How to Become an Online Advertising Pro in 30 Days

Whenever people are scrolling on their phones, be it just casual web browsing or checking their endless social media profiles, ads are present everywhere. Online advertising is a huge industry and has a lot of potential because of its massive reach and ever-increasing users. So becoming a pro at online advertising has huge benefits where it will also boost your online advertising career greatly.

What is Online Advertising?

Online advertising refers to all the promotional content that exists on online platforms such as social media, websites, and search engines. The creation and publishing of all such content is essentially an attempt to take your products directly to where the audience is – online.

Benefits of Online Advertising

The most powerful use of digital advertising is that you get to harness the potential of massive networking platforms, such as Facebook and Instagram. In addition to that, global reach, easy access to your target audience, fast results and cost-effectiveness are some of the broader advantages of online advertising.

To further emphasize the impact and benefits of online advertising, a few points have been listed below:

Every passing year, the number of searches on Google goes up by 10%
Among the billions of searches done by users every day on Google, 35% are for products
92% choose from the options which are listed on the first page of the Google search results

Types of Online Advertising Platforms

Online advertising platforms can be classified into the following categories:

Social Media

These have been known to give quick ROIs as the audience you want is already there. You won’t have to plan a content marketing strategy or spend time establishing yourself.

Once you have figured out which platform or combination of platforms will work best for your product, more than half your work is done. The main thing is to stick to the platforms which are not going away anytime soon and place your ads.

Facebook Ads: One of the best social media platforms for ad campaigns owing to the massive user base it has.

Instagram Ads: The platform is owned by Facebook, and after it is one of the most established social media platforms currently. Further, you can display your ads in a variety of ways. Both these platforms are excellent for target-specific ads.

Twitter Ads: Next to the first two, it is the biggest platform for ads. Not only can ads be in multiple forms but also the ‘promoted tweet’ feature will help in driving organic traffic for your business.

Some other examples of social media platforms for advertising are LinkedIn and Pinterest.

Search Engines

Taking the help of search engines such as Google to advertise your products is always a good idea. More than 3.25 billion searches are processed by Google every day and this traction can greatly help you in marketing.

Even though SEO is an important tool, search engine marketing works faster as compared to organic search. This is why many businesses go for search engine ads. As they have endless data on their users, search engines are going to be around for a long time and you can easily get access to your target audience.

Most popular search engine ads are Google Ads and Bing Ads.

Alternative PPC platforms

While Google and Bing ads display a large portion of any advertiser’s search engine and banner ad needs, you can also take the help of various other PPC platforms as well. Just to cover all your bases. Some of these platforms are:

AdRoll: One of the best ad networks out there which makes use of Google and Facebook to gauge who your audience is and then retargets them. Hence, giving them incentive to return.

Bidvertiser: Optimal choice for the creation of banner ads. Websites that register with Bidvertiser get a cut of the revenue generated by ads and the cost per click is also quite low.

Yahoo Gemini: It enables you to make use of another section of the online sector such as AOL, Tumblr and Huffpost. Ads are placed on both – search engines and website margins.

Some more examples of PPC platforms are BuySellAds, RevContent, Airnow, and AdMob.

Key Terms of Online Advertising

Some basic terms of online advertising are:

Impressions: Number of times an ad has been viewed.
Click-Through Rate (CTR): Number of times an ad has been clicked on and led to the user viewing the landing page.
Conversion: Number of times the click led to an action of any sort, be it a purchase, download, registration, or something else.
Call To Action (CTA): It lets the user know what needs to be done further to achieve a certain goal. This could be how to download or buy or even provide a quote for something.
Pay Per Click (PPC): The payment model which is based on the number of clicks an ad gets.

How Do You Become a Pro?

A few simple steps which will set you on the path of becoming an online advertising pro have been given below:

Learn the Basics of Advertising

You need to start from the start and develop on that as you progress in your career in online advertising. Learning the basics include having a working knowledge of advertising, PR, digital marketing, sales promotions, and other such topics.

Tune to the Best Resources

There is endless content out there which you can turn to learn online advertising better.

Enroll in courses on platforms such as Udemy, Skillshare and endless others which are teaching online advertising.
Websites such as Search Engine Journal, WebFx, Neil Patel and others have simplified the digital process and it can be implemented.
Many channels on Youtube are dedicated solely to digital marketing and you can easily gather the required knowledge from here. Some noteworthy digital marketing channels are Jordan Steen, Neil Patel, UpGrad and Simplilearn.

Take-up a Real Client

It can be through engagement on your blog, website, referral, or even any one of your social media profiles but work towards landing your first client. Once you do, make sure to do your best work and then ask them to refer your services to others.

Don’t focus on the money but make sure that your work is excellent. This is how you get the ball rolling.

Conceptualize the Campaign

When it comes to conceptualization, there are a few things that you need to keep in mind:

Clarity is vital when it comes to conceptualizing your ad campaign. Have a clear objective in your mind. This will help you in planning accordingly.
You need to know what exactly your customer should think when they come across your ad. How exactly the ‘main idea’ will influence your audience’s reaction and spur them to action.
There should be a uniqueness, a freshness to your campaign which automatically catches the eye of your audience and makes them click on the ad.
The goal that you set for yourself should be measurable. Even though not everything is measurable, numbers are clear indicators of whether you were able to achieve said goal or not.
Ensure that you are using means which will make tracking your customers possible, such as URLs, campaign-centric QR codes, phone numbers or forms. This will help you in determining where they are coming from or which channels are working best for you.

Build Landing Page(s)

Building landing pages is one of the most important steps to become an online advertising pro. It is vital to campaigns as landing pages play an important role in simplifying the process for the consumer. It will automatically direct them to the product/service they want and increase conversions.

Setup the Campaign

Some key things that need to be kept in mind when setting up a campaign are:

Define your goals and target audience.
Carefully decide what you wish to promote.
Research how to get the point across to your audience effectively.
Maintain a budget for your campaign.
Choose the outlets you’ll be using to advertise your products.

Setting up a campaign also includes searching the required keywords, determining what ads you’ll be using and how exactly the content is going to be placed on the various platforms. You need to put your tactical, analytical, and research skills to use.

Run the Campaign

When it comes to running a campaign, make sure that:

Your target audience should be clear in your mind since the whole campaign hinges on that. Do your research and know which platform you’ll use, and how you are going to use it.
Work around your budget and make the optimal use of whatever the amount is. For example, if you are on a budget and confused between Twitter and LinkedIn, you could opt for Twitter since its cost per clicks is much lower in comparison.

Analyze the Results

To analyze your ad’s performance, there are a number of factors that you can track and get to know where exactly you’re going wrong:

Your quality score is partly dependent on your click-through rate. So keep track of it.
Monitor your conversions and cost data.
Observe which ads are working the most, number of impressions per ad, cost being pushed to every ad, how are they ranking and so on.

Optimize the Campaign

Before optimization, make sure that you have a clear idea of what you’re expecting from your campaigns. Some of the ways in which optimization can be done are:

If you’re using multiple platforms at once, you need to determine which channels and campaigns are working out the best for you. Then you allocate your budget accordingly.
Analyze whether your audience’s search queries are being met from the keywords you’re using and remove those which aren’t faring well.
How effectively negative keywords are assisting you in controlling the wastage of money on irrelevant searches. (Negative keywords are used when you don’t want your ad to be displayed for a particular query as it is not relevant to your work.)
Work on your landing pages as they’re important for closing the deal and getting conversions.
Ensure that your webpages are mobile-friendly.
Gather how different demographics are responding to your campaign and then bid accordingly.

Run Experiments

Running experiments can give you knowledge on how everything works which lets you become a pro at online advertising. So run experiments before making any changes to your content as it will help you in determining whether it will have a positive impact on your campaign or not.

You need to keep working on new things and conducting experiments because you get to know which one works better for you and results in better ROIs.

Repeat

Once you’re done with the whole online advertising cycle, from conception to strategy, creation, and implementation, go again. After all, practice makes perfect. You learn something new each time you run a campaign.

Try the Same on a Different Advertising Platform

Now that you have a good idea of how one platform functions, try running a campaign on another platform. Make the required changes to optimize the content for the new platform, and then monitor your progress.

Conclusion

A lot can happen in 30 days and if you follow the steps given above properly, you can become an online advertising pro and it will also boost your online advertising career greatly. In the digital field, you are learning something new each day and to learn something new every day, you need to make sure that your foundation is solid. Therefore, don’t shy away from working extra hard in the beginning since it will benefit you greatly in the long run.