Here’s our list of definitions of terms and jargon we use to talk about PPC, in particular, Google AdWords.

Click

Quite simply, a click occurs when a user clicks one of your ads. This is recorded, and tracked, so we can analyse which ads were clicked, how often, whether the clicks led to sales, and much, much more. The click is the heart of PPC advertising because you are paying for each individual click.

Cost Per Click

The actual cost paid for a click. This is usually averaged out into an “Average Cost Per Click” which is a very useful metric to understand how much it costs to run an advertising campaign through PPC.

Cost Per Conversion (CPC)

Once a user has clicked your ad, we can track whether she went on to take a convertible action on your website. This could include buying something, playing a video, downloading information, signing up to a mailing list or much more. Since we know how many clicks you get, and how many conversions they lead to, we can work out the average Cost Per Conversion. This is a key metric, as most businesses care more about conversions than clicks, and they know how much they can afford to pay for a conversion.

Daily budget

In Google AdWords, it’s common to set a daily budget, which AdWords cannot exceed. (Occassionally, AdWords may slightly exceed this budget, but if this happens you will be credited for the excess). By setting a fixed budget, you know exactly what the maximum amount of money you will be spending in a given month will be.

Pay Per Click (PPC)

A name given to all types of online advertising where the cost of advertising is linked directly to clicks on ads. Includes services such as Google AdWords, Bing Ads, Facebook Advertising, Twitter Ads, and many others.

Top-of-page rate

If your ad is shown at the top of the page in search results, as opposed to at the bottom of the page. Historically, ads could also appear on the right-hand side of the search results in Google search results, but this was removed in 2016.

Your top-of-page rate is the ratio that your ads have been shown at the top of the page, compared with your PPC competitors. It’s a useful metric to understand how you compare with your PPC competitors, and we can also get a list of who those competitors are.