Paid search and display advertising

Paid search, often called PPC after its pay-per-click billing, places text ads on a results page in response to the words someone typed. Display advertising places visual ads on websites and apps in front of audiences chosen by interest, behaviour or earlier visits. Video and shopping ads extend the same machinery to YouTube and to product listings drawn from a feed. Google sets most of the vocabulary because Google Ads runs the largest of these auctions, but Microsoft Advertising, Amazon and the social networks sell space by closely related rules.

The auction does not simply go to the highest bidder. Google weighs each bid against the expected click-through rate, the relevance of the ad and the quality of the landing page, which is why a well-built account can pay less per click than a wealthier rival. Keywords carry match types that set how loosely a query may match them, and negative keywords exclude searches you never want to pay for. Bidding has moved largely to automation: strategies such as target cost per acquisition or target return on ad spend let Google's systems set each bid, and campaign types such as Performance Max hand over placement as well. DMI's paid search module and Google's own exams now teach these automated forms as the default.

What the Skillshop exams cover

• Search: building, bidding on and refining campaigns on the results page; the credential most agency job adverts have in mind.
• Display: audiences, creative for each stage of the funnel, and reaching people who were not searching at all.
• Video: YouTube campaigns organised by whether they aim at awareness, consideration or action.
• Shopping: retail ads driven by the product feed and by Merchant Center policies.
• Measurement: conversion tracking, attribution and the experiments that show what the spend caused. Unlike the other four, it does not count toward Google's agency Partner badge.

Where budgets leak

The first costly mistake is switching on automated bidding before conversion tracking works. The system then optimises for whatever it can observe, frequently cheap clicks or a form counted twice, and spends confidently in the wrong direction. The second is loose matching with no negative keyword list, which buys searches that share one word with the product and nothing else. The third is judging success by the platform's own report, which credits the ads with conversions they may not have caused; people searching for your brand name would often have found you anyway. Each is a measurement failure before it is an advertising one, which is why paid media managers work closely with marketing analytics and with landing page optimisation. The Skillshop exams are free, unproctored and lapse after a year, so treat a pass as proof that you know the interface and its recommended settings, not that you can run an account profitably.