New to Google Ads? Without taking the free classes Google's Academy for Ads
, the interface would be confusing to say the least.
Let's introduce you to some of the terms that you will see on Google Ads before you venture into the free classes and the interface itself! If you're looking for a specific term, you can click on CTRL + F to find it in this list.
Familiarize Yourself with These Google Ads Terminologies
In this article, we will focus on the basic terms that you might come across while using the interface. In the next few articles, we will be introducing terms that are a little more advanced or specific for each Google Ads campaign type.
Account Structure Terminologies
Account
The biggest structure you can have in Google Ads interface. Having one Google Ads account means you will have one billing info, one log-in email and one password to access it. It's just like any other accounts that you have elsewhere, and you can share access to the account later on too.
Here, you can choose your billing preference - monthly invoicing or credit card and your account timezone.
Campaign
The second structure in your Google Ads interface. You can have multiple campaigns in one Google Ads account. You can allocate different budgets and settings to different campaigns under the same account.
Here, you can choose your campaign type (refer to next terminology) and how much budget you want to allocate daily for each campaign that you have under your Google Ad account, and the duration for which you want your ads to run.
Campaign Type
There are different campaign types for different goals and priorities. You can run Search Ads, Display Ads, Video Ads, Shopping Ads and more. Basically, you choose the type of ads that you want to run for your business here.
Want only text ads? That's Search Ads. Want to use images? That's Display Ads. We'll discuss more about this in our next Google Ads terminology article.
Daily Budget
How much are you willing to spend for your Google Ads everyday? Let's say that when someone visits your website by clicking on the ad you set up, you might get charged RM3.00 for it. How many website visits do you want?
You campaign might not spend up to its daily budget everyday, or it might overspend it for a few days in a row. In total, your campaign will not spend more than your average daily budget times the average number of days in a month (30.4).
Ad Group
Just like how you would organize your website's products into categories, ad groups are the best way for you to organize your ads and the terms related to it.
When you click into ad groups, you will find your ads and keywords organized in it, and each ad group can have ads that direct to one URL.
Example of a Google Ads Structuring Experience
You log in to your Google Ads account with your Google account, for which the email address is test@gmail.com. Here, you find three different campaigns. All three are search campaigns only:
Campaign 1: Best-Sellers
Best selling flower products with daily budget of RM50
Campaign 2: Other Products
All other plant products, even those which do not sell very well. You allocate only RM25 per day for this campaign.
Campaign 3: Promotions
Temporary campaign created to run for only 2 weeks with budget of RM20 per day to boost reach.
When you click into campaign 1, you find three ad groups for three different products: Fresh flowers, floral bookmarks and flower seeds.
There are several different elements inside these ad groups as well, and we will be discussing them in the section below.
Google Search Ads Terminologies
Once you're in the ad groups, you will see the ads and keywords related to the ad group. Let's take a look at the definitions below before we show you an example of these terms as well.
Text Ad
A text ad consists of several parts - two headlines, one description line, one display URL and one final URL. Try searching for any famous shopping platforms or products. Google search results with a small label [Ad] next to it is typically an example of a text ad.
Responsive Text Ads
Think of responsive text ads as an upgraded version of text ads. Instead of producing three different text ads (the minimum number of ads recommended in a single ad group), you can use one responsive text ad instead.
A responsive text ad can include multiple headlines and descriptions, which Google's algorithms will mix and match according to a user's search query and relevance.
Headline
Headlines can go up to 30 characters. Your headlines are the attention grabber. If you have a 30% promotion for Product A, put it as a headline. If it happens to be only for a week, you can even put 'Limited Time Only' for headline number two.
Description
Great - Users are definitely interested now that they see the headlines about a promotion for the product that they are looking for. Now, give them more details in the descriptions. You have up to 90 characters for this, so keep it short!
As an example, your ad description can read, "Purchase Product A at MYR19.90 Only from 13 to 20 July 2019. Don't Miss Your Chance for this One-Time Offer!"
Final URL
When customers are interested, they will click on your ad. Where will the ad bring them once they click on it? That's the final URL! This is pretty straightforward - you can just copy and paste the link to the promotion page for Product A for this.
Display URL
Your actual URL may be something like https://yourshopname.com/shop/cat=flowers/aBOIhgIgs/id=04828505/skohEHOG
... which is not exactly the most friendly URL to look at or read.
Display URL lets you choose up to two paths after your website name. While "https://yourshopname.com"; cannot be changed, you can set your display URL to read as "https://yourshopname.com/promotion/ProductA".
Of course, that is not a real URL that exists on your website. The display URL is just as the name says - it's just for display. This gives the users a better idea of what to expect when they click on the ad.
Call to Action (CTA)
What do you want the readers to do after reading your ad? The action that you want your readers to take is referred to as the Call-to-Action, or CTA for short.
Some examples of CTA would include: Buy Now, Claim Your Voucher Today, Register Your Free Account Here, Sign Up Now and many more.
These CTAs can be used in several places - headlines, descriptions or even the display URL if the character limit fits!
Keywords
These are the terms that you want to use to let your customers see your ads. Let's say you sell three types of flowers - red rose bouquets, white rose bouquets, pink rose bouquets.
You will want to use keywords that are just relevant enough; That's keywords which are not too broad or too specific. Here's some examples
- Too broad
- Roses
- Bouquets
- Flowers
- Florist
- Too narrow
- Red Rosa rosaceae bouquets for sale online at Sunway Geo Selangor
- Buy bouquet with 12 red pink white roses online
- Just right
- rose bouquets online KL
- buy red rose bouquet online Selangor
- online rose florist Klang Valley
The keywords with the terms that are just right reflects a stronger intent to purchase with rather generic terms that the public will use to purchase the roses that you sell.
When users search these keywords on Google, your text ads could pop up with all the headlines, descriptions and CTAs that you have set!
Negative Keywords
These are the keywords that you want to exclude from your campaign. Sometimes, your range of keywords can be misunderstood and your ads might be mistaken to be relevant to a user's search query even when it's not.
As an example, you might have the keyword "red roses for sale online" in your ad group. Yet somehow, when someone searches for "blue roses for sale online", your ads still show up.
You don't sell blue roses, and you don't want people to click on your ads (which you get charged for), go to your website, and leave immediately because they saw that you don't sell the blue roses they wanted.
You can add the term "blue" or [blue roses] into your negative keyword list to ensure that your ads don't show up for any queries with these terms anymore.
Notice how there are " and [ ] signs next to the negative keywords above? Those are called 'match types', which we will be exploring in the next few terminology articles.
Search Term
How do you know which terms to add into your negative keyword list? It's through the search terms column!
When you visit the keyword section in your Google Ads interface, you'll notice columns for keywords, negative keywords and search terms.
The search terms column shows you the exact query that a Google user has entered before they see your ads.
While you have a set list of keywords in your ad group, the actual search query could differ from it - sometimes a little, sometimes a lot.
Let's say you have a keyword for 'red roses for sale online'. Here are some of the possible search terms that might result in your ads popping up:
- roses for sale online
- rose flowers online KL
- pink roses for sale
- buy red roses online
If you notice that some of these search terms are relevant to your business, you can add the search term into your keyword list too! The irrelevant ones? Just put them as a negative keyword and you'll be fine.
That's all for our first glossary list for Google Ads terminology! Be sure to check our blog every now and then to find new terms to learn about with us at PanPages TRINITY!
