Active Days

Active days, as the name suggests, is the number of days in the month shown on your report that your campaign was active. There are numerous reasons (such as suspension by Google for a breach of their guidelines, the campaign may not have started till midway through the month, you may have requested your campaign to be paused for a period through the month, etc.) why a campaign may not be active for any given period during the month in question, and should you have any queries about this, please do not hesitate to speak to your campaign manager about it.

Ad Group

An ad group contains one or more adverts which target a set of keywords that searchers use when looking to find your services or products that are being advertised.

Ad Rank/Ad positioning

The ad rank is calculated by considering the bid price, the click through rate (CTR) and the relevance of the advert text to the search query.

Adverts

These are the concise, action-oriented adverts that link to your website. These adverts appear in the Google Sponsored Links.

Average Cost Per Click (Avg CPC)

This is the average amount you pay each time someone clicks your adverts. Average Cost Per Click is calculated by totalling the cost of all clicks and dividing it by the number of clicks received. Here's an example: if your advert receives two clicks, one costing $1.00 and one costing $2.00, your average Cost Per Click for those clicks is $1.50.

Average Position (Avg Position)

This measure relates to the average rank or position of your adverts on a search result page when they are triggered by the keywords being used in a search on the Google search engine '1' is the highest position on the first page of search results. There is no 'bottom' position. An average position of 1-8 generally trigger adverts on the first page of search results. Keywords with an average position of 9-16 generally trigger ads on the second page, and so on. An average position of '1.7' means your advert usually appears in positions 1 or 2, and it may appear more often in higher positions than when triggered by a keyword with an estimated average position of '1.8.' Average ad positions are not fixed; they may vary depending on various performance factors.

Bid Price

The maximum amount of money you are willing to pay for a click on your advert. This has a direct effect on your advert's rank. If you bid too little compared to your competitors your adverts will generally appear in a lower ranked position. This is something your campaign manager monitors closely in order to make optimal use of your budget

Campaign

Campaigns are used to give structure to the products or services that are advertised. The ad groups in a given campaign share the same daily budget, location targeting and scheduling. Within each campaign, one or more ad groups are created. While a campaign may represent a broad product or service class, the ad groups within that campaign will be more focused on the specific product or service that is being advertised.

Click

A click (sometimes called a click-through) occurs when a searcher sees your advert and clicks on it, leading them to your website. Each time a searcher clicks on one of your adverts, the cost of that click (calculated by Google at the instant the click occurs) is subtracted from the total amount of your daily budget. Once your daily budget has been expended, your adverts will no longer be visible for the remainder of that day.

Click Through Rate (CTR)

The number of clicks that your ad receives divided by the number of times that your ad is displayed (Impressions). The CTR is an indicator of how relevant your advertisement is to the keywords used to trigger it, and is also used in Google’s Quality Score Calculations.

Content Management System (CMS)

A Content Management System (CMS) is software, implemented as a Web application, for creating and managing website content. It is used to manage and control a large, dynamic collection of Web material (HTML documents and their associated images). A CMS makes content creation, content control, editing, and essential Web maintenance functions easier for the end user.
The software provides authoring (and other) tools designed to allow users with little knowledge of programming languages or markup languages to create and manage content with relative ease. Most systems use a database to store content, metadata, or files that might be needed by the system. The content is generally presented to Website visitors based on a set of templates.  Administration of the content management system is typically done through browser-based interfacesand allows non-technical users to make changes to a website with little training. A CMS typically requires an experienced coder to set up and add features, but is primarily a Website maintenance tool for non-technical administrators.

Cost

Each time an advert is triggered by a keyword used by a searcher, those keywords will attract a cost per click when the searcher subsequently clicks on your advert and is directed to your website. The cost shown on your reports outlines the cumulative monetary total of those clicks for each keyword used during the reporting period.

Daily Budget

Your daily budget is the amount that is spent on a specific AdWords campaign each day. Google displays your adverts as often as possible while keeping within your daily budget. When the budget limit has been reached, your adverts will stop being displayed for that day. Your adverts will appear again from the time they are scheduled to start the following day.

FTP (File Transfer Protocol)

This is the method used to transfer data from one computer to another over the Internet, or through a network. You will generally be given an FTP server name, login name and password by your website hosting company for you to be able to view and edit the files which comprise your website

Geo-targeting

Also known as Location targeting, this is a way in which your adverts are targeted to specific geographic locations. For each AdWords campaign, you can select the countries or regions and the languages for your adverts. That campaign's adverts will appear only to users located in those areas and who have selected one of those languages as their preference.

HTML (Hypertext Markup Language)

The predominant language for web pages. It provides a means to describe the structure of text-based information in a web document and to supplement that text with interactive forms, embedded images, and other objects. Simply put, HTML is the code that tells the web browser how to present the information on your web page to the website visitor.

Impression

Impressions is the number of times your advert is displayed on Google and is triggered by a searcher typing one of the keywords in your ad group into their Google search page.

Impression Share

Impression share is a metric that represents the percentage of the number of times that your adverts appeared as a result of a search being carried out via the Google search engine (i.e. your accrued impressions) out of the total number of page impressions (i.e. pages where your ad appeared or could have appeared) in the market you were targeting, during the period that your adverts are scheduled to show A low percentage value for impression share is an indicator of potential low daily budget and possible missed opportunity to attract additional customers.

Keywords

The keywords are the words that searchers use to find your products and services when carrying out a search on the Google Search Engine.

Meta description tag

Text that is hidden from view on your web page that describes your site’s content, giving search engines an accurate summary of the theme of the page.

Meta keywords tag

A brief and concise word list of the most important themes of your page. The words used in this list should have a direct relationship to the words found in your page's heading and content

Monthly Budget

This is the amount which you have elected to spend on your advertising and is debited on the fist day of each respective month. Searchsmart, on your behalf, pays to Google the cost of all clicks accrued. In order that your entire budget is not spent in the first few days of the month, this monthly amount is divided equally into the days of the month, to provide an amount which can be spent on each day (Daily Budget) in order that maximum visibility of your adverts is achieved

Negative Keyword

This is a keyword that defines the search term(s) you don't want your adverts to display for. As an example, if you sell mp3 music files your campaign manager might use the word 'free' as a negative keyword so that your adverts do not appear for searches such as'free mp3 downloads'. This would be done to reduce the number of irrelevant impressions you might receive, and thus targeting your adverts to the audience that is most likely to purchase your products.

Organic Results

These are the search results(not sponsored links) which are displayed at the left of the search engine's results page when somebody makes a search. There are a very large number of factors which determine the position in which your website appears, and getting a high organic rank or position is only achieved through rigorous Search Engine Optimisation of the pages of your website.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is the active practice of optimizing a web site by improving internal and external aspects in order to increase the traffic the site receives from search engines. SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.