Pay Per Click (PPC)

A setting that determines how quickly you want Google to use your budget each day: either spread throughout the day (standard) or more quickly (accelerated). This setting affects when during the day your ads are likely to show, especially if your campaigns are limited by budget.

Additional incentives that increase the likelihood that users will click your ads. Advertisers can include business addresses and phone numbers, additional site links, or specific product information.

A set of keywords, ads, and bids that is a key part of how your account is organized. Each campaign is made up of one or more ad groups, while each ad group typically includes about 5-10 keywords.

The order in which your ad appears on a page in relation to other paid ads. An ad position of “1” means that your ad is the first ad on a page. Position one doesn’t mean that you are on top of the organic results necessarily. You can be in position one while appearing on the side of the results.

Not to be confused with Ad Position, Ad Rank is a value that’s used to determine your ad position behind-the-scenes. This is calculated as the product of your bid and Quality Score.

A preference that determines which ad in your ad group should show when you have multiple ads active. Rotation settings include Optimize for Clicks, Optimize for Conversions, Rotate Evenly (90 days) and Rotate Indefinitely. This setting is important to check to ensure that you have a proper balance between testing of your messaging and performance of your account.

Setting that allows you to control and specify which hours and days you want your ads to appear, targeting periods of time when you expect your ads to be more successful. It can also be used to automatically adjust bids during specific time periods (which is also known as dayparting).

A status for each ad that describes whether that ad is able to run, and if so, whether there are any policy restrictions on how or when it can run. Common ad statuses include Under Review, Eligible, Approved and more.

A Google-based product that compensates website owners for showing relevant Display Network ads on their site.

Strongly suggested guidelines for your ads, keywords, and website. Ads that violate policies won’t be able to run.

Allows users to test changes to their account on a portion of the auctions that your ads participate in. ACEs can be set up to test new keywords, bids, placements and more. Users can also choose how much of the traffic they want to test and even discard the experiment at any point. If the experiment is discarded, your changes will automatically revert to the way they were before the test.

A free software application by Google that allows you to make changes to your account in bulk. This allows users to add new campaigns/ad groups/keywords, make bid changes and more.

These allow advertisers to organize elements within their accounts into meaningful groups for faster and easier reporting. Labels can be applied to keywords, campaigns, ad groups, and ads.

Formerly known as Website Optimizer (standalone), this tool is built into the Analytics platform and allows users to setup A/B or multivariate tests for their landing pages to see how those changes affect user behavior. This tool can be a great way to make incremental improvements to conversion rates.

An application that interacts directly with one or more external servers.

The maximum amount you are willing to pay for a search keyword click.

There are several ways to bid on your keywords, depending on what matters most to you and your business. There are three main bidding types available: focus on clicks (CPC), impressions (CPM), or conversions (CPA).

Formerly known as adCenter, Bing Ads is a service that provides pay-per-click advertising on Bing and Yahoo! search properties.

A free desktop tool designed to help you manage your account offline and easily make changes in bulk. As it stands currently, this is only available for Windows OS applications.

The Campaign Analytics tool helps you track whether or not your ads are achieving your desired goals. You might also think of this as Bing’s version of Google Analytics.

Feature that enables users to display a Google forwarding or business phone number along with their PPC ad.

A set of ad groups (ads, keywords, and bids) that share a budget, location targeting, and other settings. Your AdWords account can have one or many ad campaigns running.

A way of measuring the success of an online advertising campaign. CTR is determined by dividing the number of users who clicked on an ad by the number of impressions.

An amount set for each ad campaign to specify how much, on average, you’d like to spend each day. However, it is important to know that on any single day, you can receive up to 20% more in costs than your daily budget.

Default bidding option where CPC bids are set manually for a particular keyword, placement, etc. Advertisers also have the option to turn on Automatic Bidding if they don’t want to control their CPC bids manually.

As opposed to auto tagging, this option allows advertisers to tag their destination URLs manually with “_utm” information that can be read and understood by Analytics or 3rd party tracking solutions. These are also used heavily in email blasts, promotional campaigns and more.

Matching option that allows advertisers to control when their ad triggers for a particular search query.