A Google Ads account follows a clear four-level hierarchy: an Account contains Campaigns, which hold Ad Groups, which in turn contain the Keywords and Ads. Within this structure, keywords can be targeted using match types that govern how broadly or narrowly they reach users. Broad Match lets your ad appear for variations and related topics, Phrase Match focuses on the meaning of a phrase, and Exact Match targets queries with the same intent. The older Broad Match Modifier has been deprecated, with its behavior folded into Phrase and Broad Match, so advertisers today rely on the three modern match types to organize targeting.
The relevance and quality of your ads are measured through Quality Score, a diagnostic tool that compares your ad quality to other advertisers. It is calculated from three pillars: Expected Click-Through Rate, Ad Relevance, and Landing Page Experience. Google combines these signals with your bid and the expected impact of ad assets to determine Ad Rank, which decides your ad's position on the page or whether it shows at all. Ad Strength, distinct from Quality Score, is a creative-time feedback mechanism that helps you provide diverse headlines and descriptions, particularly when building Responsive Search Ads where Google's machine learning tests combinations automatically to find the best performer for each user.
The everyday metrics advertisers use to evaluate performance on this foundation are calculated with simple formulas. Click-Through Rate is clicks divided by impressions multiplied by one hundred. Conversion Rate is conversions divided by clicks multiplied by one hundred. Cost Per Acquisition is total cost divided by total conversions. Alongside these, Impression Share measures your share of impressions relative to total eligible impressions, and Interaction Rate captures how often users engage with your ad relative to how often it is shown. Together these metrics diagnose whether you are losing traffic to budget limits, low bids, or creative issues. To broaden reach, Performance Max campaigns grant access to YouTube, Display, Search, Discover, Gmail, and Maps from a single goal-based campaign, while Video Action Campaigns drive conversions on YouTube using call-to-action overlays on skippable in-stream videos.
Beyond the core formats, Google Ads offers tools to refine and scale campaigns. Keyword Insertion, sometimes called Dynamic Keyword Insertion, dynamically updates ad copy with the user's search term, increasing relevance to the query. Ad Assets, formerly Ad Extensions, such as phone numbers, sitelinks, and callouts add information that improves visibility and CTR. The Google Ads Editor is a free downloadable application that lets you make bulk changes offline before posting, and Auction Insights benchmarks your performance against competitors through metrics like Overlap Rate and Outranking Share. Together, these features form the operational backbone for managing campaigns.