I was exchanging emails with a client the other day - having reviewed the performance of a previous group of campaigns they wanted to allocate some more budget to them and asked to put them live again.

The campaigns in question were a group of search campaigns and a single display campaign, which we put live.

An hour later I got a follow-up email asking ‘just to be sure, this is PPC only, not GDN?’

To cut a long story short, in their mind PPC = search, whereas in my mind PPC = everything Google Ads.

(No harm done, we switched the display/GDN campaign off)

What this did highlight to me though, is how easy it is in our industry to be talking about two different things without realising it. And we also really don’t make it easy for a non-expert to truly understand what we are saying.

Terms and acronyms get bandied around as though everyone is an PPC expert and understands all that's being said. (If you ever read an article on LinkedIn from a PPC pro you’ll see this. It often takes me a couple of read throughs to fully understand what they are trying to illustrate).

For a business owner or marketer, we expect them to understand the difference and nuances between a max-conversion v a Tcpa bid strategy, PMAX v other campaigns UA v GA4 and so on.

As an industry, we really need to learn to explain ourselves more clearly.  Clients don’t always want to know the nuts and bolts, but they do need to understand the implications of what we tell them.