Every term your team uses. Finally defined clearly.

Affinity audiences are Google Ads audience groups built from people's long term interests and habits, such as technology fans or business news readers.

Ad Assets are extra pieces of information, such as sitelinks, callouts, and phone numbers, that make your Google Ads more useful and prominent.

The Auction Insights Report shows how your ads compare with other advertisers competing in the same Google Ads auctions, including which competitors appeared in the same auctions as you and how often they outranked you.

Ad Rank determines where and whether your ad appears in a Google Search auction. It considers your bid, ad quality, competition, and other auction-time factors.

Brand exclusions are a Google Ads setting that stops a campaign showing for searches containing brand names you choose, including your own and your competitors'.

A buying committee is the group of people inside a company who collectively decide on a purchase, typically spanning the person who will use the product, the person who owns the budget, and several people who can block the deal.

CAC payback period is the number of months it takes for a customer's gross profit to repay what you spent acquiring them. It is the standard measure of how capital-efficient a company's growth is.

Cost Per Qualified Lead is the average amount spent to generate a qualified lead that meets predefined criteria for sales readiness and customer fit overall.

A conversion window is the period after an ad interaction during which Google Ads credits a conversion to that interaction, helping measure campaign performance accurately.

Customer Match lets you use your first-party customer data, such as email addresses, to reach existing customers and similar audiences with Google Ads.

Dynamic Search Ads are Google Ads that pick which searches to appear for by reading your website, instead of using a keyword list you write.

Lead generation captures contact details from people already interested. Demand generation creates the interest in the first place. One collects names, the other builds the market those names come from.

The dark funnel is the part of a B2B buying process that happens in places your analytics cannot observe, including private communities, peer conversations, podcasts, group chats and social feeds, before the buyer ever visits your website.

Demand capture is the practice of converting buyers who already know they have a problem and are actively searching for a solution, using channels that intercept live intent.

Data-Driven Attribution (DDA) uses Google’s machine learning to give conversion credit to the interactions that most influenced a customer’s decision.

Demand Gen campaigns use Google’s visual platforms, such as YouTube and Discover, to create demand and reach potential customers before they actively search.

Enhanced conversions for leads is a Google Ads feature that matches an offline sale back to the original ad click using the lead's hashed email address instead of a click ID.

Enhanced Conversions improve Google Ads measurement by securely using first-party customer data to better match conversions to the ads that drove them.

Firmographics are the descriptive attributes of a company, such as industry, headcount, revenue, location and growth stage, used to segment B2B markets the way demographics segment consumer ones.

A GCLID is a unique tracking code that Google Ads adds to the end of your landing page URL every time someone clicks one of your ads.

Impression Share shows the percentage of eligible impressions your ads actually received, telling you how much of the available search traffic you captured.

Keyword Match Types tell Google how closely a person’s search must relate to your keyword before your ad can appear.

The LTV:CAC ratio compares the gross profit a customer generates over their lifetime against the cost of acquiring them. It is the standard measure of whether a company's acquisition model is fundamentally profitable.

Matched audiences are LinkedIn ad audiences built from your own data rather than LinkedIn's targeting filters, including uploaded company and contact lists, website visitors, and people who engaged with your ads.

A LinkedIn document ad is a sponsored post that lets people read a multi-page PDF directly inside the feed, page by page, without leaving LinkedIn or clicking through to a landing page.

Multi-touch attribution is a method of assigning credit for a conversion across every recorded touchpoint in the buyer's journey, rather than giving all of it to a single interaction.

An MQL is a lead marketing believes is worth contacting based on behaviour and fit. An SQL is a lead sales has spoken to and confirmed is worth pursuing. The difference is who did the qualifying and on what evidence.

Negative Keywords tell Google which searches you don’t want your ads to appear for, helping prevent irrelevant clicks and wasted budget.

Optimization Score is a percentage in Google Ads that estimates how closely your account follows Google's own recommendations, not how well your campaigns are performing.

Offline Conversion Import (OCI) sends sales outcomes from your CRM back to Google Ads, helping it optimize toward leads that actually become customers.

Pipeline velocity measures how much revenue moves through your sales pipeline per unit of time, combining opportunity count, deal size, win rate and sales cycle length into a single number.

A product qualified lead is a user who has taken actions inside your product that historically predict buying, such as hitting a usage threshold, inviting teammates, or reaching a plan limit.

Performance Max is a Google Ads campaign type that uses AI to find the best customers across Google’s channels and optimize toward your goals.

Quality Score is a 1 to 10 rating Google gives each keyword, based on how useful your ad and landing page are likely to be to the person searching.

Responsive Search Ads (RSAs) let you provide multiple headlines and descriptions, which Google automatically combines to create ads tailored to each search.

Search Partners is a network of websites outside Google that can show your Google search ads, including other search engines, app stores and site search boxes.

Self-reported attribution is the practice of asking buyers directly how they first heard about you, usually through a single open field on a demo or signup form, and using their answers as an attribution source alongside analytics.

The Search Terms Report shows the actual searches that triggered your ads, helping you find valuable queries, irrelevant traffic, and new keyword opportunities.

Smart Bidding uses Google’s AI to automatically set bids for each auction, aiming to achieve a specific goal such as conversions, conversion value, or return on ad spend.

A thought leader ad is a LinkedIn ad format that promotes an existing post from an individual's personal profile, so the ad appears in the feed under that person's name and face rather than the company page.

Target ROAS (tROAS) is a Smart Bidding strategy that adjusts bids to maximize conversion value while aiming for your target return on ad spend.

Target CPA (tCPA) is a Smart Bidding strategy that automatically adjusts bids to help you get as many conversions as possible at your target average cost per acquisition.

Value-based bidding is a way of running Google Ads where you attach a money value to each conversion, so the system chases revenue instead of chasing lead count.

A view-through conversion is counted when someone sees your ad without clicking it, then converts on your site within a set window afterwards.