PPC Glossary for E-commerce
A practical guide to digital advertising, feed management, and unit economics terms for direct-to-consumer founders.
Break-Even ROAS
The exact Return on Ad Spend required to cover the product cost of goods sold (calculated as 1 divided by gross margin percentage). At this point, advertising generates neither profit nor loss.
Catalogue ads
Paid social ads on Meta that show each shopper the products most relevant to them, using the same product data as your Google campaigns. They pull directly from your product feed so creative and pricing remain accurate.
Conversion Rate (CR)
The percentage of website visitors who complete a transaction out of the total visitors arriving from an ad click.
Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)
The total ad spend divided by the number of completed conversions or orders.
Cost Per Click (CPC)
The actual price charged by the advertising auction each time a user clicks on an ad.
Custom Labels (0-4)
Attributes within Google Merchant Center used to categorise products by business logic (such as margin tiers, price bands, seasonality, or performance roles) for segmented campaign bidding.
Dynamic remarketing
Dynamic remarketing shows shoppers the exact products they viewed and gives them a reason to come back and finish the order. These ads run across Google and Meta using your live product feed.
E-commerce PPC agency
An e-commerce PPC agency plans and runs pay-per-click advertising, mainly Google Search, Google Shopping, Performance Max and Meta ads, so that an online store's ad spend turns into profitable sales. At JD AdsClick that includes the product feed the ads run on, bidding against your margins and reporting the results as profit.
Feed Disapproval
A status assigned by Google Merchant Center when a product fails Google's product data specifications or advertising policies, preventing it from appearing in Shopping or Performance Max ads.
Google Merchant Center
The platform where online stores upload and manage their product feed for Google Shopping and Performance Max. It checks your product data against Google policies and provides diagnostics to help resolve disapprovals.
Gross Margin
Revenue minus the direct cost of goods sold (COGS), expressed as a percentage of revenue. We use gross margin to ensure ad bidding targets net profitability rather than unprofitable vanity revenue.
Performance Max (PMax)
A goal-based Google Ads campaign type that accesses Google's entire ad inventory (Search, Shopping, YouTube, Display, Discover, and Maps) from a single automated campaign powered by product feed assets.
Product feed
A structured file of product data—including titles, attributes, images and categories—used by Google and Meta to power Shopping and catalogue ads. Keeping this data accurate and optimised improves search matching and prevents disapprovals.
Quality Score
Google's diagnostic rating (from 1 to 10) evaluating the relevance of your keywords, ad copy, and landing page experience compared to other advertisers.
Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)
Total ad-driven revenue divided by total ad spend. Because ROAS ignores product margins and overheads, high ROAS can still result in financial loss if product margins are narrow.
Want to look at your numbers together?
Book a short call with our team to review your campaigns, margins and ad profit.
Book Your Free Growth Call