Your PPC Glossary & AdWords Jargon Buster

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Welcome to your very own PPC Glossary & AdWords Jargon Buster. Feel free to bookmark the page for future reference, or send it to a friend or colleague who you think it will help. We have gone through some of the most common words that you may find confusing in your AdWords account, we are happy to help if there are any more specific words that you struggle with.

Whether you control your PPC and AdWords account or you have someone who does it for you, it is important that you know exactly what is going on, after all, it is your money that is being spent. When it comes to Digital Marketing, there are a lot of words that simply, for some people do not make sense. This is why we have collected together keywords that you should know when it comes to controlling and understanding your PPC and AdWords account. 

If you have an agency managing your account, it is also important to understand what these words mean and relate to within your AdWords account as it can help you to test and understand what work they are doing. Put them under a bit of pressure and show that you are aware of everything that is going on in your AdWords account.

PPC Glossary

AdWords: Google’s advertising service, allowing you to display ads on Google. You can create specific ads to reach people at an exact time suited to taking an interest in your product or service.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC): PPC is very similar to CPC. Basically, as an advertiser, you must pay a fee each time one of your Ads is clicked. This is a way of buying the visits instead of attempting to get them organically.

Cost Per Click (CPC): The most common bid type in Google AdWords, meaning you pay every time a person clicks on your ad. You can set a maximum amount that you are willing to spend on each of your clicks.

Click-Through Rate (CTR): Your CTR is the measurement of how well your text ad performs. You can work it out by dividing the total ad clicks by the total ad impressions.

Ad Group: An ad group comes as part of the campaign, it includes your keywords, budgets and targeting methods. An example of this could be if you are running an ad campaign for shoes for sale, then you could set up ad groups to target online sales, men’s shoes and women shoes.

Campaign Type: The campaign type is where you want your ads to be seen, the options are below:

• “Search Network Only”
• “Display Network Only”
• “Search Network with Display Select”

Keyword: A keyword (or keywords) is a particular word or phrase that describes the contents of the Web page. These keywords trigger the ads that the campaigns will show.

Impressions: The measurement of how many times your ad is shown.
Ad Extensions: This is the extra information that you can display below your ad description. This includes your local address, phone number and additional websites.

Ad Text: This is a crucial part of an ad that is there for the account manager to write a quality piece of content in order to entice the user to click on the ad.

Landing Page: A Landing Page is a standalone web page that serves as an entry point for many users. The Landing Page is the destination a user will land on when clicking on an ad or call to action button. Google refers to this as a “Destination URL”. They are a fixed, optimised destination for marketing campaigns.

Call-To-Action: Through any piece of marketing, this is when you are asking the users to do something. Often in button form such as download eBook or fill in a form.

Quality Score: This is a score that Google gives your ad campaign depending on the relevance of your keywords and your PPC ads. By getting a better quality score you can benefit from lower prices and better ad positions which help to increase your chances of conversions.

Google Merchant Center: This is used for uploading your product listings in order to be used by Google Shopping, product ads or more.

My Client Centre: This is a tool that is used by many who deal with more than one AdWords account. This tool allows third-party companies or employees to be added into it at any given time allowing them to manage a specific AdWords account or multiple.

Negative Keywords: Negative keywords are specified by the account manager as words in which they do not want their ad to be shown when searched.

Invalid Clicks: These are clicks that Google sees as being unintentional or clicks which are done using malicious software or other means.

Ad Rotation: Ad Rotation allows advertisers to test new ads and landing pages, if you have 2, for example, you can set it to evenly rotate between the two.

Geo-Targeting: This is a great way for advertisers to target a specific location, most often the location around the business. Google determines where the user is whilst searching and will show them relevant ads based on location, keywords and interests.

This PPC glossary is a great example of just a small selection of the many words, phrases and abbreviations which are commonly used within Google AdWords and PPC platforms.

We have created a free video that you can watch that goes into detail on how a PPC campaign can help grow your eCommerce store, amongst many other methods. Watch the video for free by clicking this link.

We hope you found our PPC Glossary useful, if you find that you are still stuck, drop us an email at hello@seotrafficlab.com and we will help.