The PPC Glossary
The terms ClickCatalyst uses to diagnose Google Ads accounts — defined precisely, with the exact formula and thresholds behind each one. No number here is asserted without the query that proves it.
19 terms · 4 categories
Waste Detection
Search Query Bleed
Search Query Bleed is the percentage of a Google Ads search budget consumed by queries the advertiser never intended to target — traffic pulled in by broad match and AI-driven keyword expansion rather than deliberate keyword choices.
Zombie Products
A Zombie Product is a Shopping or Performance Max product that keeps receiving clicks and spending budget while never producing a sale — typically 20 or more clicks with zero units sold.
Placement Leakage
Placement Leakage is ad budget draining into junk inventory — mobile game apps, low-quality websites, and irrelevant YouTube channels — where impressions accumulate but nobody is shopping.
Brand Leakage
Brand Leakage is paying non-brand campaign prices for searches that contain your own brand name — demand you already own, bought twice.
Shopping Waste
Shopping Waste is the portion of a Shopping budget consumed by catalog segments that structurally cannot pay it back — zombie SKUs, thin-margin categories, and products crippled by incomplete feed data.
Waste Leakage Rate
The Waste Leakage Rate is the percentage of total Google Ads spend that produced zero conversions over a 30-day window — the headline number of a waste audit.
True Wasted Spend
True Wasted Spend is hourly spend above what the conversions in that hour were worth at the account's own average CPA — a stricter measure than simply counting zero-conversion hours.
Waste Categories (EXPLORATION / CREATIVE / QUERY / AUCTION_BID)
ClickCatalyst classifies every dollar of detected Google Ads waste into one of four structural categories — EXPLORATION, CREATIVE, QUERY, or AUCTION_BID — so the dominant category names the lever to pull first.
Measurement & Tracking
Tracking Mismatch
Tracking Mismatch is the gap between the conversions Google Ads reports and the conversions GA4 can verify — the raw count difference that Smart Bidding silently treats as real.
Attribution Drift
Attribution Drift is the percentage gap between what Google Ads claims as conversions and what GA4 confirms, measured per campaign over time.
Conversion Quality
Conversion Quality measures how much of an account's reported conversion volume is observed reality versus estimation — splitting every conversion into click-through, view-through, cross-device, and modeled components.
Signal Health Score (AI Max)
The Signal Health Score is a single number summarizing whether an account's conversion data is trustworthy enough to train Google's AI bidding — combining attribution drift, signal composition, and training-data pollution.
Budget & Profit
Margin Erosion
Margin Erosion is losing money on paid sales while ROAS looks healthy — ad spend quietly exceeding the gross profit of the products it sells.
Spend Concentration
Spend Concentration is budget inequality across campaigns, measured with a Gini Index — a value near 1 means one campaign is a billionaire while the rest starve; above 0.6 is dangerously concentrated.
Recovery Potential
Recovery Potential is the conservative dollar estimate of what an account gets back by fixing its confirmed waste — calculated as identified waste multiplied by a 70% capture rate, never as a hype number.
Frameworks & Scoring
Trust Trail
The Trust Trail is ClickCatalyst's evidence log: for every finding and recommendation, a traceable record of exactly which checks ran on the account data, what they measured, and which thresholds triggered the verdict.
Minimum Viable Signal (MVS)
Minimum Viable Signal is a Bayesian readiness framework that scores each campaign from 0–100% on whether it has accumulated enough statistically significant conversion data to be scaled safely.
The 8-Level Framework
The 8-Level Framework is ClickCatalyst's developmental model for Google Ads accounts: Level 0 establishes data connectivity and integrity, Levels 1–2 diagnose what is happening, Levels 3–6 explain why, and Levels 7–8 decide what comes next.
Account Efficiency Score
The Account Efficiency Score is a 0–100 composite summarizing what share of an account's spend produced at least one conversion in the reporting window — the inverse of the Waste Leakage Rate.
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