Paid search
In practice, for a UK buyer
The paragraph above is the neutral answer. This is the part a vendor glossary leaves out.
Search took £17.9bn of a £46.7bn UK market in 2025 on AA/WARC figures, and if you are reading this you are almost certainly already buying it competently. AdBuyMCP's contribution is not better search management — it is stopping search being planned in a different room from the television, audio and out-of-home around it, and deduplicating the audience across them. It is also the channel where the fidelity score moves most with the quality of your brief: buyer-authored intent topics score 82, interests without intent 68, and a persona label with no product context 45, with the plan telling you which you supplied. Nothing auto-buys: provider keyword suggestions have to be explicitly applied to a version-fenced draft.
Goes deeper: How search compiles
What this one connects to
Most confusion in media buying comes from two adjacent terms being used interchangeably, so these are the neighbours worth reading next.
CPC
The cost of one click on an advert, and the standard price unit for paid search and for much of paid social, where the advertiser pays for a response rather than for the impression that produced it.
Fidelity score
A published score out of 100 answering one question: how much of an audience definition survives translation into a channel's native targeting words. It is a property of that translation rather than a forecast, and it is not a quality rating.
Attribution
Assigning credit for an outcome to the advertising touchpoints that preceded it, according to a rule the advertiser chose. A description of correlation in a conversion path, not a demonstration that the advertising caused anything.
More on channels and formats
The seven things you can actually buy, and the words the sellers use for them.
45 minutes. Bring a real brief and we compile it live. You describe one audience and watch it compile into seven targeting specifications, each with the score for how much of the definition survived.
Talk it through