Every term in your Google Ads report, in plain English
Most glossaries explain the term and stop. This one also says what it means for a trade business, because the answer is frequently different. 100 terms across 8 groups, updated 6 September 2026.
Google Ads has its own vocabulary, and a trade business meets it in two places: a monthly report, and a proposal from someone who wants the account. The terms below are the ones that turn up in both, defined plainly, each with a line on what it actually means when the business is a trade business in Australia.
- Every entry says what the term means, then what it means for a trade business.
- Nothing here promises a ranking, a position or a number of leads. Nobody controls the auction.
- The terms a proposal leans on hardest are usually the ones worth reading first.
- If a word in your report is not here, that is a fair question to put to whoever wrote it.
Where to start, by the part of the account
8 groups, covering the same terms as the A to Z below. If you are working through a proposal, the group it leans on hardest is usually the one worth reading first.
Campaign structure
How the account is arranged, and why what you separate decides what you can control.
Keywords and matching
What you are willing to pay for, and what Google decides that means.
Bidding and budget
What a click costs, who decides it, and where the money actually goes.
Ads and assets
The thing a customer reads, and everything Google lets you attach to it.
Landing pages and conversion
What happens after the click, which is where most trade campaigns are won or lost.
Measurement and reporting
The numbers, what they mean, and which of them is a result rather than a step.
Local Services Ads and your Google presence
The pay-per-lead product, the badge and the profile beside your name.
Contracts, policy and risk
The parts that cost you money when they go wrong rather than when they go right.
Google Ads terms for tradies, A to Z
A
Above the fold
What is visible before anyone scrolls.
What it means for a trade business
On a phone that is roughly a business card of space. The trade, the suburb and the phone number have to be in it.
Account structure
How campaigns, ad groups, keywords and ads are arranged. The invisible decision that determines whether anything else can be optimised.
What it means for a trade business
A badly structured account cannot be fixed by raising the budget. If nobody can tell you what each campaign is for in one sentence, the structure is the problem.
Account suspension
Google stopping an account from running ads.
What it means for a trade business
Recovery is slow and there is no phone number that speeds it up. This is one of the reasons the account should be yours and the billing should be yours.
Ad disapproval
Google refusing to run an ad because it breaches a policy.
What it means for a trade business
Common trade causes are unsubstantiated superlatives, a phone number in a headline, and claims about licensing that the landing page does not back up. A disapproved ad in a two-ad group can halve your coverage silently.
Ad group
A set of closely related keywords inside a campaign, with the ads that match them. One theme per ad group is the point.
What it means for a trade business
A single ad group holding hot water, blocked drains and general plumbing cannot write an ad that speaks to any of them. Splitting by job type is what lets the ad repeat the words the customer just typed.
Ad Rank
The score that decides whether your ad shows and where. It combines your bid, ad and landing page quality, and the context of the search.
What it means for a trade business
This is why the highest bidder does not automatically win. Fixing the landing page can lower what you pay for the same position.
Ad rotation
Whether Google favours the better-performing ad or shows them evenly.
What it means for a trade business
Optimise is right almost always. Even rotation is for a deliberate test, and only with enough volume for the result to mean anything.
Ad schedule
The days and hours your ads are allowed to run, sometimes called dayparting.
What it means for a trade business
There is no point paying for emergency clicks at 2am if nobody answers the phone at 2am. Equally, the after-hours hours are where the least competition often sits for trades that do answer.
Ad strength
Google's rating of how well an ad uses the format — Poor through Excellent.
What it means for a trade business
A diagnostic, not a score you are graded on. Excellent ad strength on an ad nobody clicks is worth nothing, and a Good ad with pinned headlines often outperforms it.
Asset
What Google now calls the extras attached to an ad: sitelinks, callouts, call buttons, images and more. Formerly extensions.
What it means for a trade business
They are free to add and they take up more of the results page, which pushes the competition down it. An account without them is leaving screen space on the table.
Attribution model
The rule that decides which click gets credit when someone touches several ads before enquiring.
What it means for a trade business
It changes the numbers without changing the leads. If your reported conversions moved and your phone did not, ask whether the attribution model changed.
Auction
The real-time process that runs every time someone searches, deciding which ads show and in what order.
What it means for a trade business
There is no fixed position to buy. Two people searching the same words a minute apart can see different ads, which is why a friend telling you they cannot see your ad proves nothing.
Auction insights
A report showing which other advertisers appear in the same auctions as you.
What it means for a trade business
The honest picture of who you are actually up against, which is often not who you assumed.
B
Bid
The most you are willing to pay for a click. What you actually pay is usually less.
What it means for a trade business
Bidding higher does not buy you the top spot on its own. Ad Rank folds in relevance and landing page quality, which is why a well-built small account can outrank a bigger budget.
Bid adjustment
A percentage increase or decrease applied to bids for a device, location, time or audience.
What it means for a trade business
The one that matters most for trades is the mobile adjustment. Trade searches are overwhelmingly on phones, and the account should reflect that rather than treat desktop and mobile the same.
Bid strategy
The rule Google uses to set your bids: manual, or one of the automated strategies.
What it means for a trade business
Automated strategies need conversion data to learn from. Switching one on before conversion tracking is working properly is how an account starts optimising toward nothing.
Bounce
A visit that ends without any further interaction.
What it means for a trade business
On a page whose whole job is to produce a phone call, a high bounce rate can mean the page worked and the call is not being tracked. Check the tracking before you rebuild the page.
Branded keyword
A search containing your business name.
What it means for a trade business
Cheap, high converting, and often already coming to you free. Whether to bid on your own name depends on whether competitors are bidding on it, which is something to check rather than assume.
Broad match
The loosest match type. Google shows your ad for anything it considers related, including searches with none of your words in them.
What it means for a trade business
It is the default, and on a new trade account it is the fastest way to spend a month's budget on apprenticeship enquiries and DIY guides. It becomes useful later, once the account has conversion data and a mature negative list.
Business verification
Google confirming a business is real, by postcard, phone, video or documents.
What it means for a trade business
It gates Local Services Ads and parts of the profile. Slow, occasionally repeated, and worth starting before you need it.
C
Call asset
A phone number attached to your ad, tappable on mobile.
What it means for a trade business
For most trades this is the highest-value asset on the account, because the job starts with a call rather than a form.
Call tracking
Showing a different phone number to ad visitors so calls can be traced back to the click.
What it means for a trade business
Without it, phone leads are estimated. For a trade business where most leads are calls, that is the difference between a measured account and a guessed one.
Call-only ad
An ad format where the click is the phone call. There is no landing page.
What it means for a trade business
Made for emergency work. Someone locked out or standing in a flooded laundry is not going to read a page first.
Callout
A short non-clickable line under an ad, used for reassurance.
What it means for a trade business
Licensed and insured, 24/7, no call-out fee if you proceed. Short claims that must be true, because these are advertising claims like any other.
Campaign
A container that holds a budget, a location target and a bidding strategy. Everything inside it shares those settings, which is why what you separate into its own campaign matters.
What it means for a trade business
Emergency call-outs and planned work want different budgets and different hours, so they belong in different campaigns. Lumping them together means the cheap enquiries quietly eat the budget meant for the profitable ones.
Click
One tap or click on your ad, which is what you are billed for.
What it means for a trade business
Clicks are the last thing you buy and the first thing you should stop counting as a result.
Click-through rate
Clicks divided by impressions, as a percentage. Abbreviated CTR.
Read the full explainerWhat it means for a trade business
A useful early signal that the ad matches the search. It is not a business result, and a high CTR on the wrong search is an expensive kind of relevance.
Click-to-call
A tap on a phone number, tracked as its own event.
What it means for a trade business
For most trades this is the majority of leads. An account not tracking it is measuring the smaller half of its own results.
Close variant
Google's decision that a different search means the same as your keyword — plurals, misspellings, reordering, and increasingly loose paraphrases.
What it means for a trade business
This is why an exact match keyword still shows for things you did not choose. It is not a fault in the setup, it is Google's matching, and the search terms report is where you catch it.
Competitor bidding
Bidding on another business's name so your ad appears when someone searches for them.
What it means for a trade business
Legal in Australia for the keyword itself, but you cannot use their name in your ad text. It is expensive, the click quality is mixed, and it invites them to do the same back.
Conversion
An action you have told Google counts as a result: a call, a form, a booking.
What it means for a trade business
Everything automated in the account optimises toward this definition. Define it loosely and Google will confidently buy you more of the wrong thing.
Conversion action
The specific event being counted, configured in the account.
What it means for a trade business
A trade account should separate calls from forms, and should not count a fifteen-second call as a lead. Getting this right is worth more than any bid change.
Conversion rate
The share of clicks that become conversions.
What it means for a trade business
Useful only against itself over time and per campaign. Comparing your rate to a figure from another trade in another city tells you nothing.
Conversion tracking
The wiring that reports a call or form back to Google against the click that caused it.
What it means for a trade business
Without it the account is bidding blind and every automated strategy is optimising toward nothing. It is the first thing to check on an underperforming account.
Conversion window
How long after a click a conversion can still be credited to it.
What it means for a trade business
A re-roof is decided over weeks, an emergency call-out in minutes. A window set for the wrong trade makes a working campaign look dead.
Cost per acquisition
Spend divided by conversions, abbreviated CPA. Often used interchangeably with cost per lead.
What it means for a trade business
Worth pinning down which one someone means. A lead and a booked job are very different denominators.
Cost per click
What you pay when someone clicks your ad, abbreviated CPC.
Read the full explainerWhat it means for a trade business
Trade CPCs vary enormously by trade, by city and by how urgent the search is. An emergency search in a capital costs multiples of a planned-work search in a regional town, so a national average tells you nothing about your own numbers.
Cost per lead
Total spend divided by the number of leads, abbreviated CPL.
What it means for a trade business
The number that matters most on a trade account, and the one to insist on. It varies by trade, by city and by season, so it should be quoted for your own campaign rather than as an industry average.
D
Daily budget
The average amount a campaign is allowed to spend per day.
What it means for a trade business
Google can spend up to twice it on a busy day and less on a quiet one, balancing across the month. So a day that looks overspent is usually not an error.
Description
The longer body line of a search ad, up to ninety characters.
What it means for a trade business
This is where the qualifying detail goes: licensed and insured, the hours you actually answer, the suburbs you actually cover. Filtering out the wrong enquiry here is cheaper than filtering it out on the phone.
Display Network
Google's banner advertising across millions of third-party sites and apps. Bought by impression or cheap click rather than by search intent.
What it means for a trade business
Nobody sees a banner and books an emergency electrician. Display has a place in remarketing to people who already visited, and almost none in filling a schedule from cold.
Display path
The two optional slugs shown after your domain in the ad. They are cosmetic and do not have to match the real URL.
What it means for a trade business
Use them to repeat the job. A path reading /emergency/hot-water tells someone they are in the right place before they click.
Dynamic number insertion
Swapping the phone number on the page per visitor so each call traces to its source.
Read the full explainerWhat it means for a trade business
The mechanism behind call tracking. Worth confirming the swap does not break your Google Business Profile number consistency.
E
Exact match
Your ad shows only for that search or a close variant of it.
What it means for a trade business
The most control and the least volume. Worth reserving for the searches you know convert, so those clicks are never competing for budget with experimental ones.
F
Final URL
The page the click actually lands on.
What it means for a trade business
If every ad in the account points at the homepage, the account has a landing page problem, not an ads problem.
Form abandonment
Someone starting a form and not finishing it.
What it means for a trade business
Almost always a field too many. Ask for what you need to quote and nothing else, and leave the rest for the call.
Form submission
An enquiry sent through a form on the page.
What it means for a trade business
Count it when the server accepted it, not when someone clicked submit. A failed form counted as a lead is worse than no tracking at all.
G
GA4
Google Analytics 4, the current version of Analytics, which records what happens after the click.
Read the full explainerWhat it means for a trade business
It should be in your own account, not the agency's. It is also the record that survives a change of agency, which is the reason it matters more than it looks.
Google Ads account
The top level of everything you run. It holds your billing, your campaigns and your conversion tracking, and it is the thing that should be in your business name rather than an agency's.
What it means for a trade business
If the account is not yours, leaving an agency means leaving behind every keyword, every negative list and every conversion you have paid to learn. Ask whose Google Ads ID the campaigns sit under before you sign anything.
Google Business Profile
Your free business listing, which drives the map results and the panel beside your name.
What it means for a trade business
Separate from Google Ads and often the highest-return thing a trade business owns. It also has to be consistent with the details on your site.
Google Guaranteed
The badge on a Local Services Ad, backing the job up to a limit if the customer is not satisfied.
What it means for a trade business
It requires verification of licence, insurance and background checks. That is the barrier, and it is also why it is worth having when competitors do not.
Google tag
The snippet on your site that reports events back to Google Ads and Analytics.
Read the full explainerWhat it means for a trade business
If it is on some pages and not others, your data has holes in exactly the places that matter. Verify it on the thank-you page, not just the homepage.
Guaranteed results
A promise of a ranking, a position or a number of leads.
What it means for a trade business
Nobody controls the auction, so nobody can guarantee its output. Under Australian Consumer Law a promise like that is a misleading representation, and hearing one is the clearest signal to walk away.
H
Headline
One of the short lines at the top of a search ad, up to thirty characters.
What it means for a trade business
Thirty characters is roughly four words. The trade, the suburb and the urgency have to fit, which is why generic headlines like Quality Service Guaranteed are wasted space.
I
Impression
One showing of your ad.
What it means for a trade business
Impressions are not attention and they are certainly not leads. An agency report leading with impressions is choosing what to lead with.
Invalid clicks
Clicks Google identifies as accidental, automated or fraudulent, which it credits back.
What it means for a trade business
Google filters most of it automatically and the credit appears on the invoice. Competitor click fraud is far rarer than it is blamed for, and the search terms report usually finds the real leak first.
K
Keyword
A word or phrase you bid on, which tells Google roughly which searches should trigger your ad.
What it means for a trade business
Keywords are what you are willing to pay for, not what people literally type. The gap between the two is where most trade budget is lost.
Keyword Planner
Google's free tool for search volume estimates and keyword ideas.
What it means for a trade business
Useful for direction, unreliable for precision — its volumes are broad ranges, and for a specific trade in a specific suburb they can be wildly off. Treat it as a starting point, not a forecast.
L
Landing page
The page an ad click lands on. Not your homepage.
What it means for a trade business
The single biggest lever on a trade campaign that already has traffic. One page, one job, phone number above the fold on a phone, and nothing else competing for the tap.
Landing page experience
Google's assessment of how relevant and usable the page is for the search that produced the click.
What it means for a trade business
It feeds Ad Rank, which means a better page can lower your cost per click for the same position. The page is an advertising cost saving, not just a conversion one.
Lead dispute
Reporting a Local Services Ads lead as invalid so you are not charged for it — a wrong number, a spam call, a job outside your area.
What it means for a trade business
Disputes have a time limit. Left unreviewed for a month, they become an unrecoverable line on the invoice.
Lead form asset
A form that opens inside Google rather than on your site.
What it means for a trade business
It lowers friction and it lowers lead quality, and the leads have to be pulled out of Google or pushed to you. Test it against your own landing page rather than assuming either way.
Learning period
The stretch after a change while an automated strategy gathers data and performance is unstable.
What it means for a trade business
Judging a campaign during learning, or changing it again mid-learning, is the most common self-inflicted wound on a new account. Give it the fortnight.
Local Services Ads
A separate Google product that sits above the search ads, charges per lead rather than per click, and requires licence and insurance verification.
What it means for a trade business
Strong for many trades because you pay for the enquiry rather than the click, and the badge carries weight. Not available for every trade or every area, which is worth checking before it is budgeted for.
Location asset
Your address and a map pin attached to the ad, pulled from your Google Business Profile.
What it means for a trade business
Worth it for a business with a real premises people visit. For a service-area business with no shopfront it can invite the wrong kind of visit.
Location targeting
The geographic area your ads are allowed to show in, set by radius, suburb, postcode or region.
What it means for a trade business
This is the setting that decides whether you pay for a click from a suburb you would never drive to. A blanket metro radius is the most common and most expensive default on a trade account.
Lock-in contract
An agreement that commits you to a term regardless of results.
What it means for a trade business
Common in agency retainers and rarely in your favour. The work should have to earn its place month to month.
M
Manual CPC
You set the maximum bid yourself, per keyword.
What it means for a trade business
Slow, and it gives full control while an account is small and still being learned. Many trade accounts start here and move to automation once there are real leads to optimise toward.
Map pack
The block of three local businesses with a map, shown above the regular results for searches with local intent.
What it means for a trade business
Not something you buy through Google Ads, though Local Services Ads appear above it. Worth knowing which one a report is actually talking about.
Match type
The rule that decides how loosely a search has to relate to your keyword before Google shows your ad. Broad, phrase and exact.
What it means for a trade business
The looser the match, the more searches you reach and the more of them are irrelevant. On a limited trade budget, tight matching plus a good negative list usually beats reach.
Maximise clicks
A strategy that buys as many clicks as the budget allows.
What it means for a trade business
Clicks are not jobs. It has a narrow use for gathering data on a brand new campaign and almost none after that.
Maximise conversions
A strategy that spends the budget chasing the highest number of conversions, without a cost target.
What it means for a trade business
It will spend the whole budget every day. Sensible once the account is stable and the conversions are real; expensive the moment either of those is not true.
N
Negative keyword
A word or phrase that stops your ad showing. The other half of every keyword list.
What it means for a trade business
For trades this list is long and it is the difference between a working account and a leaking one: jobs, courses, apprenticeships, salary, DIY, how to, cheap, free, second hand, and every brand you do not install.
Negative keyword list
A shared list of negatives applied across several campaigns at once, rather than added one at a time.
What it means for a trade business
A specialist arrives with the negatives from every campaign in your trade before yours. That list is worth more in the first month than any bidding tweak.
P
Page speed
How quickly the page becomes usable, particularly on a mobile connection.
What it means for a trade business
Paid traffic is overwhelmingly mobile and often on data rather than wifi. A slow page loses the emergency caller before your ad has finished being paid for.
Performance Max
An automated campaign type that spends across Search, Display, YouTube, Gmail and Maps from one budget, with limited visibility into where the money went.
What it means for a trade business
It can work once an account has real conversion history to learn from. On a new trade account it often spends the budget on cheap Display clicks that never ring the phone, and the reporting will not show you clearly that it happened.
Phrase match
Your ad can show when the search includes the meaning of your keyword, in order, with words allowed before or after.
What it means for a trade business
For most trade campaigns this is the workhorse. Tight enough to stay on the job, loose enough to catch the way people actually phrase an emergency.
Policy violation
An ad or a site breaching Google's advertising policies.
What it means for a trade business
Repeated violations escalate to account suspension. The common trade triggers are claims that cannot be substantiated and landing pages that do not match the ad.
Q
Quality Score
A one-to-ten diagnostic of how relevant your keyword, ad and landing page are to a search.
What it means for a trade business
It is a symptom rather than a lever. A score of three is telling you the ad or the page does not match the search, and no bid increase repairs that.
R
Radius targeting
Targeting everything within a set distance of a point on the map.
What it means for a trade business
A circle does not know about a river, a freeway or a toll. Suburb and postcode targeting matches how a trade business actually decides whether a job is worth the drive.
Responsive search ad
The standard search ad format. You supply up to fifteen headlines and four descriptions and Google assembles combinations for each search.
What it means for a trade business
Write headlines that can stand in any order, because they will. And pin the ones that must always show, such as your suburb or the fact that you are licensed.
Retainer
A recurring fee paid whether the leads arrive or not.
What it means for a trade business
Not automatically wrong, since managing an account is ongoing work. It is wrong when it continues while nothing is being managed, which is the case you can only test by asking what changed last week.
Return on ad spend
Revenue divided by ad spend, abbreviated ROAS.
What it means for a trade business
Only meaningful if job values are being fed back. Most trade accounts do not, so cost per lead plus your own close rate is the more truthful pair.
S
Search campaign
Text ads on Google's results page, triggered by what someone typed. The format most trade work starts with.
What it means for a trade business
Someone searching for your trade with a suburb attached is a person with a job, not a browser. For most trades this is where the budget belongs before anything else is considered.
Search partners
Non-Google sites that show Google search ads, such as some directories and smaller search engines.
What it means for a trade business
Performance here is usually worse than Google's own results and it is a single checkbox to turn off. Worth checking it is off before you conclude the campaign is not working.
Search term
What a person actually typed, as opposed to the keyword you bid on.
What it means for a trade business
This is the ground truth of an account. Any report that does not show you search terms is showing you a version of events you cannot check.
Search terms report
The list of real searches that triggered your ads, and what each one cost.
What it means for a trade business
Read it weekly. It is where the wasted spend announces itself, in plain English, before it becomes a month.
Search volume
How many times a search is made in a period, usually shown as a monthly average.
What it means for a trade business
A low-volume search that books a job beats a high-volume one that fills your inbox with quotes you do not want. Volume alone is a poor reason to target something.
Segment
Splitting a report by device, time, network or conversion type.
What it means for a trade business
Almost every misleading average on a trade account resolves the moment it is segmented by device and by campaign.
Service area
The suburbs or regions you tell Google you serve, on the profile and in the campaign.
What it means for a trade business
It should match the drive you would actually make for the job, not the area you would like to work in one day.
Sitelink
Extra links under an ad, pointing at other pages on your site.
What it means for a trade business
For a trade, these are the job types. Someone searching generically for an electrician can go straight to switchboards or EV chargers without a second search.
Smart bidding
Automated strategies that set each bid using Google's signals — device, location, time, search history and more.
What it means for a trade business
The signals are real and largely unavailable to a human. The catch is that it optimises toward whatever you told it a conversion is, so a badly defined conversion produces a confidently wrong campaign.
Structured snippet
A labelled list under an ad, such as Services followed by several items.
What it means for a trade business
Useful for spelling out the range without spending headline characters on it.
T
Target CPA
A smart bidding strategy that aims for an average cost per conversion you nominate.
What it means for a trade business
Only as good as the conversion behind it. If a wrong number counts as a conversion, Target CPA will happily buy you more wrong numbers at the price you asked for.
Target ROAS
A bidding strategy that aims for a return on ad spend, expressed as revenue divided by cost.
What it means for a trade business
It needs a revenue value per conversion, which most trade businesses do not pass back to Google. Without real job values it is guessing, and cost per lead is the more honest measure.
Trademark policy
Google's rules on using another business's brand name in ad text.
What it means for a trade business
You may bid on a competitor's name as a keyword; you may not write it into the ad. Naming a brand you are not an authorised installer of is a separate risk again.
Questions about the terminology
Because the answer is frequently different. Broad match on a national retailer and broad match on an electrician in one metro area are the same setting producing completely different outcomes, and the definition alone will not tell you that.
Every entry here says what the term means, then what it means when the business is a trade business advertising in Australia.
Search terms report, cost per lead, and conversion action. Those three between them tell you what people actually searched, what a lead actually cost, and what the account has been told counts as a lead.
A report that shows impressions, clicks and a click-through rate has told you about the steps before the result, and stopped there.
Possibly. This covers the vocabulary that turns up in Google Ads reports and agency proposals for Australian trade businesses, not every term in the platform.
If something in your report is not here, that is worth asking about on its own. Call 0483 986 615 and I will tell you what it means, and whether it matters.
It changes what you can check. Most of the money wasted on trade campaigns is wasted in places the vocabulary hides: a match type nobody tightened, a conversion counting a wrong number, a budget split across job types worth very different amounts.
None of that is complicated once the words are plain. That is the whole reason this page exists.
Send me your current report
I will go through it with you and say which numbers are results and which are steps. Jordan Pizzica runs the accounts, so it is the same person on the call and on the campaign.
0483 986 615No lock-in contracts. No retainers. I only take on clients I can genuinely help.