Top 5 Free Certifications To Get You Started With Programmatic Advertising
If you are keen to learn about programmatic advertising and don’t have relevant experience in the field, the best way to start shaping your knowledge in the field is by taking up certification courses provided by the leading programmatic advertising companies.
In this post, I am going to list down the top 5 certification courses offered by various adtech companies in the market for free. The list consists of courses which will give you an overview of how the whole programmatic advertising ecosystem works. These certifications will allow you to understand how advertisers use programmatic advertising to get the right message in front of the right audience at the right time, how publishers with huge number of ad inventory use the supply side platforms of programmatic advertising to sell the ad space on the websites and lastly some certifications on how advertiser use ad server technologies in programmatic advertising.
1) Display & Video 360 Certification
Google’s Display & Video 360 is the Demand Side Platform through which advertisers can buy programmatic ad inventory. If you are totally new to programmatic advertising, you can start with this course, as it very well explains how the ad buying side works in a detailed manner with the help of examples.
2) The Trade Desk – The Edge Academy
The Trade Desk is another very well known programmatic buying platform in the market. The Trade Desk has introduced “The Edge Academy” which has in detailed course on programmatic advertising starting from the basic “Marketing Foundations” and “Data Driven Planning” course open for all and advanced courses such as the “Trading Essentials” which are only for the traders using the platform. The course content is very good and well explained in the form of videos featuring the Co-founder and CEO of The Trade Desk Jeffery Green and some more top management leaders at The Trade Desk. It is also one of the most trusted DSPs in the market and the content they have in the courses also explain why they are at the top with the likes of Google and Adobe.
3) Google Ad Manager
Google Ad Manager is the SSP offered by Google to various publishers. An SSP is a Supply Side platform through which various publishers can make their inventory available for advertiser to bid and buy. This course will help you in understanding how the sell side of the programmatic ecosystem works. The Google Ad Manager course is a comprehensive explanation of the supply side of programmatic advertising ecosystem. This course covers details such as building inventory and ad units, delivery ads using Google Ad Manager, controlling ad delivery on the publishers web assets such as websites, mobile apps etc, forecasting ad inventory in order to manage direct buy bookings and so on.
This is a very good course for publishers who are just getting started with using supply side platforms or those who want to build a career in the programmatic ad sales operations and management field.
4) Campaign Manager Certification
The Campaign manager is the Ad Server technology provided by Google. An Ad server is where all the creatives assets of the advertiser are hosted and managed. The Ad server manages campaign delivery, tagging, reporting & insights for advertisers. This course is a very good start for those who want to learn how trafficking of campaigns and tagging the campaigns is executed in order to be able to access the performance of various publishers the advertiser works with to optimize the overall digital advertising performance. Some of the things covered in this course are building you campaigns in campaign manager, controlling who sees the ads, configuring floodlight tags and gathering insights, tracking campaign performance and attribution modelling.
5) Introduction to Programmatic Advertising by Udemy
Last but not the least, the “Introduction to Programmatic Advertising” course provided by Udemy is one of the most comprehensive course you will find on the internet. The course covers all the aspects of programmatic such as DSPs, SSPs, Ad Exchanges, Ad Networks in details and explain how all these work in sync with each other which is the actual power of programmatic.
Starting from the evolution of digital advertising, the course will take you through to some advanced things like Brand Safety, Ad Fraud, Pros and Cons of various ad buying types, Programmatic Display vs Standard Display and some case studies on how programmatic advertising was successfully used by advertiser to accomplish their marketing objectives.
Though, the course is not free of cost, but comes at a mere cost of $9.99 till the 14th of May 2020 which is very much worth of the content of the course.
