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September 26, 2019

34 Pay Per Click (PPC) Acronyms and Terminology

by Harry Phillips

People make acronyms for all sorts. But, when it comes to PPC acronyms and terminology, they are actually very useful and make communicating to both clients and co-workers easier and more efficient.

With this in mind, we’ve collated 34 of our most used PPC terms so that you can learn and refer to them in the future.

1. Ad Extension

A feature which allows you to extend ads with extra pieces of information, often leading to a much higher click-through rate. These include Sitelinks, Callouts, Structured Snippets and more.

2. Ad Group

A key component to organising ads, keywords and bids. An Ad Group often houses a select number of related keywords and a minimum of three ads.

3. Ad Rank

A metric used to determine the position of your ads in the search results. Although you won’t ever see your Ad Rank, it is calculated using both your maximum bid and Quality Score.

4. Average Position

Before 30th September 2019, this metric used to see on average what position your ad was in. For example, 2.0 would mean your ad was shown in second place on average.

5. Bid

The amount of money you are willing to pay per click. This will vary depending on campaign type (Search, Shopping, Display etc), how competitive the keyword or product is you’re bidding on and how much traffic you want to receive.

6. Bing Ads

Now known as Microsoft Ads, a PPC platform almost identical to Google Ads that operates on the Bing search engine.

7. BMM (Broad Match Modifier)

A keyword match type which allows your ads to be displayed if the user has searched for your keyword, regardless of the order it’s in. Similar to Phrase match, however, it is less controlled. Using BMM also accounts for close variants and misspellings.

8. Broad match

The default keyword match type and the least accurate. When using Broad match keywords, your ads may show if a user searches for your keyword or searches for terms that are related. We highly recommend not using this match type, as it will mostly drive high volumes of irrelevant traffic.

9. Campaign

In best practice, a campaign houses ad groups, keywords, ads and bids. Campaigns are usually themed around a specific topic such as ‘Running Shoes’, then the ad groups inside would consist of sub-categories such as ‘Men’s Running Shoes’, ‘Women’s Running Shoes’ etc.

10. Click-Through-Rate (CTR)

A key metric in determining how effective an ad is. CTR is calculated by dividing clicks by impressions, giving you a percentage figure.

11. Clicks

A click is measured every time a user clicks on any of your adverts.

12. Conversion

An action which you want users to complete after they have clicked through to your website from an ad. For example, complete a sale or fill out a contact form.

13. Conversion Rate (CVR)

The percentage of users who completed a desired goal, such as filling out a form, after clicking on one of your ads. This is calculated by dividing the number of conversions by clicks, giving you a percentage figure.

14. Cost-Per-Acquisition (CPA)

Also referred to throughout Marketing as Cost-Per-Lead (CPL), this is the total amount of money the advertiser has spent in order to get a conversion. For example, if you spent £100 and got 2 conversions, your CPA would be £50.

15. Cost-Per-Click (CPC)

The total amount of money you pay every time a user clicks on your advert.

16. Enhanced Cost-Per-Click (ECPC)

A manual bidding strategy that uses machine-learning to automatically raise your bids when it thinks a conversion is more likely and lower your bids when it thinks a conversion is less likely.

17. Exact match

The most highly targeted and specific keyword match type. Your ads will only display when the user searches for your keyword exactly and in the same order, allowing for slight mistakes and variants.

18. Google Ads Editor

An application which allows you to download Google Ads accounts and work on them offline. In the Google Ads Editor, you can make bulk edits with ease, import/export files, search and replace text and more.

19. Google Merchant Centre

A platform which allows advertisers to upload product feeds so that they can advertise their products on the Google Shopping network.

20. Impression Share (IS)

The percentage of impressions your ad was eligible to show for, is divided by the total amount of times that it did show. For example, 1,000 impressions were available to show for in that day, but due to your bids, budget and quality score you may have only shown 100 times–giving you an impression share of 10%.

21. Impressions

An impression is counted every time a user sees your ad.

22. Key Performance Indicator (KPI)

KPIs allow businesses to measure their performance and success against business objectives. Examples of this could be to grow revenue, increase profit, lower cost, decrease the cost of sale etc.

23. Keyword

A word or a selection of words you wish to target and display your ads for in the search results.

24. Long-tail Keyword

A keyword that is longer and more specific. This usually results in less traffic, however, the traffic that does come through is of a higher quality.

25. Match Type

Different keyword match types change what searches your ads appear for. There are 5 different match types to choose from, Broad, Phrase, Exact, BMM and Negative.

26. Microsoft Ads

Formerly know as Bing Ads, Microsoft Ads is a PPC advertising platform almost exactly the same as Google Ads which allows you to advertise on the Bing search engine.

27. Negative Keyword

A specific type of keyword you set in place to let Google know not to display your ads when a search includes any of those words. For example, if you only sold new running shoes, when you add “used” as a negative keyword and somebody searches for “used running shoes”, your ad won’t show.

28. Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

A form of online advertising which allows advertisers to pay an amount of money every time someone clicks on one of their ads. The most common form of PPC is Search Engine Marketing, using the likes of Google Ads and Microsoft Ads.

29. Phrase match

A keyword match type which will show your ads when a user searches for the keywords you have chosen to target, allowing for additional words both before and/or after.

30. PPC Audit

A method of reviewing the data and performance in an existing PPC account, on platforms such as Google Ads and Microsoft Ads.

31. Quality Score

Google’s way of scoring the relevance and quality of your keywords, ads and landing pages to which you send users to. Using a number-based score out of 10, it is calculated by taking into account your ad relevance, landing page experience and expected CTR.

32. Remarketing

A method of re-engaging with previous visitors of your website.

33. Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)

A metric used to measure the success of an ecommerce based Paid Media campaign. ROAS is calculated by dividing conversion value (revenue) by cost (ad spend). For example, if you got £1,000 revenue back from £100 ad spend, you would have a ROAS of 1,000% or 10 to 1.

34. Search Query Report (SQR)

A report ran that can be both Google Ads and Microsoft Ads to see which search terms are responsible for driving traffic. Using this report, you can implement negative keywords to ensure the traffic coming in is relevant and of high quality.

Hopefully, you’ve learnt some new PPC acronyms to describe your amazing campaigns with.

Liked this article? Check out our blog section for more.

Written by Harry Phillips
This Digital is one of the leading Paid Media agencies in the UK. Looking to learn more about who we are and how we could help you grow online?
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