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Glossary: Ad History (for a Domain)
Glossary: Ad History (for a Domain)

Ad History shows the history of a domain's ads over time. This is what the terms on the page mean.

Sidra Condron avatar
Written by Sidra Condron
Updated over a week ago

Best Keywords: This includes all of the domain's paid keywords over the past 12+ months, sorted by "best" keywords. To determine a domain's "best" keywords, we give weight to factors that tell us the keyword is important to the domain and competitive in the industry. That usually points to keywords that the domain has advertised on the longest, at a relatively high CPC, and where they continue to test and update the ad copy.

Worst Keywords: These are keywords that the domain seems to have tested and ultimately dropped from their lineup. Or, for new keywords, there isn't much competition on them to believe that the advertiser gets many clicks from this ad.

A-Z / Z-A: Alphabetical order options

Type to Filter: This keyword filter acts like a phrase match "include" filter. Your keyword results will be limited to any word (or part of a word) that you type.

KEYWORD RESULTS

Clicks/Mo: This is the estimated number of clicks we expect that this keyword gets to any of its results (paid or organic)

Cost per Click: The average amount advertisers pay Google anytime someone clicks their own ad for this keyword. The default is “broad match” costs, but exact match and phrase match are available on the results page for this keyword.

This is used for estimating purposes. True CPC is on a domain-by-domain basis and takes other factors like quality score into consideration.

Coverage: This is also known as Impression Share. It measures the number of times an ad was shown compared to how often it was eligible to run.

For example, on a keyword with 1,000 searches in a month, a domain with 75% coverage had its ad show up on 750 of those searches.

This metric helps advertisers know when they are missing potential clicks since Google might not always run a domain’s ad even though they bid on a keyword.

TOP ADS SECTION

Top Ads: These are the ad copy variations (of the keywords shown) that the domain has run most often. Any time you filter the results, these top ads will update to match the ads in the results.

% of Ads Served

This measures the percentage of the domain's ads that use this specific ad copy. It's a good indicator of their most dominant message.

% in Top of Page

We measure how often this specific ad ended up at the top of the SERP (above the organic results) as opposed to the bottom. If a domain’s ad ran 100 times, a 45% rating means that it would have appeared 45 times at the top.

Also, having a high percent of ads in the above the SERP is very strongly correlated with high quality score.

Avg Ad Position

This metric ties to the exact ad copy shown in the Top Ads section.

When you see “3 of 21 Avg Ad Position” it means that this ad placed 3rd (on average) in a field of 21 advertisers (average) for each time it has run. Higher competitor numbers mean a more competitive field.

**Differences in the Export Page**

Export pages are usually spreadsheets that cannot rely on icons and charts in the same way that our live pages can. A chart that you see on the live page might appear as a number in the export. Or, we include some notations that are used for sorting purposes on the live page. Because of that, we list any significant differences below.

Term: Keywords are repeated on the exported spreadsheet so that we can list multiple data points tied to different dates.

Date: The format starts with the year, followed by the month to help mark when we collected these different ad variations. A date of June 1 does not mean that the ad necessarily ran on June 1. It means that the ad ran near that time, and we rolled it into the June release.

Months in Use: Showing "6 of 12" helps you see that this particular ad ran only 6 months of the full year. Its visual counterpart on the live page would be the series of ad boxes shown on the chart.

Title: Title/Headline of the ad that ran at the time for this domain

Body: Main copy from the ad that rank at the time for this domain

Extended Body: If the ad contained additional extensions, those could be listed as "extended body" in the export.

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