Click any term. One plain sentence first, then the part that shows up on the bill.
The number that decides your position, recalculated for every single search.
What it costs you: Google documents four inputs: your bid, ad quality, the Ad Rank thresholds and the context of the search. Three of the four are not your bid, which is why a competitor beats you without outbidding you.
A minimum quality bar an ad must clear to show at all, separate from beating rivals.
What it costs you: It is why a lone advertiser on a term can still fail to appear. Raising the bid on a bad ad clears the bar expensively; fixing the ad clears it once.
You normally pay only what was needed to beat the ad below you, not your full maximum.
What it costs you: So your bid is a ceiling, not a price. People who cut bids to save money usually just lose the auctions that were converting.
A 1 to 10 diagnostic per keyword, built from expected click rate, ad relevance and landing page experience.
What it costs you: It is a diagnostic, not the number used live. Its three components are the real levers, and landing page experience is the one nobody owns.
The list of real queries that triggered your ads, with cost against each.
What it costs you: Your keyword list is what you asked for; this is what you bought. Sorting it by cost and reading fifty rows is the cheapest hour in the account.
A report showing which domains competed with you and how often.
What it costs you: Useful for spotting a new entrant who just raised the price of your whole category. Not useful as a scoreboard.
A match type letting Google show your ad for searches related to your keyword, not containing it.
What it costs you: One broad keyword can pull hundreds of unrelated searches. It is not wrong, it is unsupervised, and it needs the search terms report weekly.
A term you exclude so your ads never show for it.
What it costs you: Add them as phrase match by default. A careless broad negative can silently kill converting traffic and nobody notices, because the traffic simply stops appearing.
Removing a group, usually existing customers or job seekers, from who can see your ads.
What it costs you: Excluding converters from prospecting campaigns is the fastest way to stop paying twice for the same person.
Automated strategies that set bids per auction using signals you cannot see.
What it costs you: It needs conversion data to learn from. Feeding it a conversion action that fires on every page view teaches it to buy traffic that does nothing.
A strategy aiming for an average cost per acquisition you name.
What it costs you: Setting it below what the account has ever achieved does not lower cost, it lowers volume until the campaign stops serving.
A strategy aiming for a ratio of revenue to spend.
What it costs you: It optimises the ratio, not the profit. A very high target produces a beautiful ROAS on a tiny amount of revenue.
How long after a click a conversion still counts.
What it costs you: Changing it changes every historical number in your reports. Compare periods only when the window was the same in both.
The rule deciding which touchpoint gets credit for a conversion.
What it costs you: Last click credits the search somebody did after already deciding. It is bookkeeping, not measurement.
The sales you would lose if the channel were switched off.
What it costs you: Different from what the channel gets credit for, sometimes by a factor of forty. The eBay experiment is the cleanest public evidence of the gap.
Turning ads off in some regions and comparing against matched regions that kept them.
What it costs you: Slow, uncomfortable, and the only method that answers the question. Small region counts can only detect large effects.
An ad format where you supply headlines and descriptions and Google assembles combinations.
What it costs you: Pinning everything defeats the format; pinning nothing loses control of the claim. Pin the one line that must always appear.
Google's feedback on the variety of assets in a responsive ad.
What it costs you: It measures asset diversity, not performance. Chasing Excellent by adding vague headlines makes ads worse and the label better.
The bundle of text, images and signals used by Performance Max.
What it costs you: It is where the little control you have in Performance Max lives. Weak assets there cannot be fixed by budget.
A campaign type running across Search, Shopping, YouTube, Display, Discover and Gmail from one budget.
What it costs you: Reporting is thinner than in Search campaigns, so brand traffic can absorb the budget quietly. Exclude your own brand before judging it.
Showing ads to people who already visited you.
What it costs you: Cheap clicks and flattering conversion rates, because these people were coming back anyway. It is the channel most likely to fail a holdout.
A limit on how many times one person sees your ad.
What it costs you: Without one, a small audience sees the same creative dozens of times a week, which raises complaints and wears the creative out.
Google's rules on using somebody else's brand name in keywords and in ad text.
What it costs you: Bidding on a competitor name as a keyword is allowed. Putting their trademark in your ad text usually is not, and the owner can complain.
Name the term and your account size. We reply with what to check first and why. No call, no pitch.