Google Ads glossary

How often your ad took the first position on the page.

The share of your impressions that landed in the very first ad slot.

How often you took the first slot out of all the times you could have.

A conversion action shared by every campaign unless overridden.

Bid changes by hour and day. Justified when conversion rate genuinely varies by time, not because the chart looks uneven.

Google rating of how varied your responsive ad assets are. A diversity score, not a performance prediction, and treating it as the latter costs money.

Broad interest groups based on long-term behaviour. Useful for reach, weak for intent.

An automated campaign type for driving installs and in-app actions across Search, Play, YouTube and Display.

The Performance Max container holding creative, audience signals and listing groups. The closest thing PMax has to an ad group.

A report showing which domains competed with you and how often. The only competitor data Google gives you free.

Bid changes for people on a list. Under smart bidding these usually apply as observation only.

A hint you give Performance Max about who is likely to convert. A starting point for the algorithm, not a targeting restriction.

Google appending a click identifier to your URLs automatically. Turn it on, or offline conversion imports will not work.

A percentage change to bids for a given condition. Mostly ignored by smart bidding, which sets its own.

Search ads with a phone number that dials instead of clicking through. Strong for service businesses where the sale happens on the phone.

A phone call long enough to count as a lead. Set the minimum duration honestly or the number is fiction.

The older name for call ads, from when they had no website link at all.

A conversion setting that overrides the account default for one campaign. Useful when lead gen and ecommerce share an account.

A single tracked event with its own settings for counting, value and attribution.

A helper tag that stores click identifiers so conversions can be matched later. Missing it silently breaks tracking on many sites.

Rules that change reported conversion value by location, device or audience. A blunt way to encode margin differences.

An audience built from keywords and URLs people recently engaged with. Closer to search intent than affinity groups.

A value you define and pass through the URL for tracking. Useful for stitching platform data to your own reporting.

The current name for custom intent and custom affinity audiences combined.

An uploaded file of known customers, used for targeting, exclusion or value rules.

Uploading customer emails or phone numbers as a targeting or exclusion list. One of the few durable first-party assets left.

Telling Google to ignore a period when conversion tracking was broken. Without it, one bad week poisons bidding for a month.

The current name for feed-style campaigns on Google, with more creative formats and better reporting than Discovery had.

Bid changes by phone, tablet or desktop. Worth checking when conversion rate differs sharply by device.

The feed-based campaign type that ran across YouTube, Discover and Gmail. Replaced by Demand Gen.

A campaign restricted to display inventory. Useful for remarketing, rarely useful for cold prospecting.

The full name for keyword insertion. Always set a sensible default, because that is what shows when the keyword will not fit.

Remarketing that shows the specific products someone viewed, pulled from your feed.

Sending hashed first-party data with a conversion so Google can match it more reliably. Recovers a meaningful share of lost conversions.

Manual bids that Google adjusts up or down based on conversion likelihood. A halfway house that is slowly being retired.

Shorthand for expanded text ads. If someone still says it, they have been doing this a while.

The old fixed-format search ad with set headlines. Retired, and still worth understanding because most account history is written in it.

Improving titles, attributes and images in the feed. Usually the highest-return work available in an ecommerce account.

The page an ad sends people to. Different from the display URL, and the only one that matters for conversion rate.

A list built from your own data rather than from Google inference. Increasingly the only kind that survives privacy changes.

A click identifier used for iOS app traffic where the individual GCLID is not available.

The Google click identifier. The key that links a click to a conversion imported later from your CRM.

The previous name for the shared measurement tag. Same job, older label.

Google advertising platform covering search, shopping, display, video and app inventory in one account. Everything else in this list sits inside it.

The older conversion tracking snippet, now folded into the Google tag.

The successor to Discovery campaigns, running across YouTube, Discover and Gmail with heavy creative automation.

Banner inventory across millions of sites and apps. Cheap reach, weak intent, and the first place a careless budget vanishes.

The agency badge programme. A spend and certification threshold, not a quality guarantee.

Text ads on the results page, triggered by what someone typed. The highest intent inventory Google sells, and priced accordingly.

Product listings with image, price and merchant name, fed from Merchant Center rather than from keywords.

The current single tag for measurement across Google products. Replaced the separate tags that came before it.

YouTube and video partner inventory, bought on views, impressions or conversions depending on the format.

A snippet that drops the matched keyword into your ad text. Improves relevance when it works and produces embarrassing ads when it does not.

How loosely Google may interpret your keyword. Broad, phrase and exact, though all three now match more than their names suggest.

Google forecasting tool for volume and bids. Ranges are wide and rounded, so treat it as direction rather than data.

The Performance Max equivalent of a product group, inside an asset group.

A campaign type aimed at store visits and directions rather than website conversions. Now largely folded into Performance Max.

Bid changes by geography. Often the fastest win in accounts serving areas with very different margins.

Setting bids yourself. Rare now, and still the right choice when conversion volume is too thin for automation to learn from.

A bid strategy chasing volume regardless of what the clicks do afterwards. Useful for learning, dangerous as a default.

The same idea, optimising for revenue rather than count. Only as good as the values you send back.

A bid strategy spending the full budget on whatever produces the most conversions. Says nothing about what those conversions are worth.

Where your product data lives before Google will show it. Feed problems here look like campaign problems downstream.

The rebuilt Merchant Center, with automatic product discovery from your site. Convenient, and prone to picking up products you did not want listed.

The file of product data that drives Shopping and PMax. Feed quality decides Shopping performance more than bidding does.

A shared set of negatives applied across campaigns. Build one properly once and every future campaign inherits it.

Terms you told Google never to match. The highest-return maintenance job in any search account.

A Google Ads setting that biases bidding toward people who have not bought before. Requires a customer list to work properly.

An extra value you assign to a first-time buyer, so bidding stops treating repeat customers as equally valuable.

An audience attached for reporting and bid adjustment without narrowing delivery.

Rules that adjust conversion value based on data Google cannot see, such as which leads eventually closed.

Letting Google look beyond your chosen audience for people likely to convert. Effective when conversion data is clean, expensive when it is not.

How often you beat a given competitor, counting auctions where only you appeared.

How often a competitor appeared in the same auctions as you. High overlap with a low impression share means you are being outbid consistently.

A middle match type covering the meaning of your phrase. Broader than most people expect, and worth auditing regularly.

Performance Max. One campaign across every Google surface with almost no manual control, driven by your assets and conversion data.

One bid strategy shared across several campaigns, so they pool learning and budget pressure.

How often a competitor outranked you when you both showed.

A conversion action that bidding optimises toward. Keep this list short and expensive.

The general name for the same file, whichever platform consumes it.

A subdivision of products in Standard Shopping, used to control bids by category, brand or custom label.

People who already visited or interacted. Posts excellent attributed returns and modest incremental ones.

An ad built from up to fifteen headlines and four descriptions that Google mixes per auction. You supply the parts, the machine picks the combination.

Short for responsive search ad, and since 2022 the only text ad format Google will let you build.

A campaign restricted to the search network. Still the most controllable campaign type Google offers.

Impression share counted only on searches that exactly matched your keywords. Strips out the broad match noise.

The share of available search impressions you won. The gap is what you left to competitors.

Impressions you missed because the budget ran out. The clearest signal in the whole account that more money would produce more sales.

Impressions you missed because your ad rank was too low. Fix with relevance and landing page quality before reaching for bids.

Google search plus search partners. Check which one your numbers include before comparing anything.

Non-Google sites that carry Google search results. Usually cheaper and usually worse, and worth splitting out before you judge a campaign.

The list of real queries that triggered your ads. Google hides a growing share of them for privacy, which makes what remains more valuable, not less.

The queries people typed. Different from your keywords, and the gap between the two is where budget leaks.

A phrase you give Performance Max to steer which queries it chases. The closest PMax gets to a keyword.

A temporary instruction telling smart bidding to expect an unusual conversion rate. For sales and launches, not for slow trends.

A conversion action reported but not bid on. Where micro conversions belong.

One budget spread across multiple campaigns. Convenient, and it hides which campaign is eating the money.

A campaign built on a product feed rather than keywords. What you sell decides what you show for.

Lists modelled on your existing ones. Retired by Google in favour of automated expansion.

The manual version of Shopping, where you keep control of bidding and negatives. Slower than PMax, and far easier to diagnose.

Uploading offline purchase data so Google can attribute in-store revenue to ads.

A modelled estimate of people who visited a physical shop after seeing an ad. Modelled, not counted, and worth remembering that.

An audience that restricts who can see the ad. Narrower reach, tighter control.

Target CPA. You name an acquisition cost, Google bids toward it. Set it below anything the account has achieved and delivery simply stops.

The share of your impressions that appeared above the organic results.

How often you appeared above organic results out of all available chances.

How often your ad rendered above organic results.

Target ROAS. You name a revenue-to-spend ratio and Google bids toward it. Only sensible once you know your break-even ratio.

Tags appended to URLs so analytics can identify the source. Inconsistent naming across a team wrecks more reporting than any tool ever fixes.

Bidding toward revenue or profit rather than conversion count. The right default whenever order values vary.

The iOS web equivalent of GBRAID, used when privacy rules prevent full click identification.

An action completed on your site. The most auditable conversion type you have.

Video inventory on YouTube, sold as skippable, non-skippable, bumper or in-feed. Each counts a view differently.

Vertical video inventory in the Shorts feed. Cheapest video CPMs Google sells, with attention to match.