. Each campaign includes one or more ad groups.
Ad Placement
This is where you allow your display ads or video ads to be placed within the Google Display Network, YouTube, or Google video partner sites. Examples of ad placement include an entire website, a YouTube channel, a mobile app, a single web page, etc.
Ad Preview and Diagnosis
Ad Preview and Diagnosis is a tool that lets you see what serving issues your ad may be having. It helps you determine why your ad may not appear, or extensions need to be included.
Ad Position
Ad position refers to the position in which your ads appear in the Google SERP. The highest position is “1,” and the lowest is infinite. Average ad position as a metric was sunsetted in Google Ads in 2019 and replaced with the Search Top Impression Share and Search Absolute Top Impression Share metrics as the closest substitute.
Ad Rotation
How often Google Ads choose to deliver each of your ads on the Search and Display Networks. When there’s more than one ad in an ad group, Google will rotate the ads in that ad group because only one can be shown in a single auction. You can set your ad rotation to
“Optimize”: prefer best-performing ads
“Do not optimize”: rotate ads indefinitely
Ad Scheduling
Ad scheduling allows you to decide which days and times your ads should run. If you don’t want clicks, calls, or submissions after hours, you can use ad scheduling to prevent that.
Ad Variations
An ad creation tool that allows you to test and create different versions of your ad across your entire account or individual campaigns. You can change copy, CTAs, and headlines to see which performs better and get the most results.
AdSense
A Google program that allows Google Search Network website publishers to show Google Ads on their website for compensation.
Assist Clicks and Impressions
Any clicks and impressions that have helped users get to the last click that ultimately led to a conversion.
Assisted Conversions
Conversions that assisted interactions, helping lead to the final click before a conversion.
Attribution Modeling
The science of understanding which paths a visitor took before conversion and how to weigh the importance of those different paths in a manner that produces the highest ROI. In Google Ads, there is also an “Attribution” tool that helps you understand these paths.
Auction Insights
This report lets you compare your share of voice (SOV) compared to your competitors in Google Ads.
Audience
An audience is a group of people you wish to target to purchase your product or become a lead. Audiences can be defined by age, location, interest, education, etc.
Audience Manager
A tool in your Google Ads Shared Library where you can create new audiences and review the statuses and sizes of audiences already created.
Audience Segment or Segment
A new Google Ads term for “audience.” In your Audience Manager, an audience segment is a group of people who are identified by Google as having expressed a specific interest. This may be a purchase interest, general interest, or interest based on site-browsing history.
Automated Bidding Strategies
These are any bid strategies that allow Google Ads to automate your bids to achieve the goals you’ve set for it.
What are examples of automate bidding strategies?
“Maximize Clicks”
“Maximize Conversions”
“Maximize Conversion Value”
“Target Impression Share”
“Target CPA” (formerly)
“Target ROAS” (formerly)
“ECPC “ (enhanced CPC)
Automated Rules
Automated rules allow Google Ads to automatically change things like ad status, budget, and bids based on conditions you choose.
Auto-tagging
This is a feature for tracking offline conversions and overall ad performance back to the initial click(s) by automatically adding a GCLID (Google Click ID) parameter to your ad URLs.
Average Cost-per-click (Avg. CPC)
This is the average amount of money it costs you when someone clicks on your ad. Google averages the cost-per-click from all your ads and displays them at all levels (account, campaign, ad group, keyword, etc.) within your Google Ads account.
Average Position (Avg. Pos.)
The average position metric would show you the average position of your ads over a selected time period. The highest average position was 1, and the lowest was infinite. Average ad position was sunsetted in Google Ads in 2019 and replaced with the Search Top Impression Share and Search Absolute Top Impression Share metrics as the closest substitute.
Below-the-fold
The part of a web page or landing page where you have to scroll down to see what’s beneath. In Google Ads, reference to the fold of a web page is commonly used to explain how much of a display or video ad must be visible above the fold to count as a viewable impression.
Bid Adjustments
Allow you to increase or decrease your bids by percentage amounts depending on things like time, location, and device. For example, you can increase bids by +30% when ads are shown on mobile devices or decrease bids by -10% when ads are shown to people in the city of Los Angeles.
Billing Threshold
The dollar amount you set that triggers a bill to be sent to you. Google bills at every $500 spent unless you specifically set otherwise.
Bottom Feeding
This is a strategy that involves breaking out broad match keywords into their own campaign and combining them with audience targeting (like in-market or affinity audiences). In successful bottom feeding campaigns, the audiences targeted are those that have shown beneficial performance in other campaigns when placed in Observation Mode. The point of this strategy is to achieve better performance with higher reach.
Broad Match Keyword
This keyword match type is also the scariest of all the match types. It allows your search ad to appear for searches on similar phrases, synonyms, variations, and anything Google deems relevant to the original keyword. You could be selling black leather couches, but for some reason, Google could show your ad for the search terms “leather,” “snuggie,” and/or “black beans.”
Broad Match Modified Keyword
A variation of the broad match keyword that allowed you to be more specific about searches you wanted your keyword to show for. The “modifier” in the keyword was represented as a “+” sign before each word in the keyword. Placing a “+” in front of any word in the keyword meant that word exactly (or something very close) needed to be included in the search term to trigger your keyword. For example, a broad match modified keyword +black +leather +boots would show for the search “black leather boots sale,” but not the search “black boots.” Broad match modified keywords have been retired as of 2021 and replaced with more flexible match functionality in phrase match keywords.
Bounce
When someone lands on your website and leaves immediately without visiting another page. If a Google Analytics account is connected, you can see the bounce rate associated with your campaigns within Google Ads.
Bulk Edits
Making a series of edits in one go instead of one edit at a time in Google Ads Editor.
Bulk Uploads
Uploading CSV files containing a large number of edits you wish to make to your account. These edits can be made to keywords, locations, negative keywords, etc.
Call-to-action (CTA)
This is a specific written action you want visitors to take after clicking your ads or visiting your landing pages. They’re all in relation to what you want a person to act upon so that you, as the advertiser, can achieve your goals.
What are some examples of CTA?
Some common CTAs are
“Call Now”
“Buy Now”
“Get Pricing”
“Book Demo”
Call Extensions
An extension to your text ad that allows you to show your company’s phone number alongside the ad. On mobile devices, call extensions will show as a clickable call button that will open a searcher’s phone call function and insert your number there. On desktops and tablets, the number will still show on the ad but won’t be clickable.
Callout Extensions
Non-clickable copy that appears below your main ad headlines and descriptions in a Google ad. It is a great place to include UVPs (unique value propositions) and additional information to help you stand out.
Call Campaigns
A type of ad campaign that allows you to only give your visitors the option of calling and not clicking through to your landing page.
Call Tracking
Call tracking is how you track which of your PPC campaigns are driving phone calls, so you can measure how successful your ad campaigns are.
Campaign
This is the second-highest level setting after the account level. The campaign is like a large folder containing your ad groups, keywords, and ads. Your campaign settings control the networks you want to advertise on, geographic locations, budgets, languages, ad scheduling, bid strategy, and more for all ad groups within that campaign.
Campaign Placement Exclusions
These allow you to create a list of unwanted website placement targets for your Display Network campaign(s).
Change History
A Google Ads report that lets you see timestamps of different actions that have happened within your Google Ads account and the users that were responsible. You can view changes to things like your budget, keywords, etc.
Click
When a person clicks on your ads.
Click-through Rate (CTR)
This is the number of clicks received divided by the number of impressions received, then multiplied by 100. CTR is expressed as a percentage. For example: 70 clicks / 1,000 impressions = 0.07 x 100 = 7% (your CTR).
Contextual Targeting
A type of targeting that occurs when search ads are allowed to show on the Display Network (a setting available at the campaign level). Contextual targeting uses an ad group’s keyword and/or topic targeting to find relevant Display Network websites to show your search ads on.
Conversion
This is the successful action that is the end goal of your Google Ads campaigns. If a visitor has converted, it means they’ve either filled out a form, called your business, chatted, bought, downloaded, or visited a key page. You decide on what you want to track.
Conversion/Confirmation Page
This is the page your conversion code should be installed on to track successful goal completions. It is usually the page people see right after they’ve completed a conversion.
Conversion Rate
The number of conversions divided by the total interactions that have taken place on your ad. For example, if 100 visitors come to your site and 32 sign up for your monthly newsletter (the conversion you want), then your conversion rate would be 32%.
Conversion Tracking
This is installing pieces of code that allow you to track various actions that you deem relevant and important to the success of your Google Ads campaigns.
Converted Clicks
This is the unique count for all customer conversions. One ad click can, at maximum, result in one conversion. This won’t count multiple conversions from the same visitor.
Cost-per-conversion
Total cost paid for an ad in relation to the success of achieving a conversion. To calculate it, divide your total ad spend by your total number of conversions.
Cost-per-click (CPC)
This is the amount of money that you will pay for each click on your ad.
Cost-per-thousand Impressions (CPM)
Your CPM is the amount of money you pay for 1,000 impressions on your ads.
Cost-per-thousand Impressions (CPM) Bidding
This is a Display Network bidding model where, instead of CPC bidding, you’ll pay for every 1,000 impressions. This is usually good for branding or getting more eyeballs on your ads.
Cost-per-view
The amount of money you’ve paid for each view specifically on a video ad.
Cost-per-view (CPV) Bidding
A bidding strategy that allows you to pay for each view on your video ad. A view is counted any time someone watches either your full ad or at least 30 seconds of it. Interactions with your ad also count as views. With this bidding type, you can set a maximum CPV limit that you’d like to stay at or under.