Ads 101
The countable event that happens when a user sees your ad on their screen (but doesn't click it).
What is an Impression?
This is the term for a valuable action a user takes on your website after clicking your ad, such as making a purchase or filling out a contact form.
What is a Conversion?
You set this targeting option to ensure your ads only show to people in specific countries, cities, or postal codes.
What is Location Targeting (or Geo-targeting)?
This is the average amount you tell Google you are willing to spend per day.
What is the Daily Budget?
Formerly known as "Extensions," these are extra snippets like phone numbers or sitelinks added to your ad.
What are Assets?
The blue, clickable text at the top of a text ad.
What is a Headline?
This 3-letter acronym represents the average amount you pay for each conversion (calculated as Total Cost divided by Total Conversions).
What is CPA (Cost Per Action / Cost Per Acquisition)?
These are words you exclude from your campaign to prevent waste (e.g., excluding "free" if you sell luxury goods).
What are Negative Keywords?
"CPC" stands for this payment model, where you only pay when someone interacts with the ad.
What is Cost Per Click?
This diagnostic tool lets you see if your ad is showing in real-time without skewing your impression data.
What is the Ad Preview and Diagnosis Tool?
The acronym "CTR" stands for this fundamental metric.
What is Click-Through Rate?
This diagnostic metric is a 1-10 rating of your ad's quality compared to other advertisers, based on Expected CTR, Ad Relevance, and Landing Page Experience.
What is Quality Score?
This targeting method focuses on showing ads to people who have already visited your website.
What is Remarketing (or Retargeting)?
This automated bidding strategy focuses on getting you as many conversions as possible within your budget.
What is Maximize Conversions?
This report compares your performance (impression share) directly against other advertisers bidding in the same auctions.
What are Auction Insights?
To stop a campaign from running immediately without deleting it, you change its status to this.
What is Paused?
If 100 people click your ad and 4 of them make a purchase, this specific percentage metric would be 4%.
What is Conversion Rate?
This "Match Type" triggers your ad for searches that have the same meaning as your keyword, even if the phrasing is different (e.g., "lawn mowing" matching "grass cutting").
What is Broad Match?
"ROAS" is a key metric for e-commerce; it stands for Return On _____ _____.
Ad Spend
This advanced campaign type doesn't use keywords; instead, Google crawls your website content to automatically generate headlines and target searches.
What are Dynamic Search Ads (DSA)?
This 0-100% score helps you prioritize actions to improve your account's performance; it often comes with "Apply" buttons.
What is the Optimization Score?
This competitive metric tells you the percentage of times your ad showed up compared to the total number of times it was eligible to show (often lost due to budget or rank).
What is Impression Share?
When adding an audience to a campaign, you choose this specific setting if you want to monitor how that audience performs without restricting your ads to only that audience.
What is Observation (mode)?
Instead of setting bids for individual campaigns, you can use this "Portfolio" feature to apply a single automated strategy across multiple campaigns at once.
What is a Portfolio Bid Strategy?
This model determines how credit for a conversion is assigned to different touchpoints in the user journey (e.g., "Data-Driven" vs. "Last Click").
What is Attribution?