Advertising & MCP glossary
Plain-English definitions of the terms that come up when you run ads through an AI assistant — from Model Context Protocol to Target ROAS.
AEO (answer engine optimization)
AEO (answer engine optimization) is the practice of structuring and publishing content so that AI-powered answer engines — such as ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode — retrieve it, quote it accurately and cite the source when answering user questions.
Approval gate (dry run)
An approval gate is a control in an AI or automation system that pauses a proposed change, shows exactly what would happen as a dry run, and executes it only after a human explicitly confirms.
Conversion tracking
Conversion tracking is the practice of recording the valuable actions people take after interacting with an ad — such as a purchase, lead form submission, phone call or app install — and attributing those actions back to the campaign, ad group and keyword that produced them.
login-customer-id
login-customer-id is an HTTP request header in the Google Ads API that carries the customer ID of the manager account you are operating through, telling Google which account in the hierarchy is authorising the call on the target account's behalf.
Lookalike audience
A lookalike audience is a targeting segment that an advertising platform builds by analysing a source list of existing customers or engaged users — the seed — and finding new people whose attributes and behaviour most closely resemble them.
MCC (My Client Center / manager account)
An MCC (My Client Center), officially called a Google Ads manager account, is an umbrella account that lets a single login access, manage and consolidate billing and reporting across multiple Google Ads accounts without signing in and out of each one.
MCP connector
An MCP connector is the configuration inside an AI client — such as Claude or ChatGPT — that links the assistant to a specific MCP server, making the tools that server exposes available inside the conversation.
Model Context Protocol (MCP)
The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard, introduced by Anthropic in November 2024, that defines how AI assistants connect to external tools and data sources through a single uniform interface instead of a separate custom integration for every system.
Negative keywords
Negative keywords are terms added to a search advertising campaign to prevent ads from being shown for queries containing those words, reducing wasted spend on irrelevant or unqualified searches.
Performance Max (PMax)
Performance Max (PMax) is a goal-based Google Ads campaign type that uses a single campaign to serve ads across all Google inventory — Search, Shopping, YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail and Maps — with automated bidding, targeting and asset combinations driven by the advertiser's conversion goals.
Remote MCP server
A remote MCP server is a Model Context Protocol server that runs on a provider's infrastructure and is reached over HTTPS, so an AI client connects to it with a URL and an OAuth sign-in instead of installing and running anything locally.
ROAS (return on ad spend)
ROAS (return on ad spend) is a marketing metric that divides the revenue attributed to advertising by the cost of that advertising, expressed as a ratio or percentage — for example, $4 of revenue from $1 of spend is a 4x ROAS.
Search terms report
The search terms report is a Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising report that shows the actual search queries people typed that triggered your ads, along with the performance of each query.
Target CPA (tCPA)
Target CPA (tCPA) is an automated bidding strategy in which the ad platform sets bids in each auction to generate as many conversions as possible at an average cost per acquisition close to the target the advertiser specifies.
Target ROAS (tROAS)
Target ROAS (tROAS) is an automated bidding strategy in which the ad platform predicts the conversion value of each auction and sets bids to achieve an average return on ad spend close to the percentage target the advertiser sets.
Write access in MCP
Write access in MCP means an MCP server exposes tools that change state in a connected system — creating, updating, pausing or deleting records — rather than only reading and reporting data.
