Clicks – each time a unique person clicks on one of your ads a click is registered.
Impressions – each time your ad is shown to a unique person.
CTR – Click-Through Ratio is Clicks / Impressions. If your ad was shown 100 times and 2 people clicked, your CTR is two percent.
Conversions – an event defined by you, normally a sale, or an email signup, or some other action that you desire your visitor to take.
Position – the position of your ad as displayed on a search results page. From the image above you can see that “Free Calendar Templates” position is one.
Quality Score – straight from Google’s mouth: “Your Quality Score reflects your keyword’s CTR and the relevance of your ad text and landing page. Keywords with high Quality Scores are more relevant for users, more effective for your ad campaigns, and have lower minimum CPC bids.” In other words, a higher quality score means you pay less per click, or are positioned higher, or both.
Keyword Matching
- Broad Match – if your keyword phrase is icon converter then your ad would be eligible to show if the user searches anything containing both of those terms (windows icon converter, converter for a little email icon, icon converter that’s free, etc.)
- Phrase Match – if your keyword phrase is “icon converter” then your ad would be eligible to show if the searches for a phrase that contains icon converter (in that order) and any word(s) before or after that phrase (windows icon converter, icon converter for windows, free icon converter for windows, etc.)
- Exact Match – if your keyword phrase is [icon converter] then your ad would be eligible to show only if the user searched exactly that term in that order. Your ad would not show if they searched for free icon converter or even icon converters.
- Negative Match – if you’re selling an icon converter, then you may not want people searching for anything free. You can use -free as a negative keyword in your campaign. This keeps your ad from showing for searches such as free windows icon converter, free icon converter, or free converter for an email icon. Negative matches can be powerful allies in ensuring that you’ll only be paying for those people truly interested in what you’re offering.
While it’s normal to start with high-level items (the Campaign) first, we’re going to start from the bottom at the keyword level.
