Advanced Pay Per Click (PPC) Certification Program

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Introduction to PPC Advertising

Welcome to the Introduction to PPC Advertising Tutorial, which is a part of Advanced Pay Per Click (PPC) Certification Course offered by Simplilearn.

In this lesson, we're going to give a brief overview of paid search or PPC advertising.

Let us look at the objectives of this PPC tutorial.

Objectives

After completing this tutorial, you will learn:

The three R's of PPC advertising
The goals of PPC campaigns
The definition of PPC advertising
How you can benefit from PPC advertising

In the next section, we will discuss the prerequisites for taking the PPC Advertising tutorial.

PPC Advertising Prerequisites

There are no prerequisites for learning PPC Advertising from this PPC Advertising tutorial. Also, there are no prerequisites for this Advanced Pay Per Click (PPC) Certification Course.

In the next section, we will focus on the benefits of this PPC Advertising Tutorial.

Benefits of PPC Advertising for Professional

With this PPC Advertising tutorial you will:

Get a better understanding of how to become an industry-ready paid marketing professional.
Learn to master the nuances of pay per click, display advertising, conversion optimization, and web analytics
Acquire extensive project experience to prepare you for managing paid marketing initiatives.

Let’s discuss who will benefit from this PPC Advertising tutorial.

Target Audience of the PPC Advertising Tutorial

The PPC Advertising Tutorial offered by Simplilearn is best suited to be PPC specialists:

Marketing managers
Digital marketing executives
Marketing and sales professionals
Management, engineering, business, and communication graduates
Entrepreneurs and business owners

Next, we will look at the PPC or Pay Per Click.

What is PPC or Pay Per Click?

Paid search advertising is also called pay per click advertising or is abbreviated as PPC advertising. Sometimes you'll also hear it called CPC or cost per click advertising as well.

At a high level, the way this works is that first you choose who can see your ad. This could be based upon geographic characteristics, a keyword is chosen, a topic selection, so forth.

Next, you set a bid for what you're willing to pay for a click. PPC advertising is an auction-based system so you can set a bid based upon what you're willing to pay for a click.

Next, when someone meets your targeting criteria, your ad can be displayed. And if that user clicks on your ad, then you pay up to your bid price, you may pay lower than your bid price as well.

Finally, when someone clicks on your ad, the searcher is taken to your website. So if you've ever seen ads on Google or Bing, these are paid search ads.

Now let us understand how effective advertising works.

Efficient Advertising

Now one of the true advantages of paid search advertising is that there are no wasted impressions.

When you look at radio advertising, television advertising, and other mediums, they're known as interruptive marketing. You stop someone from watching a television commercial to show an ad copy. After the commercial is over, someone can return to the content.

Because you're displaying this ad to everyone who can see the content, there's a lot of people who are not interested in your ad, they don't care about your message.

With PPC advertising, since you're targeting someone based upon user criteria whether it's a search query they've conducted, whether it's a specific site they're on and so forth, there's no waste of ad impressions, your ads are always relevant.

In the next section of this PPC tutorial, we look at what are the three Rs of Pay Per Click.

The 3 Rs of Pay Per Click

The 3Rs of pay per click advertising are:

Reach: This is where can the ad be seen?
Relevance: How useful is the ad to the user?
Return on investment(ROI): How can you measure PPC advertising effectiveness

We are going to look at these three components of paid search in the next few sections.

Reach

In Reach, we try to understand where are these ads seen. Well, they can be seen on Bing, Yahoo, Ask, Google, AOL, many other places.

Advertising on search engines gives you a huge amount of reach. Google processes about 34,000 searches a second. The number of potential impressions is staggering when that's just one search engine.

When you add Bing, Yahoo, and other engines to the possibilities of reach, the reach is an impressive number of how many people can potentially see your ad.

Content Sites

The paid search ads go beyond just search sites. There are more than a million partners just on Google's display network.

Even on content-based sites, About.com, New York Times, How Stuff Works, The Food Network these ads can also be seen and you can choose which of these sites you want to be on, and how your ads are displayed on display sites, as well.

Many More Players

Beyond search engines, there's also other types of PPC advertising you can do like YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook. So the reach of paid search is an impressive reach.

It is important to understand how to control the reach, so you can:

Target your specific user base
Give an ideal customer profile
Look to see what your customer does online
Target the customers based on their behavior

Multiple Device Types

Reach of Pay Per Click goes beyond just the desktop. You have ads on tablets, ads on mobile devices, in-app ads.

So regardless of how someone's accessing the internet, you can serve ads to those users based on their behavior.

Let us now look into the second component of paid search, that is relevance.

Relevance

If an ad isn't relevant to the user, the users don't care about the ad very much. In fact, when people are surveyed and asked a simple question, do you mind advertising if it's relevant to you?

Many more say no, they're okay with advertising if it's relevant. What we don't like to see is non-relevant advertising.

Choosing a search audience

To give an example of how relevant you can be just using Google. You can serve an ad to a user based upon these behaviors.

The user search for online advertising while sitting in New York City. They use an iPad on a Monday morning between 10 and noon.

Now that's a very targeted ad copy. You may not use every potential behavior. However, you can also consider paid search as restrictive advertising.

Overall, Google processes 100 billion queries a month, that's a lot. So maybe you just want to advertise the word online advertising, lowers your query total 100 million a month.

Then you say, just the United States, your query total's now 20 million a month. And say, while they're in New York City. You create a total about 500,000 a month. They're using an iPad, that about 8,000 a month.

On a Monday morning, got 1,000 searches a month between 10 and 12, about 100 searches a month. So paid search has a high relevance on search pages. But even on content sites, also known as displayed advertising, you can be just as specific about the user behavior.

Choosing a display audience

You can target an ad for display advertising, assuming someone the user is:

On the New York Times.
They are in the travel section of the New York Times.
They're reading about Caribbean vacations while in the Travel section on the New York Times.
They're located in Minneapolis, using a computer, and it's a weekend between 12 and 6 o'clock.

So targeting options with paid search exceed every other advertising medium out there.

Ad Format

Often people talk about paid search. You think of text ads. You think of the ads on the top of Google's search page or Bing's search page. There are other ad formats. There are video ads, image ads, app-based ads, so it's not just text ads that can be used.

There's a lot of other ad formats based upon how you wish to portray your message to the consumer.

Landing Pages

With paid search, you choose where the customer goes after the click. So often when someone gets to your site, they arrive at your homepage.

The first thing they have to do is look around, search, find your navigation to find the relevant information on your site to whatever their question is, why they searched. With paid search, you can choose what page you're sending the traffic to.

So now you can have a page dedicated to that user behavior, whether it's their search query, the site they're on, so forth and make custom messages on your website that connect back to your ad.

Let us now understand what return on investment is.

Return on Investment

The final R in the three Rs of paid search is Return on Investment. You have accessed the powerful metrics. If you do not have access to data, your blind to how your ads are performing.

When you buy ads on TV, it's really hard to measure how many sales you got from that ad. However, online it's very transparent. You can see your goal types, your conversion types, whether it's a phone call, any commerce transaction, a form fill, so forth.

As you have access to the data, determine who is converting, what's making them convert. So you can continue to refine your ad serving and increase your online advertising efficiencies.

ROI - Bid Based System

Paid search is often an auction-based system. You'll set a bid up to how much you're willing to pay for anyone click.

Now, what you'll find is that different targeting behaviors, we did different overall conversion metrics.

Therefore you can set bids by every keyword your targeting or topic you're targeting, site your ad is placed on based upon having access to the data to understand the true value of what a visitor is worth to you, so that as you're advertising, every click is profitable, that you're not wasting ad spends.

Now let us look at what PPC has to offer to you.

What does PPC give you?

Now every company should have a paid search account and with marketing, as you can accomplish things such as:

Drive customers to your store.
Sell products online.
Generate more product demand.
Increase brand recognition.
Just get more visitors to your website.
Receive leads for the sales force.
Increase newsletter subscriptions.
Have prospects call you, instead of outbound calling.

If anyone of these looks attractive to you, then you should have a paid search account. Because a paid search account will help you meet these goals.

When you buy ads in a newspaper, you have to wait at least a week before we can change your ad copy. If you buy ads in the Yellow Pages, you have to wait a year to see if it works.

Paid search gives you quick access to data to determine what marketing and messages, what ads, what web pages are leading to revenue and customer actions on your site.

Let us now take a look at the lessons covered in this PPC Advertising Tutorial.

Lessons Covered in this PPC Advertising Tutorial

There are total nineteen lessons covered in this PPC Advertising Tutorial. The lessons are listed in the table below.

Lesson No	Chapter Name	What You’ll Learn
Lesson 1	Search Engine Marketing	The formula for successful search engine marketing The secrets of effective copywriting What a successful SEM campaign looks like The motivations behind why people surf the Internet
Lesson 2	The Search Opportunity	Who relies on the Internet for research Where people spend their time online The correlation between user attention and ppc advertising spend How consumer control continues to change
Lesson 3	The Buying Cycle	How to engage your customers How to keep your customers interested throughout the buying process The importance of landing pages How a customer progresses through the buying funnel
Lesson 4	Introducing Keywords, Part 1: Keyword Basics & Keyword Organization	Explain the difference between search queries and keywords List and give examples of three types of search query intent Name different types of keywords and explain how various keywords can tell a story Organize and group keywords with the effective adwords account structure
Lesson 5	Introducing Keywords, Part 2: The Long Tail & Keyword Discovery	Explain how the long tail concept relates to paid search Describe the pros and cons of long tail keywords Find and expand a keyword list effectively
Lesson 6	Understanding Adwords Match Type	Describe exact match, phrase match, modified broad match, and broad match Explain how AdWords match types play a major role in triggering ads to be displayed Organize AdWords match types for effective budgeting Evaluate whether a match type is appropriate for a specific situation
Lesson 7	Managing Search Queries & Negative Keywords	Define negative keywords and defend the importance of using negative keywords List negative keyword match types and describe how each one works Decide whether to apply negative keywords at the campaign level or the ad group level depending on the situation Analyze paid search data to determine when to use negative keywords Manage keywords in your account and delete or expand keywords based on data
Lesson 8	Creating Compelling Ad Copy, Part 1: Connecting Search Queries to Websites	The different elements of ad copy How to write compelling ad copy The difference between feature-based and benefit-based ads How to set expectations with your ads
Lesson 9	Creating Compelling Ad Copy, Part 2: Trademarks and Dynamic Insertion	How to take advantage of destination and display URLs How to write compelling ad copy How dynamic keyword insertion (DKI) works How to check if you're infringing on any trademarks
Lesson 10	Ad Extensions	The importance of ad extensions How to use various extensions including the location extension, call extension, social extension and others Why every business should be using the sitelinks extension How ad extensions affect CTR and ad rank
Lesson 11	Landing Pages: Landing Page best practices	About basic PPC landing pages How to create dedicated PPC landing pages How to keep the buying cycle length in mind How to segment your traffic to various landing pages
Lesson 12	Ad Copy Testing	Identify the best ways to test your ad copy Analyze your test data Adjust ads to appeal to different customers Do Split Testing and Ad Optimization Run tests in a low-volume account
Lesson 13	Account Settings and UI Walkthrough	Why you should create a new email address to manage your PPC accounts How to set up access levels for other users of the PPC account Which notification settings to use and why Why PPC account structure is so important
Lesson 14	Campaign Settings, Part 1: Location and Language Targeting	How to write ads for a local audience What to consider when geographically targeting How to target based on language How to reach the most people within a geographic area
Lesson 15	Campaign Settings, Part 2: Types, Budget, & Reach	The difference between Search and Display networks The differences between the available CPC bidding options How to manage your ad rotation How to create your daily budget Campaign Schedule Target CPA Bidding & CPM
Lesson 16	Setting and Measuring Goals	How to effectively set and measure goals How to set up AdWords and adCenter conversion codes How to use PPC data to measure your company's objectives How to track all of the sites you're running ads on
Lesson 17	ROAS, Conversion, & Setting Initial Bids	How to estimate initial conversion rates How to calculate your initial bids by exposure level How to determine your revenue per conversion The average conversion rates of various product types
Lesson 18	Effective Bid Strategies, Part 1: Bidding Options	How to optimize bidding options according to your needs The pros and cons of each bidding option How to optimize your budget How to bid using enhanced CPC bidding, CPA bidding, and flexible bidding
Lesson 19	Effective Bid Strategies, Part 2: Setting Bids	How to calculate the value of a click How to account for your margins in paid search How to take advantage of ad scheduling The importance of figuring out when people buy from you

Summary

Let us now summarize what we have learned in this lesson.

PPC advertising also gives you other valuable insights. You can use keyword metrics to direct your search engine optimization efforts.

You can test display ads for print media since there are display ads, image-based ads across paid search.
Pay per click advertising will help you get the data so you can mine your information to get a better insight into your customer base.

Whenever you want insight, you want rapid feedback, paid search is useful for getting that information.

Conclusion

With this, we come to an end to what PPC Advertising is all about. In the next chapter of this Advanced PPC Tutorial, we will try to understand the Search Engine Marketing.