Our irreverent, slightly jaded, list of what Adwords terms mean. This is 100% fictitious and meant to be funny… but probably isn’t.
- Ad delivery – set the times you want your ad to appear, so Google can ignore it.
- Ad rotation – set if you want Google to rotate your ads, or if you want some sitting on the bench.
- Frequency capping – Set if you want your ads to have a limited life, so you can watch them make the most of the short time they have
- Ad extensions – They make your ads longer
- Ad groups – Meant to group similar keywords together, really only used as a smaller bucket than campaigns
- Ad position – Where your ad sits in the bidding war
- Ad Preview and Diagnosis – Find out what is killing your campaign.
- Advanced Targeting – Found out your competitor’s IP address? Put it in here to block them from seeing your ads.
- Analyze competition – Find our what your competitor is bidding on, before they block your IP
- Audiences – Set up remarketing tags or audience groupings, so you can SPAM your competition.
- Auto targets – 100000000 blogs with Adsense suddenly start displaying your ad, and only the owners click.
- Automation – The thing you play around with, trying to bid 1000% of your budget at midday, but only end up using to reduce your budget to 0% for 3 weeks.
- Bid – What you hope Google will charge you per click, but what really just ends up being some made up number
- Bidding option – CPC, CPM, CPA? Again, some ficticious figures.
- Billing – Come on, hand over your dough.
- Campaign Bid Simulator – What Google thinks should happen if you change your bids, but really just another type of bid.
- Campaign negative keywords – Where you don’t want your ads to appear
- Campaign placement exclusions – Where you don’t want your ads to appear…. wait didn’t we do that already?
- Campaigns – Just larger more complicated versions of Ad Groups
- Change history – Where you can see all the times you had nothing better to do than fiddle.
- Contextual Targeting Tool – Find how many pageviews some websites have, which is always good for a laugh… yeah sure, your block is 500K+ site.
- Conversions – Where you realise you haven’t set this up correctly, and are actually counting the number of times people see your site….
- CPC – Cost Per Click. Completely made up by Google, seriously.
- CTR – Click through Ratio. See CPC.
- Daily Budget – How much you want to spend per day max, which is frequently ignored by Google, really.
- Day – A period of 24 hours, which is how long it can take to get through your month’s budget sometimes.
- Day of the week – A specific one of the above, seen in “Dimensions”, the answer is Wednesday, always.
- Delivery method (advanced) – Evenly spread, or accelerated, in theory it shouldn’t matter it just is how long it takes for Google to take all of your money
- Destination URL – Where people are supposed to land on your site. Usually a product page, frequently amateurs choose the front page, no idea why.
- Devices – iPad, iPhone, Computer? Remember no one converts from an iPhone. Really? Have you ever bought a car from your phone? No….
- Dimensions – The area where you can see the days, months, devices that people have used to click your ads. Again, the answer is always Wednesday.
- Display Network – An area of Google’s network that displays image/animation ads. Remember they are always “good for branding” which is code for “will never convert”
- Experiment – want to try out something new, do it to 50% of your ads. Any relationship between this and reality is purely coincidental.
- Filter – where you can segment your data by whatever you want. If it looks like your ads are not showing, the chances are you have set something here, and forgot about it.
- Free clicks – Like russian unicorns. People talk about them, but no ones has seen one convert.
- Geographic – A good segment if you are in the US, in Australia this is pretty much useless as ISPs don’t log the location of IP Addresses.
- Google Analytics – Something that really should be connected to Adwords automatically, but isn’t. Something that, regardless, has a completely different set of data to Adwords.
- Ideas – Where you can see how Google proposes to waste your money. Frequently proposes you should bid on “real estate” to increase your reach.
- Impressions – Google does a good impression of an ad serving network… just watch.
- Keyword – The search term you are bidding on, or not because that is actually “refined keyword”. Go figure.
- Keyword matching options – Exactly what people type, or just something similar?
- Keyword Tool – Find similar keywords
- Labels – something no ones uses. Seriously who doesn’t understand how reporting works?
- Languages – block ads for people who speak them. Some sort of linguistic discrimination?
- Locations – block ads for people who live in certain areas. Some sort of Victorian discrimination?
- Month – a period of varying length
- My Client Centre – A group of accounts, mostly just your friends.
- My Product Listing Ads – Ads based on Products in Google Merchant.
- Quality Score – Where the fairies live.
- Sitelink – a list of places on your site that have nothing to do with the ad, and your are only allowed one group of them.
- Status – Green means good, red means something went wrong. Usually because you are selling a brand that has blocked advertising. Seriously, don’t sell their product.
- View-through Conversion – Google swears someone saw your ad from somewhere else and then converted, honestly!