Google Adwords Glossary

In a Google Ads account, you can find various components organized hierarchically. Here is an overview of the structure:

This hierarchical structure helps keep all the necessary elements for online advertising organized and easily accessible within the Google Ads platform.

With ad customizers, you can input data that will be automatically added to the end text ad shown. For instance, you can input various product prices to have them automatically included in your ads when users are searching. Ad customizers function similarly to Dynamic Keyword Insertion.

An ad group is nestled under a campaign. You can have multiple ad groups in one campaign and multiple ads in one ad group.

You will want to organize and categorize your ad groups by services or products. Ideally going after one service or product for each ad group. This is not the case all the time, because you can also club ad groups by keywords and their CPC's (Cost-Per-Click) if they belong to a similar family or services or products.

At the ad group level you define: the bid for keywords, target keywords, negative keywords, audiences, content targeting and ads for the ad group.

In the older versions of Google Adwords, marketing agencies used to create SKAG's (Single Keyword Ad Group) to maintain more control over their keywords and ads. As time has gone by, and as Google Ads' machine learning algorithm has become stonger, our marketing agency has moved away from SKAG's and into similar themed keywords for one ad group.

For cities the size of Vancouver, Scarborough, Quebec, Hamilton, Surrey, Calgary or Edmonton this type of grouping works really well.

For larger cities like New York, Chicago, Houston, Toronto area you will usually want to breakdown the ad groups by keyword CPC or move to manual CPC.

This is a tool inside your Google Adwords account under Tools --> Troubleshooting.

This tool helps you evaluate which keywords your ads show up, for which regions they show up under and which devices they show up on. You can change the device, location and language for the keywords to test them out.

It will also show you a preview of your google ads so that you can decide how to optimize them.

If you are marketing and running Google Ads in smaller regions ( population size of 400,000 and lower) your results may not be very accurate. This tool works really well when it has a lot of search engine marketing data to scrape from.

Ad Rank is a quantitative measure of your ads. It determines where your ads are eligible to be shown and how high they will be shown in each auction.

The Ad Rank of an ad depends on many factors, bidding, context of the search, landing page optimization, relevance of your ads to the search keyword, your competition and their bids, impact of assets and other factors.

Your ad rank should be monitored over a time period to make changes to affect this metric. In search engine management, as stated above, there are a multitude factors that may suddenly change the ad rank and this should not be a surprise to you.

Lastly, this metric should be used to make directional decisions rather than tactical changes in your ad campaigns.

For more details: https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/1752122?hl=en&ref_topic=24937&sjid=18347169718149963649-NC

Ad Rank threshold decides if your ads to show up in an auction or not and in which position they show up.

Ad Rank thresholds are dynamic and decided in real-time during the ad auction. The following factors determine the thresholds:

Ad quality: Google wants their users to have the best experience. And so, higher quality ads have a lower threshold while the same is true the other way around

Ad position: Ads that are higher on the page, have higher thresholds compared to ads that are lower on the page.

User attributes: Google takes into account the attributes of the users that have interacted with your ad, eg. their location and device type. Thresholds vary by country and mobile or desktop devices.

User Intent: The search intent and the past search history of the user are taken into account while determining thresholds.

These are the inputs we know about, there maybe other inputs that Google uses through its machine learning to optimize the thresholds. As a specialized search engine marketing agency we use this metric to ascertain the bidding for cost per conversion and what to set as the limits for the same.

It is a metric that shows how relevant your ad is to the user's search term and the keywords that are being triggered.

Some digital marketing agencies will keep this as a monitoring metric in their Google Adwords account to decide on ad and keyword changes.

This is a qualitative metric. It tells you if the ad is eligible to run and if it is restricted / limited in any category or not.

Ad strength is an internal Google Adwords metric to ascertain if you have given Google's algorithm enough combinations of headlines, descriptions, assets etc. And if the given data is relevant to the keywords you are targeting.

In our experience of handling multiple search engine marketing account in Google Adwords, we haven't found a direct relation between conversion rate or cost per conversion and ad strength. We have had ads that have shown average ad strength that have performed better than those with good strength. But it is always better to make sure that you ad strength is good because it is a directional value on how to craft your search ads.

This is a measure of all your conversions in your account. You may choose to include certain conversions and exclude certain conversions in your conversion actions that drive business revenue. This metric takes into account all of your conversions, regardless of whether they are being included or excluded in the optimization.

This metric includes numbers from the conversions column and the conversion actions column, including conversions that coming from cross-device sources, store visits, phone calls etc.

Formerly called ‘Ad Extensions’, assets are used to add additional information to your ads. They are designed to make your ads more relevant and engaging. Assets include headlines, descriptions, links to specific pages (Sitelinks), salient features about your business (Callouts), phone number links, location information, and a lot more that help make the ad more engaging for the user.

To maximize the performance of your responsive search ads, Google Ads selects which additional assets to show in response to each individual search on Google. For that reason, it’s a good idea to use all the assets relevant to your business goals.

The Business Logo asset display your logo as a small favicon alongside your ad.

You can display your business name with your ads to create more brand awareness and increase credibility.

The Call asset display your phone number as a clickable link alongside your ad.

Callout assets give you the ability to show more features about your products or services. These can help you differentiate yourself from other competitors.

The Description asset gives you the ability to attach upto 2 descriptions at a campaign-level.

The Headline asset gives you the ability to attach upto 3 headlines on a campaign-level instead of an ad group level

Image assets display images along side your ad to give users a look and feel of your product or service.

Lead Form assets help display a lead form in your ad so that the user can book an appointment or consultation directly from the ad itself.

Location assets display below the ads as a location pin, sometimes showing the distance to the business. This can help people make a decision to visit your business if they are nearby.

Price assets are used to convey your product's or service's pricing. You can display a base price for services or the total price.

Promotion assets help you display discounts, deals or sale offers. You can also set the date period within which the sale is available.

Sitelinks provide additional links to relevant pages on your website.

Structured snippets highlights specific aspects of your products or services. You can structure them as a collection, eg. Benefits, Style, Types, etc.

Asset groups are primarily used in the Performance Max campaigns, as of the date of writing of this article.

Asset groups are a collection of assets (images, videos, headlines, descriptions, etc) that are grouped by product or service. They are attached to one campaign and not shared between them. You can, however, add additional asset groups to already created campaigns.

Google's algorithm creates a combination of different ads from the asset data that you provide and shows it to the user based on their search intent.

Associations view is a line item view of all your assets and which campaigns, ad groups, ads they are connected to.

This is the backbone of how Google Adwords work to show ads to their users. Everytime a user searches, Google conducts an automated and internal auction of all the advertisers in the space. Then depending on the advertiser's targeting attributes it shows their ads in the google search page.

Since the auction process is repeated for every search on Google, each auction can have potentially different results depending on the competition at that moment. Therefore it's normal for you to see some fluctuation in your ad's position on the page and in whether or not your ad shows at all.

All of this takes place within a few milliseconds!

There are 2 main bid strategies: Automated and Manual CPC

Automated bid strategies take the guesswork out of the equation. You define what your business goals are: maximize clicks, maximize conversions, conversion value, etc. And the Google AI adjusts the bid in each auction to optimize that goal. It also learns from previous auctions to adjust the bid in the future and change it based on competition, schedule etc.

This is used in as a reporting metric in Google Adwords. This encompasses all the websites, apps, video etc on the display network where your ad showed. You can control the placement of your ads by specifying target destinations.

This is used more when you are targeting based on behavior, keywords, demographics or topics.

This is the average cost per action (conversion) you have paid. It is calculated by divinding the total amount spent by the total number of conversion actions in your account.

Be mindful of this metric because not all conversion actions are the same and not every conversion leads to a sale / lead. Configuring your conversion actions properly is important to make sense of this metric.

Eg. For a restaurant business in Calgary, if the Google Adwords' marketing campaign is relying on phone calls and reservations as lead conversion actions - then a google maps direction conversion, or an engagement conversion from Edmonton should not be account for in the CPA.

The average amount you are charged for each click. This value is calculated by the total amount you were charged for all your clicks, divided by the total number of clicks.

The average daily budget is set at a campaign level. Over a 30 day cycle Google Adwords aims to spend the total budet but may spend a different amount per day.

Eg. If you create a Google Ads campaign for your roofing company and if your campaign bidding is set to optimize for conversions, then it might spend a larger amount if there is more demand after a storm and go down on the spend when there is not enough demand in the market for your keywords.

This is the maximum cost per click you can estimate to pay for a given keyword.

In every Google Adwords auction, a bid is submitted by each advertiser. The bid amount depends on how you have setup your campaigns and the Maximum CPC will be highest value you can expect to pay in that auction.

This is an automated campaign optimization technique that tries to optimize the cost per conversions based on a target value given by the user.

It is good practice to change your campaign optimization technique to Target CPA after you've had about 30 to 50 conversions in the last 30 days. In our Google Ads glossary you will find another term like Average CPA which is a metric and not an optimization technique.

Eg. If a car cleaning company running Google Adwords marketing campaigns is optimizing for phone calls in the Edmonton region and does not have more than 10 phone calls in the last 30 days, Google's algorithm will have a tough time optimizing for the objective. Whereas an account that has 20 or 30 (and more) conversions, it will be easier for the algorithm to optimize in that case.

Basically, the more conversions that you have in your account, the easier it gets to optimize for it in the future.