Digital advertising is lousy with acronyms. Once you’ve been fully indoctrinated into the world of paid digital ads, something happens to your brain that renders you incapable of speaking or typing in complete words. Our digital ad strategy team at Rock Candy Media is guilty of this ourselves, so we put together this quick and dirty guide to ad acronyms to help our clients out.

Being a generous and kind marketing company, we decided that everyday people should have access to it too. Check out the glossary below and download the PDF so that you’ll never be wondering what the difference is between CPC and CTR.

We’ve also included a quick rundown of the basic types of Facebook and Google ads. These change all the time (which is why marketing agencies like ourselves are paid to keep up with them), but this is a solid primer for anyone trying to understand how advertising works on Facebook and Google.

Ad Acronyms

Paid ads are like an alphabet soup. Here are the acronyms you need to know.

CTR: Click-Through-Rate. This is what percentage of people who see your ad end up clicking on it. The higher the CTR, the more relevant the ad is to the people seeing it. The higher the better.

CPC: Cost-Per-Click. How much you pay for each ad click. The lower the better.

CPM: Cost-Per-Impression. How much you pay for every thousand impressions. This measures people that see the ad, whether they click on it or not. Lower is usually better here, but not always.

Reach: How many people have seen your ad total.

Relevancy Score: How relevant your ad is to the target audience. 10 is the highest, 1 is the lowest.

Clicks: How many people total that have clicked your ad.

Avg. Position: How high your ad appears on search results. (Google only)

% Served: This one is kind of complicated, but basically it’s how frequently your ad is served when people search for a specific keyword. For example, if you’re bidding on the keyword “austin pet groomers” and you have a 50% serve rate, that means 50% of the people searching that term see your ad. (Google only)

Facebook Ads

There are many types of Facebook ads. Here are some of the most frequently used.

Click-To-Site Ads: These ads are designed to drive traffic to a website, you pay when people click through to your site.

Engagement Ads: These ads are designed to get people to engage with a specific piece of content. You pay when they like, comment, share or otherwise interact with it.

Like Ads: These ads are designed to get people to “Like” your page. Like ads tend to be very simple with a direct CTA. We like to run these to build up your follower base, as once people follow you, they’re more likely to see your content organically without you having to pay for it.

Offer Ads: These ads are designed to get people to claim an offer (coupon, discount, etc.). When someone clicks on an offer ad, Facebook will send them reminders that they’ve got a coupon.

Lead Gen Ads: These ads capture emails directly from Facebook.

Google Ads

Search Ads: These are your basic Google ads that come up at the top of the page every time you Google something. They are text based, cheap and effective.

Dynamic Ads: These are slightly more intricate search ads where Google will automatically populate the ad copy based on keyword phrases.

Display Ads: These are ads that are served on the Google display network. They are art based and Google will automatically display them on relevant sites. (Think banner ads). Slightly more expensive than search ads, but still a wise spend.

Call Ads: These are like search ads, but the call to action is for people to call you on the phone. (Mobile only).

Click for downloadable PDF.