Our glossary provides a handy overview with explanations of frequently used words in these fields. On this page, you can read the meaning of various marketing and online marketing terms.
When you come to the ad management page for the first time, you see terms everywhere, often even more vague than the other. If you're new to the world of advertising, it's hard to understand what these terms stand for, but those who have read up a bit more know that these are the measuring instruments for your ads. But what exactly does it stand for, what is being measured and what can I do with this information? We take you through the most common terms.
An ad group consists of one or more ads, these ads are classified in these groups because they have a common goal or theme. This makes it easier to analyse whether an advertisement is doing well or not, but also which one is doing better or worse.
Think of it as having 3 different colours: red, blue and yellow. These are your "ads", you want to advertise them all on the theme "black" and so you put all 3 in the same group. You also want to test these 3 colours to see if they work well on the "green" theme, so you create an ad group for this as well. Now you have two ad groups (green and black) containing the ads red, blue and yellow.
Because we want to test the combinations in order to get the most optimal settings, for example, the advertisement "yellow" does not do well at all in the "green" theme, but it does in the "black" theme. So we switch it off in the theme "green" and continue in the theme "black" for this advertisement.
This speaks for itself, but of course you can also do very nice things with it. Scheduling your ads can be done via all platforms such as: Google, Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok, Bing etc. (be careful with scheduling your ads with TikTok & Snapchat, these platforms need quite a long time to approve your ads. So make sure you have your ad ready at least 48 hours in advance).
Some here are very creative with the scheduling of advertisements. For example, running ads only during certain events. This may be a stretch, but you can make it as simple as you like to schedule ads for Easter, Christmas, Valentine's Day, New Year, etc.
Conversion is another word for purchase, offer request, brochure request. This differs per company and also how the advertisements are set up. Do you have a shoe webshop, for example? If you have sold a pair we call this a conversion. Is your ad aimed at collecting signatures for a certain point of view? This goal of the campaign is then called the conversion.
When an advert is live, it is displayed on the screens of many people. Far fewer people click on it and yet far fewer people end up making a purchase. The conversion rate is simply the percentage of all visitors who have made a purchase. So if you have had 100 visitors to your website and 6 of them have ordered something, your conversion rate is 6%. The total value of this purchase is called the conversion value.
This means that you only pay when an action takes place. This is the case with Google Ads, where you bid on certain keywords and if someone clicks on them, that party pays the price.
The Dutch translation of this term is "Kosten per klik". The name may speak for itself, but how does this work exactly? It is a bidding strategy that shows how much is needed to get a click, so it is different from paying only when there is a click. It works like this: you give X number of euros to the advertising platform and it will look for potential customers for you. To do this, it will use the set budget. As the platform uses the budget, your ads are displayed to hundreds or thousands of people. A small number will eventually click on the ad to look further. For example, let's say you gave the platform 10 euros and eventually 22 people clicked on your ad, your CPC would be 45 cents.
Normally this differs between 0.10 and 1.20, this depends on: how big your target group is, how well your ad fits your target group, how good your product or service is, how beautiful/good your ad is and if it looks reliable. The time of year can also make a big difference, for example during Christmas, Sinterklaas and Black Friday people are in the mood to buy and therefore click faster.
CPM stands for Cost per mille and means how much money does it take to reach one thousand (one mille) people with my ad. This is often used as a yardstick for ads that want to reach a large target group quickly and cheaply.
Unfortunately, you have to pay quite a lot to keep your ads visible, but how much is up to you. You can set how much money you have for each ad group and the advertising platform will then not use more than you wish, this is called the daily budget.
This is a platform on which you can advertise, there are different ways of advertising: keyword campaigns, shopping campaigns and display campaigns.
Keyword campaigns mean that you pay to be visible for certain keywords. For example, you have a jewellery brand and you want people to find your website when they search for "jewellery men's silver", then you can set up a keyword campaign for this. You pay for your name to appear at the top when people search for this keyword.
Shopping campaigns are the products that you see at the top of Google when you search for a product. For example, if you google "hoover", you get a number of suggestions directly at the top. Companies pay money for this and get a lot of clicks in return.
Display campaigns are advertisements that appear on all kinds of websites, for example on the side of a website or in a banner between the text, but also in various apps such as Tinder.
An advertisement usually contains a button or something similar, but it is also possible that when a user clicks on the advertisement itself, the link is already activated. The page where the user arrives at from the advertisement is called the landing page. This page is very important, because if the landing page is not filled out properly, your "potential customer" will have disappeared in no time.
A frequently used term in advertising is remarketing, which means that you look for "active customers" again with another advertisement. Because of all the data that Google stores via cookies, they can see exactly what each visitor is doing on your site, including who has put something in their shopping cart, who has viewed a product page, and who has been on your site longer than 3 minutes - it's a long story.
But these visitors have shown that they are interested in your product or service, but they haven't converted yet. How nice would it be if you could approach this particular group of people again with a call-to-action to get them to buy again, which you can do with remarketing.
These are ads that consist of multiple headlines and descriptions, allowing the advertising platform to choose which works best for which customer. This allows people to see more relevant ads based on their behaviour.
This is an abbreviation of "Return On Advertising Spend" which means what kind of "return" you get for the amount of money you advertise with. This is a measure of how effective your campaigns are. How much do you spend on advertising and how much do you get back in terms of conversion value, divide these two and you get the ROAS.
For example I advertised for 2000 euros in a month, for that I received 8700 euros in conversion value back. 8700:2000 = the ROAS is 4.35, so I invested 2000 euros and got back 4.35 times that.
The full term is Return on Investment, which simply means what the profit percentage can be. The following formula is used: (expected) return / costs x 100%. Many investors use this formula prior to a project to see if it is lucrative enough.
These are keywords that you can add to your campaigns. Exclusion keywords are also known as "negative keywords" and they work in the opposite way to the normal keywords you use for your campaigns. This means that your ad will not show up if the search query contains one of your exclusion keywords, making you more relevant to be found in the future.
A display is how frequently the advertisement or search result is "shown", this is also called an impression. When people search on your keyword and your ad is visible then this counts as a display.
Instead of advertising on a specific keyword, you can also give Google a bit more space. You can do this by purchasing a word group, so you will be found on more terms instead of just that exact keyword. This is also used to use new keywords and then use these as exact keywords.
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