27 Terms to Know: Google Ads, SEO, AI, and Buying Apps

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Here are the 27 terms that come up most often across AutomaizeIT's service, app, and purchase-policy pages, each with a short, general definition and a link to the related service where one exists.

Advertising and online sales

Google Ads – Google's paid advertising system. Ads bought through it can turn up in search results, on YouTube, across the Display Network, or inside Google Shopping listings, and billing is usually per click rather than per view. See: Google Ads management for e-commerce and for services and restaurants.

Performance Max – one Google Ads campaign format that spans a whole cluster of Google properties simultaneously — Search, YouTube, Display, Gmail, Maps, and beyond — where the system itself handles most placement and bidding decisions based on the goals you set.

Google Merchant Center (GMC) – where you upload and keep your product catalog current for Google. That feed is what makes Shopping campaigns and free product listings possible in the first place.

Shopping campaign (Shopping, PLA) – an ad format pulling photo, name, price, and seller name straight from your Merchant Center data, assembled automatically without manual ad copy.

Allegro Ads – the paid promotion layer inside Allegro, Poland's biggest online marketplace, letting sellers push their listings higher in search and across the platform; sponsored placements are billed by the click. See: Allegro Ads management.

ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) – revenue generated per dollar of ad cost. Hit 500% ROAS and you're pulling PLN 5 back for every PLN 1 spent — but that figure says nothing about margin, so a strong ROAS alone doesn't prove a campaign is profitable.

CPC (Cost per Click) – what a single ad click costs you. Because most systems run on an auction, what you actually pay per click typically lands below the ceiling bid you configured.

Conversion and conversion tracking – a conversion is any action with real value to your business — a sale, a submitted form, a phone call. Tracking ties those actions back to the campaign that produced them, which is what lets the system optimize toward outcomes that matter.

Remarketing – putting ads back in front of people who've already been to your site or store once. Inside the EU, that typically requires cookie (or similar) consent first.

E-commerce manager – whoever owns the outcome of your entire online sales channel — targets and metrics, campaign performance, pricing and offers, and getting the team and vendors pulling the same direction. See: remote e-commerce manager.

E-commerce audit – a third-party review of how your online sales actually work: channels, campaigns and how well you're tracking conversions, the path buyers take, your data, your processes — capped off with concrete recommendations. See: e-commerce audit.

SEO and technology

On-site SEO – everything about the site itself that shapes how well it shows up in search: site structure and crawlability, the content itself, headings and metadata, speed, internal links, and structured data. The other half of the equation is off-site SEO — backlinks and mentions elsewhere. See: on-site SEO audit and on-site SEO optimization with implementation.

Structured data – code-level markup (typically schema.org vocabulary written as JSON-LD) that tells search engines exactly what a piece of content is — a product listing, a price, a business entity. It opens the door to rich results in search; it doesn't guarantee them.

Core Web Vitals – Google's trio of page-experience scores: LCP measures how fast the biggest visible element loads (aim under 2.5 s), INP measures how snappy the page feels to interact with (aim under 200 ms), and CLS measures whether the layout stays put while loading (aim under 0.1).

Canonical URL – a tag in the page's code pointing to the one "real" version of content that's reachable at more than one address — useful, for instance, for avoiding duplicate-content problems after moving a store to a new platform.

API – a defined interface letting two pieces of software exchange data or trigger each other's functions, whether that's a store talking to a warehouse system or an app calling out to an AI model. Example: DualDrive AI puts a whole range of AI models behind one single API.

AI and automation

Process automation – handing repetitive, time-consuming tasks over to software instead of people — writing product copy, sorting data, assembling reports. See: AI implementation workshop and applications that optimize business processes.

Language model (LLM) – an AI system trained on massive amounts of text that builds its responses by predicting the most likely next words. It's capable of stating wrong things with total confidence, so its answers are worth a second look before you rely on them.

Prompt – the instruction you hand an AI model to work from. How well you frame that instruction — the context you give it, the goal, the format you're expecting back — shapes the quality of what comes out the other end more than almost anything else.

Buying apps, taxes, and your rights

One-off license – a single payment buying usage rights within whatever scope the license agreement lays out. It's a right to use the software, not a transfer of copyright in it. See: applications.

Subscription – time-limited software access, billed monthly or annually. Ours run prepaid: an email with a payment link lands in your inbox before the current period runs out, and nothing gets charged automatically.

Net and gross price – net leaves tax out of the number; gross bakes it in. What a consumer actually sees at checkout is the gross figure — the full amount owed.

OSS (One Stop Shop) – an EU mechanism for handling VAT on cross-border sales like electronic services to consumers in other member states, letting a seller file one return at home instead of registering separately in every country. Cross EUR 10,000 in annual sales and the buyer's own country's VAT rate kicks in. Relevant for EU sellers and customers — not something a US buyer needs to think about.

Reverse charge – shifts the job of accounting for VAT from seller to buyer. It kicks in on services sold to businesses elsewhere in the EU holding a valid VAT number, and the resulting invoice carries no VAT line, just a "reverse charge" note. This is strictly an EU business-to-business mechanic and doesn't touch US buyers.

VIES – the European Commission's lookup tool for confirming whether a company's EU VAT number is genuinely valid, which in turn decides things like whether reverse charge applies. Again, this is an EU-side concern that US buyers can skip entirely.

Durable medium – any format that lets you save information and pull it back up unchanged later — an emailed attachment or a PDF both qualify. Contract confirmations, for one, typically get delivered this way.

Right of withdrawal – the right a consumer (and, in certain cases, a sole proprietor) has to back out of a distance purchase within 14 days, no reason required. For digital content delivered instantly, that right disappears the moment the buyer explicitly agrees to start the download and acknowledges giving up withdrawal rights. See: withdrawal – information.

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