PPC Glossary of all the commonly used terms in paid marketing, to help you understand your PPC marketing campaigns better.
Impressions – Number of times your ad campaign is displayed in the platform or its partner networks.
Clicks – Number of times your ad has been clicked on.
Clickthrough Rate (CTR) – Number of clicks on the ad / number of impressions. Average Clickthrough rate for search ads is 1.91% and for display ads, it’s .35%.
Bounce – The number of visitors who visit only one page on your website, and immediately exit from there.
Exit rate – Number of people who leave from a certain page, after visiting other pages on your website.
Conversion – Number of times a desired action was taken by a customer on your website. This could be form fills, purchases, subscriptions, phone calls or emails. You can define goals for each campaign, or even connect to Google Analytics so that it maps to Goals already assigned on GA.
Daily budget – Money you are willing to spend each day. Most ad platforms will give you an approximate number of clicks you can get for a certain budget.
Cost Per Click (CPC) – Money that you have to pay for each click on your ad. This is usually calculated as Average CPC since different keywords will have different costs per click.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) – The method of advertising wherein your ads are shown in search engines/their networks, and you pay for each click that you receive on the ad.
Cost-per-thousand-impressions (CPM) – The most common method of paid campaigns is PPC, where the payment is for each click. But there other methods like CPM, and CPE (cost per engagement) where the payment is based on other metrics.
Campaign – The highest in hierarchy, campaign is a set of ad groups that share common objective, goals, targeting, and audiences.
Ad groups – Set of ads that share common characteristics like audience, location targeting and budgets.
Ads – Each ad has its own set of title, description, landing page, imagery, videos and extensions.
Search Ads – These are ads shown to visitors based on keywords used by them, in search engines.
Display Ads – These ads are shown to visitors depending on their interests and the websites they frequent. Most ad platforms have a network of display partners where they show ads relevant to the content on those websites.
Retargeting Ads – These ads are displayed to audience who have already interacted with your websites, videos or previous campaigns.
Bid – The amount of money you want to spend on a particular keyword.
Keywords – The set of terms that you want to bid for. There are tools that help you arrive at this list of keywords to bid for.
Keyword matching – While bidding for keywords, you can use broad match, phrase match or exact match depending on how narrow or broad and audience you want your ads to be shown to.
Negative keywords – These are keywords that you do not want to show your ads for.
Single Keyword Ad Group (SKAG) – Set of ads focused on a single keyword. This helps in better ad targeting as well as Dynamic keyword insertion.
Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI) – Dynamically inserting the keyword into your ad by replacing a specific text string, so that your ad will be more noticeable.
Bid adjustments – Most advertisement platforms allow you to make bid adjustments, or different ratio of budget allocation based on geography, device, time of the day etc.
Locations – The countries that you want to show your ads for. You can also give an ‘excluded locations’ list of the countries that you do not want to show your ads for.
Ad extensions – These are extra links that you can add to your ads like pricing, About us, Offers. Clicks on these links will be charged the same as your ad clicks.
Landing page – The URLs that your campaign lead it, usually on your website. These pages have to be designed well to provide all relevant information to your visitors.
Destination URL – These are URLs of the landing pages that you want your visitors to land on.
URL tagging – Destination URLs have to be tagged with relevant utm tags or utm_id, or cid to capture all relevant information about your customers, for better campaign analytics.
UTM tags – UTM tags are added to the destination URLs to capture information like source, medium, campaign type, ad type, keyword etc. If you would like to know more about UTM parameters and how they can help you get more accurate information.
utm_source – This parameter specifies what source your visitor came from, like Google Ads, Bing Ads, Mailchimp, LinkedIn, Twitter etc.
utm_medium – Specifies the channel through which the visitor came like ppc, social, email, affiliates etc.
utm_campaign – Type of campaign like lead generation, Christmas offer, Black Friday, product launch etc.
Custom dimensions – In addition to standard dimensions like source, medium, campaign, term, content, you can add custom dimensions like geography, products, category, sub-category etc. to get more segmented information about your campaign performance. Reach out to CampTag if you would like to add multiple custom dimensions easily to your campaign URLs.
Autotagging – Google Ads has a feature calling autotagging wherein Google will automatically tag your URLs using GCLID tags to capture essential information. UTM tags are not required if you enable autotagging.
Scheduling – Specific day and time that you want your ads to show. It’s good to check the time and day during which your target audience is most active, and schedule your ads to run during that time.
Ad Rotation – Google Ads will show different ads to different users, where you can specify whether the ads will be showed evenly, or chosen by Google based on performance.
Ad placement – Specifies which websites or applications your ad will be displayed. You can specify exclusions if you do not want your ads to be shown in certain websites.
Google Smart Ads – This Google Ads feature lets you create ads on auto-pilot for your website, where Google will map your business from ‘Google My Business’ to the ad, choosing audience and keywords automatically.
Topics – Specify which topics your ad should be displayed. This is very relevant for display campaigns, where you have to exclude certain related topics from your target group.
Experiment – You can experiment by creating ad variations, different videos or even custom variations to your campaigns.
Campaign group – Club campaigns together into a campaign group, for better organizing of data.
If you would like help with your campaign URL tagging, and taxonomy, reach out to CampTag today. We can help standardize your marketing taxonomy, as well as URLs for better analytics.
See how CampTag works without spending a penny.