Intermediate · 7h 13m · 32 lessons
PPC Ads
The auction mechanics every paid channel shares — learn once, apply everywhere.
What you'll learn
- ✦Explain the bid x quality auction (taught as a simplified second-price model) and show why the highest bid can still lose
- ✦Run the ten-minute economics gate and tell a business honestly whether a paid-search click is worth what it costs
- ✦Treat quality score as a price lever, not a report card, and say which of its parts you can fix yourself
- ✦Choose match types deliberately and build a negative list that cuts a large share of wasted spend
- ✦Structure an account for both ad relevance and enough conversion data to manage or automate it
- ✦Diagnose a broken promise chain across the query, ad and page, and know which link to fix first
- ✦Choose a bid strategy from your own conversion volume, not from reputation
- ✦Define a conversion so bidding optimises toward money, and reconcile the count against real orders
- ✦Separate the four common causes of a CPA jump using impressions, click-through rate and conversion rate
Part of these career paths
- Digital Marketer path · course 4 of 6
- Performance Marketer path · course 2 of 6
Certification projects
Build 6 projects to earn your certificate
Hands-on work that proves you can apply what you learned — part of the certificate requirements.
Syllabus
Module 1 · 54m
What PPC is and when it works Free
What you'll be able to do
- Can explain why paid search reaches stated buying intent while paid social interrupts attention, and what that means for price.
- Can compare PPC and SEO honestly on speed, control and what happens the day you stop paying.
- Can run the economics gate (conversion rate x order value x margin, against cost per click) on a real business in ten minutes.
- Can judge, for several real-shaped businesses, whether PPC is likely to pay off, and defend the answer with numbers.
Module 2 · 54m
The auction Locked
What you'll be able to do
- Can explain Ad Rank (bid x quality) and show why the highest bidder can still lose.
- Can show, with a worked example, why raising quality score lowers price at the same position.
- Can explain why average CPC hides device, time and location differences, and segment it to find the expensive slice.
- Can find the cheapest route to a target ad position using bid and quality together, not bid alone.
Module 3 · 53m
Keywords, match types and negatives Locked
What you'll be able to do
- Can explain why a keyword's match type changes what real searches it actually buys.
- Can build a negative keyword list from the common families of wasted, non-commercial spend.
- Can read a search terms report and decide which terms to promote, exclude or leave alone.
- Can cut wasted spend from a real account without changing bids, ad copy or the landing page.
Module 4 · 54m
Account structure Locked
What you'll be able to do
- Can explain why account structure changes cost per click, not just organisation.
- Can explain why Single Keyword Ad Groups stopped being best practice, and what replaced them.
- Can decide whether a new keyword set needs its own campaign or only its own ad group.
- Can restructure a messy account to meet a relevance target and a data-per-group target at once.
Module 5 · 55m
Ad copy and landing page fit Locked
What you'll be able to do
- Can diagnose, from click-through and conversion rate alone, which link of the promise chain is broken.
- Can write a search ad that confirms the searcher's intent instead of trying to persuade them.
- Can judge whether a landing page delivers on its ad's promise within the first few seconds.
- Can fix a broken promise chain and explain why fixing only one link still disappoints.
Module 6 · 55m
Bidding and budgets Locked
What you'll be able to do
- Can choose a bid strategy from an account's own conversion volume, not from reputation.
- Can predict a realistic monthly spend from a daily budget, and explain when 'overspend' isn't a fault.
- Can decide which bid adjustments still matter under automated bidding, and which don't.
- Can recommend the right bid strategy for accounts with different data volumes and order values.
Module 7 · 54m
Tracking conversions Locked
What you'll be able to do
- Can define a conversion so that bidding optimises toward money instead of just activity.
- Can find and explain the common silent faults that make a tracking setup report the wrong number.
- Can explain why feeding lead quality back to the platform changes what it goes and buys.
- Can audit a conversion setup, find the faults, and present the corrected numbers honestly.
Module 8 · 54m
The optimisation loop Locked
What you'll be able to do
- Can match each optimisation task (bids, search terms, structure) to the review cadence it needs.
- Can judge how much data a keyword-level decision needs before treating it as evidence, not a guess.
- Can use impressions, click-through rate and conversion rate to identify which of four causes moved a CPA.
- Can read a campaign's daily numbers to separate two unrelated shocks and name their true causes.