PPC Glossary
The terms that decide whether your ads make money.
53 definitions, each written the way we explain it to a client: one sentence you can quote, then what it means in a real account and why it matters. Written by Ilya Bulychev, Founder of Live PPC Ads.
Google Ads · Meta Ads · Microsoft Ads · Measurement
Metrics
AOV (Average Order Value)
Average order value is total revenue divided by the number of orders over a period, showing how much a typical customer spends per transaction.
Read definition →Auction Insights
Auction insights is a Google Ads report that shows which other advertisers competed in the same auctions as you, with their impression share, overlap rate, outranking share, and top-of-page rate.
Read definition →CPA (Cost Per Acquisition)
Cost per acquisition is total ad spend divided by the number of conversions, giving the average cost to produce one defined outcome such as a sale, lead, or sign-up.
Read definition →CPC (Cost Per Click)
Cost per click is the amount paid for a single click on an ad, reported as an average across a keyword, ad group, or campaign.
Read definition →CPL (Cost Per Lead)
Cost per lead is ad spend divided by the number of leads generated, where a lead is a form submission, phone call, chat, or other inquiry that a sales process can follow up on.
Read definition →CPM (Cost Per Thousand Impressions)
CPM is the cost of one thousand ad impressions and is the standard pricing unit for display, video, and social advertising where the platform sells reach rather than clicks.
Read definition →CTR (Click-Through Rate)
Click-through rate is clicks divided by impressions, expressed as a percentage, showing how often people who saw an ad chose to click it.
Read definition →Impression Share
Impression share is the percentage of eligible impressions your ads actually received, with the lost share broken out by budget (you ran out of money) and by rank (your bid or quality was too low).
Read definition →LTV (Customer Lifetime Value)
Customer lifetime value is the total revenue or profit a customer is expected to generate over the whole relationship, not just the first purchase.
Read definition →MER (Marketing Efficiency Ratio)
Marketing efficiency ratio is total business revenue divided by total marketing spend across all channels, measured without platform attribution.
Read definition →ROAS (Return on Ad Spend)
ROAS is revenue attributed to advertising divided by the cost of that advertising, expressed as a multiple such as 5x or a percentage such as 500%.
Read definition →Bidding & Budgets
Ad Schedule
An ad schedule is the set of day and hour blocks during which a campaign is eligible to serve, optionally with bid adjustments per block, defined at the campaign level.
Read definition →Bid Modifiers (Bid Adjustments)
Bid modifiers are percentage adjustments applied to bids for specific dimensions such as device, location, ad schedule, audience, or demographic, raising or lowering what you pay in those segments.
Read definition →Budget Pacing
Budget pacing is the practice of planning and controlling how ad spend is distributed across days, weeks, and months so that a monthly budget is spent evenly, front-loaded, or concentrated according to demand.
Read definition →Dayparting
Dayparting is scheduling ads to run, or bidding differently, during specific hours of the day and days of the week based on when conversions actually happen.
Read definition →Experiments (Campaign Experiments and Drafts)
Google Ads experiments split a campaign's traffic between the original and a modified version so a change in bidding, keywords, ads, or settings can be measured against a control before being applied.
Read definition →Smart Bidding
Smart Bidding is Google's set of automated, conversion-based bid strategies (Target CPA, Target ROAS, Maximize Conversions, Maximize Conversion Value) that set auction-time bids using machine learning signals.
Read definition →Target CPA (tCPA)
Target CPA is a Smart Bidding strategy that sets bids to generate as many conversions as possible at or near an average cost per conversion you specify.
Read definition →Target ROAS (tROAS)
Target ROAS is a Google Ads Smart Bidding strategy that sets bids automatically to achieve an average return on ad spend you specify across a campaign or portfolio.
Read definition →Campaign Types
Asset Group
An asset group is the unit inside a Performance Max campaign that holds a set of creative assets, audience signals, search themes, and (for retail) a listing group filter for a specific theme or product line.
Read definition →Demand Gen Campaigns
Demand Gen is a Google Ads campaign type that serves image and video ads across YouTube, Discover, and Gmail using audience targeting and conversion-based bidding to create demand rather than capture it.
Read definition →Performance Max (PMax)
Performance Max is a Google Ads campaign type that serves across Search, Shopping, YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail, and Maps from a single campaign using automated bidding and asset-based creative.
Read definition →Search Themes
Search themes are keyword-like phrases added to a Performance Max asset group that tell Google which search queries the campaign should reach, supplementing what it infers from assets and landing pages.
Read definition →Shopping Campaign (Standard Shopping)
A standard Shopping campaign serves product ads built from your Merchant Center feed on Google Search and the Shopping tab, with bidding and targeting controlled at the product group level rather than by keywords.
Read definition →Keywords & Targeting
Brand Exclusions
Brand exclusions are a Performance Max and Search campaign setting that prevents ads from serving on queries containing specified brand names, most commonly your own brand.
Read definition →Brand Safety
Brand safety is the set of controls that keep ads from appearing next to content, placements, or contexts that would damage the brand, including content exclusions, placement exclusions, and inventory type settings.
Read definition →Broad Match
Broad match is the default keyword match type that shows ads for searches related to the keyword's meaning, including synonyms, related topics, and queries that do not contain the keyword's words at all.
Read definition →Customer Match
Customer Match is a Google Ads feature that lets you upload hashed first-party customer data (emails, phone numbers, addresses) to build audiences for targeting, exclusion, bid adjustment, and as signals for automated campaigns.
Read definition →Exact Match
Exact match is a Google Ads keyword match type, written in brackets, that shows ads for searches with the same meaning or intent as the keyword, including close variants.
Read definition →Landing Page Experience
Landing page experience is the Quality Score component that rates how relevant, useful, transparent, fast, and mobile-friendly the page a searcher lands on is for the keyword and ad that brought them.
Read definition →Location Exclusions
Location exclusions are geographic areas, from countries down to cities and postal codes, where a campaign is prevented from showing ads even if they fall inside a broader targeted region.
Read definition →N-gram Analysis
N-gram analysis breaks search terms into their component one-, two-, or three-word sequences and aggregates performance by sequence, revealing which words drive waste or conversions across thousands of individual queries.
Read definition →Negative Keywords
Negative keywords are terms added to a campaign, ad group, or shared list that prevent ads from showing on searches containing them.
Read definition →Phrase Match
Phrase match is a keyword match type, written in quotes, that shows ads for searches that include the meaning of the keyword, with additional words allowed before or after.
Read definition →Quality Score
Quality Score is Google's 1 to 10 diagnostic rating of a keyword based on expected click-through rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience, indicating how well the ad and page match the searcher's intent.
Read definition →Remarketing (Retargeting)
Remarketing is advertising to people who have already interacted with your business, such as site visitors, product viewers, cart abandoners, or past customers, using lists built from tracking and first-party data.
Read definition →Search Terms Report
The search terms report lists the actual queries that triggered your ads, with performance metrics for each, as opposed to the keywords you bid on.
Read definition →Feeds & Shopping
Google Merchant Center
Google Merchant Center is the platform where retailers upload and manage product data that powers Shopping ads, Performance Max retail campaigns, and free product listings across Google.
Read definition →Product Feed
A product feed is the structured file or API connection that sends your catalog attributes (id, title, description, price, availability, image, GTIN, category) to Merchant Center.
Read definition →Supplemental Feed
A supplemental feed is a secondary data source in Merchant Center that adds or overrides attributes on products already in your primary feed, matched by product id.
Read definition →Measurement & Tracking
Attribution Model
An attribution model is the rule set that decides how credit for a conversion is divided among the ad interactions that preceded it, such as last click, first click, or data-driven.
Read definition →Consent Mode
Consent mode is a Google framework that adjusts how Google tags behave based on the user's consent choices, sending cookieless pings when consent is denied so Google can model conversions that are not directly observed.
Read definition →Conversion Action
A conversion action is a defined event in Google Ads (purchase, form submission, call, sign-up) that the account counts as a valuable outcome and that Smart Bidding optimizes toward when set as primary.
Read definition →Data-Driven Attribution (DDA)
Data-driven attribution is Google's model that assigns conversion credit across ad interactions using machine learning on your account's actual conversion paths, rather than a fixed rule like last click.
Read definition →Enhanced Conversions
Enhanced conversions is a Google Ads feature that sends hashed first-party customer data (email, phone, address) with a conversion event so Google can match conversions to ad interactions that cookies alone would miss.
Read definition →GA4 Key Events
Key events are the events in Google Analytics 4 that you mark as important business outcomes; they replaced the term conversions in GA4 and can be imported into Google Ads as conversion actions.
Read definition →Google Tag Manager (GTM)
Google Tag Manager is a free tag management system that deploys and controls marketing and analytics tags on a website from a single container without editing site code for each change.
Read definition →Offline Conversion Import
Offline conversion import uploads events that happen after the click, such as qualified leads, booked appointments, or closed deals, back into Google Ads or Meta, matched to the original click so bidding can optimize toward them.
Read definition →Meta Ads
Advantage+
Advantage+ is Meta's family of automated campaign and ad features, including Advantage+ Shopping and Advantage+ audience, that use machine learning to handle targeting, placements, budget allocation, and creative optimization.
Read definition →Conversions API (CAPI)
The Conversions API is Meta's server-to-server interface for sending web, app, and offline events directly from your server to Meta, complementing or replacing the browser-based Meta Pixel.
Read definition →Custom Audiences
Custom audiences are Meta targeting segments built from your own data, including customer lists, website visitors, app users, video viewers, and people who engaged with your Page or Instagram profile.
Read definition →Event Match Quality (EMQ)
Event Match Quality is Meta's 1 to 10 score of how well the customer information sent with a Conversions API event can be matched to a Meta account, shown per event in Events Manager.
Read definition →Lookalike Audiences
A lookalike audience is a Meta targeting segment of people who share characteristics with a source audience you provide, such as purchasers, high-value customers, or engaged website visitors.
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