Last Updated on 2020-12-26 by ppcguybklyn
In my previousarticleI discussed the idea of how to lead your team members when they don’t have any paid search experiences. What if the positions switch? What if today we are completely newbies to PPC advertising, but want to enter the industry? How are we going to utilize the resources that are available to us, and appear competent during interviews? I was lucky enough that my first PPC role accepted people without prior knowledge and I taught myself a lot of skills while on the job. This article is based on my self-teaching experience to introduce some good methods and tools to accumulate PPC knowledge.
Understanding basic know-how through Google certifications and Google Ads support articles
The quickest way to have a basic understanding of paid search advertising is to follow the steps of Google Ads Certifications. Currently the certification has Search, Display, Shopping and Video 4 parts. Each part has its corresponding Support articles that introduce fundamental concepts. Search and Shopping are the priorities when having limited free time because they are the most practical and best converting ad formats at the moment.
The articles in Google Ads Support introduce all kinds of concepts with concise wording. Sometimes I will have to go back to these articles to check some functions that I seldom use. Although these articles could be a little difficult to read due to their simplified and compressed nature, they are still an extremely useful way to start learning PPC.
I highly recommend trying toget the certification by your own efforts.There are a lot of solutions on the internet but I believe avoiding these solutions the first time getting the certification is the best way to learn.
Practice keyword research
After having some basic understanding, we can start practicing some of the everyday tasks when we are running PPC ads. I would prioritizepracticing keyword researchfirst because it is the very foundation of digital marketing. All of the ad campaigns start with keyword research. If we could have some experience with keyword research before an interview, it would be a big plus in front for the hiring manager. The following are two keyword research tools that I think are really useful when we don’t have access to a Google Ads account:
Google Trends
The keyword trend tool provided by Google, Google Trends offer not only the change in keyword search volumes over time but also other functions like geographic analysis and similar keywords. This basically includes everything we need when it comes to keyword research. The only downside is the search volumes in Google Trends are not absolute value but instead relative percentage that treats the highest volume as 100. If we want to know the actual search volume we would have to use other tools.
Keyword Surfer
This is a browser extension that shows search volumes and estimated CPC in Google search results and shows similar keywords on the top right corner. Keyword Surfer is free and easy to use. All we have to do is to search the keywords we are interested in to see the results. However, its biggest downside to me is that it doesn’t support Mandarin Chinese. If our target language is Madarin, we’ll need to find another tool.
Observe and practice copywriting
A lot of hiring managers would want the people they are interviewing to havebasic copywriting skills.So it would be a huge advantage if we could practice before an interview. Plus this is something we could do by ourselves even without access to Google Ads back end.
The key to PPC ad copywriting is character limits. The ads must grasp the attention of the audience with limited character counts and spaces. The fastest way to learn and improve copywriting, is searching for the keywords or brands we are interested in and observe how the top ranking ads promote their products and services with their ad copies.
Knowing Google Analytics is a must
Basic understanding of Google Analytics is another must-have aside from knowledge to paid search platforms. Google Analytics can be useful not only to analyze the performance of our PPC ads, but also analyze the overall traffic if we are also in charge of other digital marketing tasks. Google offers a series of basic and advanced tutorials so that we can follow the step-by-step guides to learn all the fundamentals.
We don’t have to be super techy when it comes to our Google Analytics skills if our main goal and responsibility is paid search advertising since the majority of our time will be spent on the ad platforms. We only need to know how to understand the metrics that we use the most on Google Analytics.
Create a Google Ads account to be familiar with the environment
After learning so many relevant knowledge and skills, if we really want to practice them in the Google Ads environment, we could consider creating our own accounts. As long as the ad campaigns are not enabled, we won’t be charged any payment. We could practice how to create ad campaigns, ad groups and keywords and also practice other related functions. Of course some functions such as changing bidding strategies and budget would require traffic and data to be used. Knowledge of PPC ads can be easily forgotten if we don’t have access to an actual account so we have to continue to practice to ensure we don’t forget what we learn.
Utilize free resources
If all of the above are completed and we wish to advance and learn more. We could try using Google Ads’s official blog or other third party website to learn more information. The following are some of the PPC related blogs or website that I often visit:
Other blogs or websites
Conclusion
Learning a new skill from scratch is always difficult. Especially in the ever changing field of digital marketing, it is very easy to lose one’s footing with the massive amount of information. Hopefully the resource I list in this article can help the people who are interested in paid search advertising, but don’t know where to start.
