Skip to Main Content

Paid Search & Google Ads Glossary

Plain-English definitions of the terms that matter in paid search. No jargon, no fluff.

SEO GlossaryWeb Development GlossaryAI Search Glossary

What is paid search?

Paid search is the practice of bidding to show text ads on a search engine results page, so your business appears when someone searches for what you sell. You pay only when a person clicks, which is why it is also known as PPC, or pay per click. Every search triggers a near-instant auction that decides which ads run and in what order, weighing each advertiser's bid against the quality of their ad and landing page. On Google, that auction is run through Google Ads.

It is the highest-intent placement in digital advertising, because the ad reaches someone at the exact moment they are looking for a solution. That is what separates it from paid social, where you interrupt people based on interests rather than intent. People use a few names for the same thing: paid search, PPC, search advertising, paid keywords, or simply google paid search. They all describe bidding for ad placement on search results.

Step by step, it works like this. You pick the keywords you want to show against and set a bid and a budget. Someone searches. Google checks which advertisers are eligible for that search, then ranks them on Ad Rank, which combines the bid with the quality of the ad and the landing page behind it. The ads that clear the threshold appear above and below the organic results, labelled as sponsored. You are charged only if someone clicks, and you are charged the minimum needed to hold your position rather than your full bid, which is why a higher Quality Score lowers what you actually pay. The whole auction resolves in the time the results page takes to load, and it runs again on every single search.

What decides whether paid search pays off is not the click price but the structure behind it: the right keywords and match types, disciplined negative keywords, a strong Quality Score, and conversion tracking that tells you which clicks actually became customers. Get those right and you win customers at a fraction of what a raw click price implies. The terms below define the concepts that make that possible, and you can see how we apply them in our Google Ads management service. If you are weighing it against organic search, our guide to Google Ads versus SEO in Australia compares the two, and what Google Ads management costs in Australia covers the numbers.

Ad Rank

The score Google uses to determine where your ad appears in search results. It is calculated from your bid, Quality Score, expected impact of ad assets, and the context of the search. A higher Ad Rank means a better position - and you can often achieve it without simply raising your bid.

Broad Match

A keyword match type that shows your ads for searches related to your keyword, including synonyms, variations, and related queries. The most flexible match type, but requires strong negative keyword management to avoid wasted spend.

Conversion

A measurable action a user completes after clicking your ad - such as a form submission, phone call, purchase, or page visit. Conversion tracking is the foundation of any data-driven paid search campaign.

CPA (Cost Per Acquisition)

The average amount spent to generate one conversion. Calculated by dividing total ad spend by the number of conversions. Lower CPA with maintained volume is a key goal of campaign optimisation.

CPC (Cost Per Click)

The amount you pay each time a user clicks your ad. CPC is influenced by your bid, Quality Score, and competition for the keyword. Managing CPC efficiently is central to maximising ROAS.

CTR (Click-Through Rate)

The percentage of people who click your ad after seeing it. Calculated as clicks divided by impressions. A strong CTR signals ad relevance and positively influences Quality Score.

Exact Match

A keyword match type that shows your ads for searches that match your keyword exactly, or are very close variations. Provides the most control over which searches trigger your ads.

Impression Share

The percentage of eligible auctions in which your ad actually appeared. Low impression share indicates budget constraints or poor Ad Rank - both of which can be addressed through optimisation.

Negative Keywords

Keywords that prevent your ads from showing for irrelevant searches. Negative keyword management is one of the most cost-effective ways to reduce wasted spend and improve campaign efficiency.

Performance Max (PMax)

Google's fully automated campaign type that serves ads across Search, Display, YouTube, Gmail, Maps, and Discover from a single campaign. Uses machine learning to find conversions across all channels. Requires strong asset groups and audience signals to perform well.

Phrase Match

A keyword match type that shows your ads for searches containing your keyword phrase in the correct order, plus additional words before or after. Sits between broad and exact match in terms of reach and control.

Quality Score

Google's 1-10 rating of the relevance of your keywords, ads, and landing pages. A higher Quality Score lowers your effective CPC and improves Ad Rank. It reflects expected CTR, ad relevance, and landing page experience.

ROAS (Return on Ad Spend)

Revenue generated for every dollar spent on advertising. A ROAS of 4:1 means $4 in revenue for every $1 spent. The primary efficiency metric for revenue-focused campaigns.

Responsive Search Ads (RSA)

The standard Google Ads format where you provide up to 15 headlines and 4 descriptions, and Google tests combinations to find the best performing mix. Ad Strength rating indicates how well your assets are likely to perform.

Search Term Report

A report showing the actual queries that triggered your ads. Essential for discovering new keyword opportunities, identifying irrelevant traffic, and building your negative keyword list.

Smart Bidding

Google's suite of automated bid strategies that use machine learning to optimise for conversions or conversion value. Includes Target CPA, Target ROAS, Maximise Conversions, and Maximise Conversion Value.

Target CPA

A Smart Bidding strategy where Google automatically sets bids to get as many conversions as possible at your specified cost per acquisition. Requires sufficient conversion data (typically 30-50 conversions per month) to work effectively.

Target ROAS

A Smart Bidding strategy where Google sets bids to maximise conversion value while achieving your target return on ad spend. Best suited for campaigns with diverse conversion values and strong conversion volume.

Ad Asset (Ad Extension)

Additional pieces of information shown alongside your Google Ads - such as phone numbers, site links, callouts, structured snippets, and location details. Ad assets increase the size and relevance of your ad at no extra cost per click, improving CTR and Ad Rank. Google now refers to these as 'assets' rather than 'extensions'.

Auction Insights

A Google Ads report showing how your campaign performance compares to competitors bidding on the same keywords. Metrics include impression share, overlap rate, and position above rate. Auction Insights is a useful competitive intelligence tool - it shows who you are competing against and how often.

Conversion Rate

The percentage of ad clicks that result in a conversion. Calculated as conversions divided by clicks. Improving conversion rate - through better landing pages, more relevant ad copy, or stronger targeting - is often more cost-effective than increasing ad spend.

Dynamic Search Ads (DSA)

A Google Ads campaign type that automatically generates ads based on your website content. Google crawls your site, finds relevant pages, and creates headlines matched to user queries. DSA is useful for covering keyword gaps, but requires a well-structured website and careful negative keyword management to avoid irrelevant traffic.

Enhanced Conversions

A Google Ads feature that improves conversion measurement accuracy by securely hashing and sending first-party customer data (email, phone number) alongside conversion events. Enhanced Conversions help recover conversions lost to browser restrictions, ad blockers, and iOS privacy changes - often recovering 10-20% of 'missing' conversion data.

Google Keyword Planner

A free tool within Google Ads for researching keyword search volumes, competition levels, and bid estimates. Useful for building initial keyword lists and understanding market sizing. Note that search volumes are shown in ranges unless you have active ad spend in your account.

Landing Page

The page a user arrives at after clicking your ad. Landing page relevance and user experience are key inputs into Quality Score. A high-converting landing page - with a clear value proposition, fast load time, and a single focused CTA - is one of the highest-leverage improvements you can make to campaign performance.

Search Network

Google's Search Network shows text ads to users actively searching for your keywords on Google Search and search partner sites. It is the highest-intent ad placement available - users are actively looking for what you offer. Distinct from the Display Network, which shows banner ads on third-party websites.

Wasted Spend

Budget spent on clicks from irrelevant search queries that are unlikely to convert. Wasted spend is a symptom of poor keyword match type management, insufficient negative keywords, or both. Identifying and eliminating wasted spend is typically the fastest way to improve campaign efficiency without changing the budget.

Branded vs Non-Branded Paid Search

Branded paid search targets queries containing your company or product name, where the searcher already knows who you are. Non-branded (also called generic) paid search targets category queries like 'plumber perth' or 'crm software', where the searcher knows what they want but not who from. The two behave nothing alike. Branded traffic converts at a much higher rate and costs less per click, because relevance on your own name is high. Non-branded traffic is more expensive and converts less often, but it is the only way to reach people who have never heard of you. Blending them into one number hides both, so run them as separate campaigns and set targets on each independently.

Paid Search (Google Analytics channel)

In Google Analytics 4, Paid Search is a default channel group, and it means something narrower than the industry term. A session is grouped there when the source platform is Google Ads and the ad network type is Google Search or Google Partners, or, for manually tagged traffic, when the source matches a known search site and the medium matches the regex ^(.*cp.*|ppc|retargeting|paid.*)$. Two things catch people out. Performance Max and Demand Gen sessions are classified as Cross-network rather than Paid Search, so a PMax-heavy account shows far less Paid Search traffic in GA4 than the spend in Google Ads implies. And a hand-written UTM medium such as 'sem' or 'google-ads' does not satisfy that regex, so a custom medium can quietly route paid traffic out of the group altogether.

Attribution Model

The rule that decides which touchpoint is credited for a conversion when someone interacted with several before converting. Google Ads uses data-driven attribution by default, which spreads fractional credit across the clicks in the path based on observed patterns, instead of handing all of it to the last click. It matters in paid search because a broad discovery keyword that never wins last-click credit can still be the reason the customer started looking, and cutting it on a last-click read removes the top of your own funnel. Changing the model restates historical conversion counts across every campaign without anything changing in the account, so check which model a report uses before concluding performance moved.

Shopping Ads

The product listings that appear with an image, price, and store name against a product search. They are generated from a product feed in Google Merchant Center rather than from a keyword list, so you influence which searches they show against by improving the product data itself: title, description, product type, attributes, and GTIN. For an ecommerce advertiser, Shopping typically carries more of the paid search budget than text ads do, and feed quality does the job that keyword and match type structure does in a Search campaign.

International and Multilingual Paid Search

Running paid search across more than one country or language. The hard parts are rarely the ads. Each market needs its own campaign so budget, bids, and targets are set per country instead of averaged across them. Keywords have to be researched natively rather than translated, because the literal translation of a high-volume English term is often not the phrase people in that market actually type. The landing page has to be in the language of the ad, or both Quality Score and conversion rate suffer. Currency, time zone, and conversion value all need reconciling before the ROAS from two markets can honestly be compared.

Paid search, explained.

Paid search is a form of online advertising where a business bids to show text ads on a search engine results page for chosen keywords, and pays only when someone clicks. Because you pay per click, it is also called PPC, or pay per click. When someone searches on Google, an auction runs in milliseconds and decides which ads appear and in what order, based on each advertiser's bid and the quality of their ad and landing page. On Google that auction is run through Google Ads. Paid search is the highest-intent form of digital advertising because the ad is shown to someone actively searching for what you sell, at the moment they are looking.
Paid search and PPC (pay per click) describe the same thing from two angles: paid search names where the ads appear, on search results, and PPC names how you pay, per click. Google Ads is the platform you use to run paid search on Google, which holds roughly 94 percent of the Australian search market, so for most Australian businesses paid search in practice means Google Ads. Microsoft Advertising runs the same model on Bing. People also call it "paid keywords" or "google paid search", but they all refer to bidding for ad placement on search results.
Paid search results are ads. You bid for placement, pay per click, and can appear at the top of the page within hours of launching a campaign. Organic search results are the unpaid listings ranked by the search engine on relevance and authority, which is what SEO works on. You cannot pay to appear there, and earning a strong position typically takes months. The two are complementary: paid search buys immediate visibility and lets you test which keywords and messages convert, while SEO compounds over time. Many businesses run both, which we cover in our guide to Google Ads versus SEO in Australia.
There are two costs: the ad spend you pay Google per click, and management if someone runs the account for you. Cost per click depends entirely on the industry and how competitive the keyword is. Low-competition service keywords can cost a few dollars a click, while high-value categories like legal, trades, and finance regularly run $15 to $50 or more per click in Australia. What matters is not the click price but the cost per acquisition: what you pay to win a customer. A well-structured account with tight keyword targeting, negative keywords, and solid conversion tracking will win customers at a far lower cost than a click price alone suggests. Our guide to Google Ads management cost in Australia breaks the numbers down in detail.
Paid keywords are the search terms a business bids on in a paid search campaign, so its ads show when someone searches those terms. You choose keywords, set how closely a search must match them using match types (broad, phrase, or exact), and set a bid. When a search matches, your ad enters the auction. The counterpart is negative keywords, which stop your ads from showing for searches you do not want to pay for, and are one of the most effective ways to cut wasted spend.
Impressions without clicks usually means one of three things. Your ad is appearing low on the page because your Ad Rank is weak, so few people scroll to it. Your ad copy is not relevant or compelling enough for the search, which shows up as a low click-through rate. Or you are showing for the wrong searches, where the person was never a good fit, which is a keyword and match type problem. The fix is diagnostic: check impression share and average position to see if it is a visibility problem, review the search terms report to see what you are actually showing for, and strengthen ad relevance and Quality Score. This is a common symptom rather than a single fault, and it is worth diagnosing before increasing bids.
In Google Analytics 4, Paid Search is one of the default channel groups, and its definition is narrower than the everyday meaning of the term. A session is assigned to it when the source platform is Google Ads and the ad network type is Google Search or Google Partners, or, for traffic you tag yourself, when the source matches a recognised search site and the medium matches the regex ^(.*cp.*|ppc|retargeting|paid.*)$. That is why mediums like cpc and ppc land in Paid Search but a hand-written medium such as sem or google-ads does not. The bigger surprise is campaign type: Performance Max and Demand Gen are grouped as Cross-network, not Paid Search, so an account leaning on PMax will show much less Paid Search traffic in GA4 than its Google Ads spend suggests. If GA4 and Google Ads disagree on how much paid search you are running, check the channel grouping and your UTM mediums before assuming the tracking is broken.
Branded paid search covers queries that include your business or product name, so the searcher already knows who you are and is looking for you specifically. Non-branded, sometimes called generic, covers category queries where the searcher knows what they need but not who from. They perform very differently. Branded keywords are cheap and convert well, because relevance on your own name is high and the intent is already settled, but the volume is capped by how many people know the brand. Non-branded keywords cost more and convert at a lower rate, and they are the only part of the account that reaches new demand. The practical consequence is a reporting one: reported together, cheap branded conversions flatter the account average and can mask non-branded work that is not paying its way, or justify cutting non-branded spend that is actually feeding the brand searches. Separate them into different campaigns so each has its own budget, target, and honest read.

Ready to put this into practice?

Book a free 20-minute strategy call and we will review your Google Ads account and show you where the opportunities are. Or explore our Google Ads management service.

Get in touch