Learn the aspects of programmatic advertising, ad fraud, and the future of digital marketing in this free online course.

Digital Advertising and Marketing 201 is a free online course that has been specially prepared to take you through widely accepted and proven concepts in the digital marketing and advertising world. The world is surrounded by digital media and there are many different channels that businesses use to entice customers into buying their products and services. One key channel is advertising. In a world where mobile is king, programmatic ad buying is a crucial component of the modern advertising strategy. Programmatic advertising offers many benefits beyond faster reporting times and real-time optimization. This digital marketing course gives a detailed explanation of programmatic advertising, real-time bidding (RTB), how it works as well as why it is changing the digital marketing and advertising world. It specifies the advantages of programmatic advertising over the traditional form of advertising where media inventory is bought and sold manually. It compares the traditional waterfall form of advertising using the direct/request for proposal (RFP) process. In the traditional form, only one network at a time addresses the impression, making the process less competitive. 

If you want to learn how header-bidding works, how publishers increase revenue from their ad inventory and why it's changing the digital marketing/advertising world, then this online marketing certificate is a great starting point. Statistics have shown that half of all time spent on digital devices is spent within apps and these apps help publishers build direct connections with their most loyal users and control those users’ experiences. You will learn about the mobile standard development kit (SDK), mobile trends, and especially the services offered by verification companies. The presence of bots and fraudulent traffic cannot be underestimated and there are a bunch of ways in which bots make additional money for sites. With the presence of bots and fraudulent traffic, the following sections of content discusses the best way to measure how your users use your website through heatmaps. A heatmap shows you how visitors interact with your website and creating your own ads.txt file gives you more control over who's allowed to sell ads on your site and helps prevent counterfeit inventory from being presented to advertisers - this and more is covered in this part of your digital marketing training. Data is the next important topic and you will explore concepts such as contextual data, location data, demographic data as well as the laws surrounding the collection of these data types for advertisers. It also comprehensively covers data management platforms (DMP) and user device tracking. Two tools that you will get familiar with are Google's EBDA (exchange bidding dynamic allocation) and Amazon’s TAM (transport ad marketplace) which are both said to be the future of digital advertising, and are aimed at solving header bidding challenges. Although for Amazon, it is more for getting into the advertising world since Amazon AWS focuses almost solely on hosting. 

The digital marketing and advertising world is a huge money-making platform when used correctly. However, it can also be a huge loss-making market when used for the right reason but in the wrong form. Anyone in the broader marketing space, digital and online marketing or someone hoping to make a career change, will gain great value from the in-depth content covered in this marketing course.