Glossary

Ad Rank is the score Google recalculates for every auction to decide whether your ad shows, in which position, and what you pay, combining your bid, ad quality signals, and the context of the specific search.

The attribution window is the length of time after someone interacts with an ad during which a resulting conversion will still be credited back to that ad, commonly set between a few days and ninety days.

Call tracking assigns a dynamic phone number to each visitor so a phone call can be attributed back to the campaign, keyword or channel that produced it, letting ad platforms and reports count calls the same way they count form fills.

A conversion action is the specific event you have configured Google Ads to count as a conversion - one particular form, call, or purchase - with its own counting rule and time window, rather than tracking as a whole.

Conversion rate is the share of clicks that became a recorded conversion, expressed as a percentage, and it depends entirely on what counts as a conversion, so two accurate-looking conversion rates can be measuring different things.

Conversion tracking is the system that records what happened after someone clicked your ad - a form submitted, a call placed, a purchase made - and reports that outcome back to the ad platform so bidding can optimise toward it.

The Conversions API is Meta's method for sending conversion events directly from a business's server to Meta, as a supplement or alternative to the browser-based Meta Pixel, intended to capture events the browser alone would miss.

Cost per acquisition is advertising spend divided by the number of conversions it produced over the same period, expressed as a dollar figure per outcome such as per booked job, per sale, or per signed customer.

Cost per click is what you actually paid for a single click on your ad, set by the outcome of the auction rather than directly by the maximum bid you entered, and it varies constantly by keyword, time and competition.

Cost per lead is total advertising spend divided by the number of enquiries it generated, regardless of whether those enquiries went on to become paying customers, giving a per-enquiry price rather than a per-sale one.

Google Analytics 4 is Google's analytics platform, built around individual events rather than the sessions-and-pageviews model that preceded it, letting you track any action a visitor takes as its own record rather than a page load.

Google Tag Manager is a free container system that loads and manages tracking tags on a website, letting someone add, edit or remove tracking code through a web interface instead of editing the site's source files directly.

Impression share is the percentage of the auctions your ads were eligible to enter in which they actually appeared, reported separately for search results and the total available impressions for your targeting.

Local Services Ads are Google's pay-per-lead advertising format for service businesses, appearing above ordinary search ads with a Google Guaranteed or Google Screened badge, where advertisers pay for a lead rather than a click.

Google Ads match types determine how closely a search must relate to a keyword before the ad can enter the auction. The positive keyword options are broad match, phrase match, and exact match, but none should be read as a literal promise about the words a person will type.

The Meta Pixel is a snippet of code placed on a website that reports visitor activity back to Meta, used for conversion tracking, building remarketing audiences, and telling Meta's ad delivery system which visitors to optimise toward.

Negative keywords are terms or phrases you add to a Google Ads campaign to prevent your ads from showing on searches that contain them, stopping spend on traffic you have identified as irrelevant.

A primary conversion is a conversion action included in the "Conversions" column and used for bidding; a secondary one is recorded for observation but does not influence how Google spends the account budget.

Quality Score is Google's 1-10 diagnostic estimate of how relevant your keyword, ad, and landing page are to a given search, used as an input to ad rank and cost per click rather than as a standalone target.

Return on ad spend (ROAS) is the revenue generated by an ad campaign divided by what the campaign cost, usually shown as a ratio like 4x or a percentage like 400%.

The search terms report shows the actual queries people typed before clicking your ad, as distinct from the keywords you chose to bid on - it is the record of what you are really buying.

Server-side tagging is a setup where tracking data is sent to a server you control, which then forwards it to Google, Meta or other platforms, instead of the visitor's browser sending it to each platform directly.