Pay-Per-Click Advertising - San Francisco

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising refers to the portion of Search Engine Marketing (SEM) that involves designing and building relevant ad campaigns which can be displayed on internet search engines, based on breadth & accuracy of terms, efficiency of cost-per click bidding and appropriate optimization of the landing page. Through effective PPC management, advertisers can achieve higher ranking on the search results page of major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN, thus lowering their overall costs associated with the increased relevant traffic being driven to their site. More relevant search results to the consumer translate to increased revenue opportunities for the advertiser. Hence, effective PPC management can benefit an organization greatly, while also helping consumers in their quest to navigate the web effectively.

PPC advertising is an evolving industry, so this course will focus on teaching the basics of starting an account with the search engines, creating campaigns, monitoring the effectiveness of those campaigns and subsequently customizing those campaigns to fit the needs of a specific product/service. Testing and optimization strategies will be covered in class to prepare students for further campaign growth.

This class is taught by a full-time PPC/SEM professional. Class topics include:

Data Analysis and Optimization

Probably, the most important part of managing a successful PPC campaign is monitoring cost/revenue data and optimizing accordingly. In this session we will discuss the many options available to monitor the performance of the test campaigns, including but not limited to Google Analytics, Omniture, VisiStat and Core Metrics. These four represent the more widely marketed available web analytic tools.

Geo-targeted Campaigns

Though geo-targeting has traditionally been the focus of local businesses attempting to gain local web traffic, more and more organizations are starting to realize the benefit of targeted and more economically feasible niche-markets on the web. In this session we will demonstrate the ease with which a geo-targeted campaign can be established with the larger search engines and the cost-savings associated with managing costs-per click in different markets.

Google AdSense and Contextual Advertising

Contextual advertising is the placement of your ads on high-traffic web sites other than search engines. Though expansive and potentially very lucrative, contextual advertising has many pitfalls that the novice PPC advertiser should take into consideration. Along with detailing the setup and launch of a “content campaign”, this class will present the power of ‘negative matching’ URLs and keywords within the networks of the respective search engines to maximize effectiveness and minimize financial and legal risk.

Second-Tier Search Engines

In the last session, we will cover the many untapped markets available within the Second-Tier Search Engines. These include Ask, FindWhat, Looksmart, E-Spotting, Enhance, Kanoodle, Lycos, ePilot, Search 123 and others. Many of these smaller engines have withstood the test of time, and others are not longer available for active PPC management, however the purpose of this class is to demonstrate the potential revenue opportunity present within markets outside of the big three search engines. We will perform some keyword and bid landscape comparisons to demonstrate this point, as well as see how current market-share is distributed outside of the major search engines.

Throughout the course, we will expose students to useful online resources that PPC experts utilize for the purposes of generating keyword lists and managing their existing campaigns. A glossary of these resources will be handed out for future reference and serves as a toolkit for students’ future PPC campaigns.