PPC glossary

There is a wide range of terminology used with PPC advertising, with some of the key ones explained here:

• Pay-per-click (PPC): The pricing structure used by some online channels, such as search engines, to charge an advertiser each time a user clicks on the advertiser's advert. The amount is usually set by the advertiser, not by the channel, which also determines the ranking position of an advert compared to competitors. Also called cost-per-click (CPC).
• Campaign: Campaigns are used to give structure to the products or services that you want to advertise within a PPC campaign. The ads in a given campaign share the same daily budget, language and location targeting, end dates and syndication options. Within each campaign, you can create one or more ad groups.
• Daily Budget: Your daily budget is the amount that you're willing to spend on a specific PPC campaign each day. An account such as Google Ads (AdWords) displays your ads as often as possible while staying within your daily budget. When the budget limit has been reached, your ads will typically stop being displayed for that day.
• Ad Group: An adgroup contains one or more ads which target a set of keywords, placements or both. You set a bid, or price, to be used when your advert is triggered by the keywords or placements in the adgroup. This is called a cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM) bid. You may also set prices for individual keywords or placements within the ad group.
• Keywords: The terms a User enters into the query field of a Search Engine when they are looking for something. The PPC advertising targets the keywords that are relevant to their product or service, and aim to match the searcher's intent.
• Keyword Match Type: The rules under which a Keyword will be matched against search queries. Available Keyword Match Types are Broad, Exact, Phrase and Negative.
• Bid Price or Bid: The current value of a click on a particular keyword in the campaign
• Average Bid Price: The average of all the current bids for the keywords in the campaign
• Impression: One Impression is recorded each time your advert is displayed on the search results, such as Google - this means that if a searcher looks through multiple search results pages, the impressions can be higher than the actual number of searches made.
• Click: When a User actively selects your Sponsored Advert in the Search Results and "clicks" on it to display your website.
• CTR (also known as "click through rate"): the number of clicks each advert or keyword receives divided by its number of Impressions. Used as a measure of relevancy.
• Av. CTR or Average CTR: The Click-Through-Rate (CTR) averaged over a day, month, or specified date period.
• CPC (also known as "cost per click", or "click charge"): The amount an advertiser pays each time someone clicks on their Advert.
• Av. CPC or Average CPC: The Cost-Per-Click (see CPC) averaged over a day, month or specified date period.
• Conversion: Recorded when a User buys a product, subscribes for a service or provides some details at your website as a result of your Ads (AdWords) promotion.
• Conversion Rate: Conversion rate is the number of conversions that your advert yields divided by the number of times that your ad is clicked.
• Destination URL: The actual website address of the Landing Page that a sponsored advert goes through to on your website
• Display URL: Your website address, with details relevant to the adgroup, displayed onscreen as part of your advert.
• Landing Page: That page of your website that is displayed to a User immediately after they click on your Advert. That page of your website linked to by your advert's Destination URL.
• Quality Score: Quality Score is a measure of how relevant your ad, keyword or web page is. Quality Scores is a measure used by Google and the Google Network.
• Sponsored Listings: PPC adverts at the top and side of the Search Results that act as paid links to the websites of commercial advertisers.

If there are other terms that you've come across with PPC advertising and would like to know more, then please contact us and ask!

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