27 Need-to-Know PPC Keywords:
How to Better Understand Google AdWords & Navigate Through Your Paid Search Campaigns
Setting up your paid search campaigns for the first time can seem like a daunting task; but understanding these 27 keywords can make the difference in how you interact with and manage your Google Adwords’ campaigns:
Ad Extensions – An AdWords feature that shows additional information in your ads like your business location, phone number, business ratings, and links to your webpage.
- Manual Extensions:
– App Extension
– Call Extension
– Location Extension
– Review Extension
– Sitelinks Extension
– Callout Extension
– Structured Snippets
– Price Extensions
- Automated Extensions (automatically added by Google)
-Consumer Ratings
-Previous Visits
-Seller Ratings
-Dynamic Sitelink extensions
-Dynamic Structured Snippets
Ad Group – The structure that contains one or more ads and a target set of keywords for Google Search, and a target set of placements for Google Display.
Ad Position – The order in which your ad appears in Google’s search results. Ads 1-3 will appear on the top of the search results page, while ads 4-11 appear on the right.
Avg. CPC – Average Cost-Per-Click – The average amount you are charged after a potential customer clicks on your ad. Average CPC is calculated by dividing the total cost of your clicks by the total number of clicks.
For example, if you saw 1,000 clicks and it cost you $100, the Avg. CPC would be $0.10.
Avg. Pos. – Average Position – This statistic will show you the position your ad ranks compared to other ads on average. The highest position is 1. According to Google, positions 1-8 typically mean you will end up on the first page of search results, 9-16 are typically on the second page, and so on.
Bounce Rate – The rate of visitors to your website that leave without visiting more than one page of your site.
Broad Match – The keyword setting that allows your ads to be triggered when any type of similar variation, synonym, or phrase is searched. It will have the largest reach (impressions) compared to all other match types, but will be far less targeted.
Let’s say you sell women’s hats and only women’s hats. If you selected “women’s hats” as a broad match keyword, your ad could trigger anytime someone searches for women’s hats, men’s hats, baby hats, dog hats, and more. Broad match keywords typically cause advertisers to spend money on irrelevant traffic.
Campaigns – The structure within AdWords that holds your keywords and ad groups. All ad groups within a Campaign share a budget and similar settings around targeting. You can have one or many campaigns as part of your AdWords account.
Clicks – The act of clicking the link in your ad. A click most often leads to a website visit. Clicks are measured numerically on the total ‘number of times’ your ad has been clicked by visitors.
CTR – Clickthrough Rate – The percent of people that click on your ad after viewing it. The formula to determine your CTR is the total number of clicks divided by the total number of impressions.
Conversions – The action of your customer taking a desired action as a result of your marketing / advertising. Conversions are defined by the advertiser, but often include sales on your website, sign-ups on a lead gen form, or phone call to your business.
Display Ad – A display ad, also known as a banner ad, is a form of online paid advertising that is typically a designed image or a photo and copy. Viewers can then click on the image with the promotion to then be taken to the corresponding landing page.
Display Network – One of the internet’s largest content networks. It contains more than a million websites and apps that can serve your ads.
Google Search – Commonly referred to as Google Web Search or simply Google, is a web search engine purposed to hunt for text in publicly accessible documents offered by web servers. The order of search on Google’s search-results pages is based, in part, on a priority rank called a “PageRank”.
Impr – Impressions – A core performance metric that tells you how many times your ad has been shown on the Search and Display networks.
Invalid Clicks – Clicks on ads that Google marks as illegitimate. Google claims to examine every single click. There are a number of qualifications for an invalid click:
- unintentional clicks
- software generated clicks (crawling, malicious software)
- clicks from owners of the site your display ad shows on
- robot clicks
- a double click
Keyword Performance – Outlines how the top performing keywords that you are bidding on.
Long-tail Keywords – Are longer and more specific keyword phrases that visitors are more likely to use when they’re closer to a point-of-purchase or when they’re using voice search. They’re a little bit counter-intuitive, at first, but they can be hugely valuable if you know how to use them.
Take this example: if you’re a company that sells classic furniture, the chances are that your pages are never going to appear near the top of an organic search for “furniture” because there’s too much competition (this is particularly true if you’re a smaller company or a startup). But if you specialize in, say, contemporary art-deco furniture, then keywords like “contemporary Art Deco-influenced semi-circle lounge” are going to reliably find those consumers looking for exactly that product.
Negative Keywords – A type of keyword Match Type that prevents your ad from showing for certain search terms. This is a critical feature for your campaigns because negative keywords assure that your ads do not show for searches irrelevant to your offering. This is especially true for people using Broad Match and Broad Match modifier keywords. You can use the Search Terms Report to see what keywords are triggering your ads.
Network Performance – This is a list of all of the places where your ads can appear, including Google sites, third-party websites (search partners) that partner with Google, and YouTube and how the ads are performing on each.
PPC – Pay-Per-Click – An Internet marketing model in which advertisers pay a fee each time one of their ads is clicked – a method for “buying” visits to your site as opposed to earning visits organically.
Remarketing – Is a feature that allows you to reach people who have previously been on your site.
Search Partners – The sites within the Search Network that partner with Google to show ads. Including Search Partners is a default setting for Search Ads that you may want to reconsider when setting up Search Ads.
Search Term (Search Query) – The word or phrase that a person types into a search engine such as Google.com. You target these terms with keywords in order to show your ad for certain Search Terms.
Shared Budget – A budgeting option that allows you to set a single budget for all campaigns. Google will then allocate your budget to each of your active campaigns to “maximize your return-on-investment”.
Text Ad – A basic AdWords ad that consists of:
- A title linking to your destination URL
- Description or promotion of your product/service
- A green link showing your Display URL linking to your Landing Page(Destination URl)
- Text labeling them as an ad
URL – The location of a website, webpage, or file on the internet. It stands for Uniform Resource Locators.
If you have additional questions while reviewing your Google AdWords efforts or monthly performance reports, please contact Tree Ring Digital.