There are many ways to learn pay-per-click advertising on Google. Most people and businesses take the self-taught route. These folks use the free content they can find: articles, videos, social posts, and more. This may indeed be the most successful method to follow, but the learning curve is massive. It takes a very long time to become a Google Ads expert this way but, more than that, it takes the right environment too. That includes dedicated ad spend to experiment with, and almost waste, so you’re able to learn what you need. You’ll have to spend hours managing a Google Ads account to experience real world results. At a certain point after that you know how to react in the face of surprises. If you want to learn faster, structured training is a much better alternative. A course can’t replace experience, but you can use structured learning to speed up the process. Courses can present the essentials to running a Google Ads campaign that turns a profit. Truthfully, the real world is going to throw you curve balls from time to time. This means the real world is guaranteed to differ from what you learn in a course. Still, properly structured courses can teach you practical skills to manage Google Ads. Research, launch, optimization, driving breakeven, scaling, and automation phases can all be taught. But, this only works if you learn the practical skills required, not just theory. Good courses don’t just regurgitate principles from the Google Ads blog. They teach mastery of the repetitive tasks you’ll complete in successful Google Ads campaigns. If you understand these tasks on a fundamental level, you don’t need to mire in indecision. You’ll know what to do, at least in the big picture. Mental energy can then focus on your specific needs, forming a test, and solving problems. Realistically, you’ll need more than just 3 key skills to succeed. But today, to help you understand what you need to know, we’ll cover the 3 that we think are the most crucial.
Research & Analysis
This conversation requires that we start with research and analysis. The reality is that both research and analysis happen throughout the life of a campaign. Whether launching or improving campaigns both research and analysis are key skills. Research is king when preparing for a launch. You can use the Google Keyword Planner or paid tools to research keywords. The keywords you researched should drive plenty of ad views (aka impressions). From this you may research Google Ads copywriting principles. If you use them to write ads that are compelling you’ll see a healthy ad CTR. If you also researched UX and conversion best practices your campaigns will drive you to your goal number of customers. Research may also include how branch into promoting other product lines in ads. Indeed, launch research can evolve based on industry, products, goal, and future plans. Once launch research is done, you almost immediately need strong analysis skills. Are you indeed driving significant enough traffic to hit your goals? Are you spending your full daily budget? Post-launch analysis helps you see if you’re on track to reach goals, or if an early adjustment is needed. You may need more traffic, a cheaper cost per click, more relevant keywords, or to fix landing pages. You may also need to watch if the type of traffic you’re driving matches your goals. If 90% of your traffic is mobile, but mobile traffic can’t convert, you just wasted time and money. Once done, analysis again yields to research. Here, you’d research some of the best ways to fix the problems you see. Perhaps for traffic, it may teach you to increase keywords or increase bids a certain amount. Or, for pages, to benchmark engagement rates or suggest page improvements. This again circles back to analysis. Now that you’re driving traffic and conversions you want to drive your campaign to break even. How do you cut costs? How do you see higher conversion rates and reduce cost per conversion? Research and analysis are almost the yin and yang of campaign intelligence. Soon after one, you almost immediately look to the other sign of the coin. Consider this when you choose a course. Make sure research and analysis content covers specific campaign phases. Courses should be able to walk you through almost a tree of decisions to get you to your goals.
Growing traffic
Growing traffic deserves specific mention. It’s true that both it and CRO also overlap a bit with research and analysis, like a Venn diagram. But growing traffic is its own skill, and is essential for your longterm success of a campaign. On launch, it’s very likely you may not yet be getting all the leads you want. Despite this, you may have a healthy conversion rate on traffic. This means you probably need to grow traffic. This could focus on impressions: increasing keywords or opening settings to widen reach. It could focus on ads: improving quality score with better ads or writing ad copy that compels the click. When driving adolescent campaigns to break even you may again try to grow traffic. This could be done by discovering new sources of cheaper traffic. One method is to expand keyword volume on a specific topic that performs well. Perhaps lead volume is short for this phase of growth. In this case you may find new ways to grow traffic without growing cost per click much. You may instead divide keywords into ad groups to better match ads to relevant searches. And again, once traffic is steady the hunt for more traffic continues at various stages of a campaign. Perhaps return is healthy and leads are coming at the right price. In this case you can probably grow traffic by increasing bids. Courses can help you learn to grow traffic, but only if they help you through your current phase of results. Branching from your specific need, growing traffic takes many different turns. For a course to be helpful, it needs to help you understand the context of what you need to do. It can provide highly relevant information, but only if it allows you to stay on the right track.
Conversion Rate Optimization
Conversion rate optimization stands very high on the list of skills you need to learn from a course. Despite this, a lot of conversion rate optimization happens outside Google Ads. Your campaign invariably drives people to a call to action. They could submit an email in the ad itself through lead ads, but those leads are often low quality. Most times, conversion rate optimization happens on a webpage (landing page). Still, conversion rate optimization happens throughout the life of your campaign. Early on, you may watch traffic, and state a hypothesis on how much traffic is required to drive a conversion. From here, the real world happens and sometimes results don’t match expectations. You may then act off instinct because your campaign doesn’t have enough clicks to look for hard data. Instead, you need to understand the principles of high-converting pages. Is your signup process understandable? How does it differ from the best practice? What are the biggest ways it departs from assumptions on best practice? How could you improve by following best practices, or even defying them? One day, you’ll evolve away from gut feel. This happens when your campaign drives significant customer volume. At this point, you’ll eventually switch to a more scientific method. That is, you’ll run a/b tests and look for statistical significance. On key pages, you can test two versions to see which stats show are likely to perform best. This establishes what we call a “control” in the marketing world, and you can continue to test against this over time with a variant. The common thread between this and the previous section is again context. Courses you choose should discuss conversion rate optimization within the context you need. They should follow to teach you how that evolves over time. If you can find this you’ll gain all the value you need.
These real skills are on the short list of what people need in a Google PPC course, but of course they need more. The most important part is that a course gives you both technical knowledge and practical knowledge. You can’t just exit your course knowing how a campaign is SHOULD work. You have to also know how it WILL work, and how to diagnose and address problems that come up along the way. This practical knowledge is typically missing from most courses. You may not need to pay to learn this, and you can probably discover both of these for free with the right effort output. The most important part is that you DO learn them, and that you build your confidence in these areas. With the right skills and confidence, advertisers can make most new campaigns work. It doesn’t take magic. It just takes a bit of realism, a bit of optimism, and a good amount of hard work.