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Make AdWords pay you back | The ULTIMATE AdWords Online Marketing Campaign Optimization Guide

2015-06-13T22:47:00.000+05:30

Hello Everyone!

To start with, I obviously assume you followed our previous set of articles on Google AdWords. If you didn't, be sure to check them out HERE.

And for those who have followed, this article will be a culmination of all those individual creations. The tiny bits and pieces of optimisations all wrapped up nicely in this singular article that will aim to provide you with the "last but definitely not the least" factor in all the comprehensive study we have done on Google AdWords. But for now, lets start!

Now that you know how to run the mill, let's go over how to use the data that our metrics provide to improve our performance. You'll also want to optimize your campaign based on your business goal, a few of which we'll go over below.

Improving your Return on Investment

In general, you'll want to focus on improving your conversion potential through attracting the right customers to your business. Here are some basic strategies and specific tips about how to optimize your keywords, ad text, bids and budget.

Basic ways to improve your ROI

If you find that a large percentage of visitors have clicked your ad but haven't made a purchase or performed an action you'd like them to take, the following steps may help you increase your conversions and ROI:

Use a landing page that's most relevant to your ad: When customers click your ad, they expect to see a webpage highlighting the exact product, deal, or information described in your ad. If they don't find what's promised as soon as they arrive, they're more likely to leave your site without making a purchase or signing up for your service. Be sure that any promotions and discounts mentioned in your ad text are visible on your landing page.
Use highly relevant keywords and ad text: If you use general keywords and ad text, a customer may arrive at your site expecting to find something that you don't offer. Highly targeted keywords and ad text help ensure that your ads show only on searches relevant to your product or service.
Adjust your bids: The bottom line for any keyword is how much value it generates compared to its cost. For keywords that show a profit, increase the bid to increase exposure and generate more traffic. For keywords that aren't profitable, decrease the bids to lower your costs or even consider removing those keywords.
Add successful sites as placements: For campaigns running on the Display Network, you can use the Placements tab to see all of the web pages, apps, and videos where your ads appeared. If you find that your ad performs particularly well on a given website, try adding that website as a managed placement.

Keyword Tips

Use negative keywords to eliminate unwanted clicks: You can use negative keywords to filter out searches for different products or services, searches that aren't relevant to your business, or people who aren't likely to make a purchase.
Remove duplicate keywords: Google shows only one ad per advertiser on a particular keyword, so there's no need to include the same keywords in different ad groups or campaigns. Since the better performing keyword will trigger your ad more often, remove the duplicate that performs worse. Keep in mind that it's okay to include duplicate keywords for campaigns targeting different geographic regions.
Optimize low-performing keywords: It's essential to regularly review your keywords to ensure that they're all performing well and providing you with a good ROI. If a keyword is not directly related to your business, website, and ad text, it'll trigger impressions and clicks that are not likely to convert into actions you care about like purchases or signups. Here are some key measurements to look for to identify whether a keyword is performing well or not:

Keyword diagnosis: Performing a keyword diagnosis will give you a detailed view of each keyword's Quality Score along with tips for improvement. To diagnose your keywords, hover over the speech bubble icon next to the status for any keyword in the "Keywords" tab. You'll see a help bubble appear with information.
First page bids: Check your keywords' estimated first page bids, which is the approximate cost-per-click (CPC) bid needed for your ad to reach the first page of Google search results when a search query exactly matches your keyword. You can use this estimate, which is based on the Quality Score and current advertiser competition for that keyword, to get greater insight when planning your bidding strategy.

Ad text tips

Understand the buying cycle: To maximize your ROI, try to understand what stage within the buying cycle a customer might be in: the awareness stage, the research and comparison stage, or the buying stage.

Use keywords to separate the serious buyers from the online equivalent of window shoppers.For example, customers searching with terms like "reviews" or "ratings" are probably still researching the product and might be less likely to make a purchase at that stage. By understanding the buying cycle for your specific product or service, you can filter out such customers with negative keywords or direct these customers to more research-friendly parts of your site.
Ad text can also help you reach customers in the right stage. The call-to-action should reflect the action that you consider a conversion, whether that's a sign-up, a request for more information, or an actual sale. Conversion-related call-to-actions will set the right expectation for customers in various stages of the buying cycle.

Enhance your ad with extensions: Ad extensions tend to improve the clickthrough rate (CTR) of your ads. Depending on the products or services that your business offers, you might consider using different ad extensions.
For example, sitelink extensions allow you to add links to your website and help people find what they're looking for, call extensions let people click a button to give you a phone call, and location extensions to help people nearby find our nearest storefront.

Bid and budget tips

Experiment with bids and budgets to see what works: Test different bid amounts and budgets and measure how effective the change is, test bids for profitability and ROI, and test budgets for ad exposure. We suggest adjusting amounts in small increments to allow your keywords to accrue conversion statistics and performance data with the new settings. Allow at least a few days between changes so you'll have enough performance data to make an informed decision.
Allocate your budget according to performance: An important aspect of budgeting is making sure you have appropriate budgets for each campaign. For keywords that are profitable, you probably want to show them all the time. To do this, the campaign's budget needs to be sufficiently high so the campaign isn't limited by budget. If you'd like certain keywords to receive maximum traffic, make sure they're in campaigns whose daily spend isn't reaching or exceeding its daily budget consistently. Try to prioritize your products or services and then match budgets to each campaign based on priority. If your overall advertising budget is limited, find budget from campaigns that have unused budget or that don't convert well, then reallocate that budget to high performing campaigns that are limited by budget.
Adjust your keyword bids: With conversion data, you'll better understand how profitable your keywords are with their current bids and can identify which keywords could be more successful with adjusted bids.

For keywords that show a profit (such as having high conversion rate and low costs), you might try increasing their maximum cost-per-click (CPC) bids. While costs may increase, your ad position could rise and provide more ad exposure, potentially increasing your conversion rate and ROI. In other cases, it may make sense to lower the bid for a keyword even if the keyword is profitable. By lowering the bid, you'll lower the average amount paid, which may increase the profit margin for that keyword.
For keywords that aren't profitable (such as having a low conversion rate and high costs), you might try decreasing their bids to lower your costs. A lower bid is likely to decrease the keyword's average position, the number of impressions and clicks it receives, and as a result, the cost it incurs. Not only can this strategy improve your ROI on low-performing keywords, but in some cases, it can also free up part of your budget so you can invest in more valuable keywords.

Use ad scheduling to automatically change your bids throughout the day: Ad scheduling includes an advanced setting which lets you adjust the pricing for your ads during certain time periods. Use the bid adjustment feature of ad scheduling to automatically take these actions:

Increase your CPC bids by a certain percentage on days or times of day that are most profitable for you.For example, if you find that your ads get the best results before noon, you can set your bids higher during that timeframe to try and get more impressions and clicks.
Decrease your CPC bids on days or times of day when appearing in a high position doesn't result in profitable clicks.

Increasing your brand awareness on the Display Network

With a brand-engagement campaign, you want to build awareness of and positive associations with your company and its products and services. Customers can interact with your brand in a variety of ways, including watching videos, playing games, spending time on your website, or communicating with other customers.

There are some tips for using targeting, rich-media ad formats, and Cost-per-Thousand impressions (CPM) bidding.

Targeting options

You can pick and choose placements, or specific websites or sections of sites within the Display Network on which you can run your campaign. You can select sites based on specific topics or the target audience that you're trying to reach, or you can choose any site that meets your branding criteria. You might also want to add other targeting options, such as age, gender, or interest categories, to reach as many people as possible without significantly limiting your reach.

Ad formats

Since a main goal of a brand-engagement campaign can be to interact with your target audience, we suggest using rich-media ad formats. With the Display Network, you can reach customers using text ads, but you can also can try a range of more visual formats, like static images, flash animation, and video.
For example, if you've produced a video ad that you're using on your local TV channel, consider uploading it to YouTube. You can set up a free YouTube user channel and customize its design to reflect your brand.

Bidding strategy

With brand-engagement campaigns, you want to maximize your brand's exposure on relevant sites. CPM bidding is typically a good fit for a campaign like this, since you can set your bids directly from the performance goals you've set for your campaign.

And yes, finally, with this we reach the end of our Google AdWords Fundamentals study guide! You have gone through everything you need to ace that exam! So just get yourself together and get that certification NOW! Best of luck!

PS. The guide can always be read again HERE. :)

Performance Metrics You Need to Watch for in Google AdWords

2015-06-13T20:20:00.000+05:30

Welcome back everyone!

To use AdWords more effectively, it's important to understand the business goals you're trying to achieve and the data that's most relevant to those goals. Hence below we'll go over different metrics to focus on based on your goal.

Metrics for Measuring Website Traffic

If your main advertising goal is to drive traffic to your website, try focusing on increasing your clicks and clickthrough rate (CTR). You'll want to start by creating great ad text and choosing strong keywords so your ads are relevant and compelling to your customers.

What to Measure

Here are some important things you can measure to help you track and improve a campaign focused on traffic:

Clicks and clickthrough rate (CTR): These two metrics help you understand how many people found your ad appealing enough to actually click on it and visit your website. You can use your CTR to gauge how closely your ad matches your keywords and other targeting settings.
Keywords: You'll want to monitor your keyword performance with the following strategies:

Pause or remove words or phrases that aren't working well for you and add new ones. You can use columns and segments to review your keywords' clicks, CTR, Quality Score, and more.
Use keyword match types to control who sees your ads. With some match types, you'll get more ad impressions, clicks, and conversions and with others you'll get fewer impressions and more narrow targeting.
Run a keyword diagnosis to get more information about your keywords' Quality Scores and whether they're triggering your ads.

Search terms: Use the Search terms report to review the list of searches that have triggered your ad, and identify the relevant terms that are driving traffic to your website and add them as new keywords. You'll also want to add terms that are irrelevant to your business as negative keywords so they won't trigger your ads.

Metrics for Measuring Conversions

To measure your results, you'll need to make sure that you're measuring conversions. Once you set up conversion tracking, here are some of the important statistics that can help you measure whether your campaign is successful:

Metric Type	Definition	Why It's Useful
Conversions	The total number of all conversions made within your chosen conversion window after an AdWords click.	See if your campaign is generating results for you.
Converted Clicks	The tally of every AdWords click that resulted in one or more conversions within your chosen conversion window.	Gauge how many clicks are leading to valuable actions for you.
Conversion Rate	The percentage of clicks that have led to conversions.	Measure how often a click leads to a conversion, on average.
Cost-per-Conversion	Your total cost divided by your total conversions.	See how much, on average, each of your conversions cost.

To see the above statistics and other conversion data, you can add conversion-related columns to any of the statistics tables in your account.

Metrics for Measuring Sales and Investment

Measuring Return on Investment (ROI)

Whether you're using AdWords to increase conversions such as sales, leads, downloads, you'll want to measure your return on investment (ROI) — the ratio of your net profit to your costs.

Why calculate your ROI? You'll learn how much money you've made by advertising with AdWords and can use that information to help you decide how to spend your budget.
For example, if a certain campaign is generating a higher ROI compared to others, you can apply more of your budget to the successful campaign and less on the ones that aren't performing as well.

The exact method you use to calculate your ROI depends on your goals, but here's one way to define it:

Here's how to measure your ROI based on your business goal:

Conversions: Once you've started to measure conversions, customer actions that you believe are valuable, you can evaluate your ROI. You can use conversion tracking or Google Analytics to determine the profitability of a keyword or ad, and track conversion rates and Cost-per-Conversions. Keep in mind that the value of each conversion should be greater than the amount you spend to get that conversion.
Sales: If your business is web-based sales, you'll need the revenue made from AdWords advertising (this is the conversion value that you set), costs related to your products sold, and your AdWords costs.
You'll want to calculate your net profit using the formula given below.
Page views, leads, and more: If you're interested in calculating the ROI for a page view, lead, or other goal, you'll use a different formula.
First, you'll want to estimate the value of the action that you'd like to measure. To calculate your ROI, you can use the formula below:

You can also estimate values for your leads and page views using a Cost-per-Acquisition (CPA) measurement. Using CPA allows you to focus primarily on how your advertising costs compare to the number of acquisitions those costs deliver. Using the above example again, your campaign may cost US$25000, resulting in 500 sales. So your CPA for that campaign is US$50. Here's the formula:

Note that your CPA should not exceed the profit you made from each acquisition.

Metrics for Measuring Return on Ad Spend

Similar to return on investment, you can measure your Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) to see how much revenue you're generating for each dollar spent on your campaigns. Measuring your return on ad spend can give you insight into how your campaigns are performing and optimize them based on your revenue.

If you're interested in calculating your ROAS, you'll need to know the amount of revenue generated by your campaigns and your advertising costs. Here's the formula:

If you use conversion tracking and have set up conversion values, consider using the target return on ad spend (ROAS) flexible bidding strategy I previously mentioned. This bidding strategy can help you to maximize your conversion value, while trying to achieve an average return on ad spend equal to your target (which you'll know if you measure and monitor your ROAS).

Metrics for Measuring Brand Awareness

If your main goal is to raise awareness and visibility of your product, service, or cause, you'll first want to determine whether your main goal is to increase traffic to your website or encourage customers to interact with your brand.

Once you establish the goals of your branding campaign, you can then measure success by monitoring impressions, conversions, and other statistics.

Here are some important metrics that can show you whether your campaign is successful:

Impressions: Impressions show you how often your ad is shown on a search result page or other site on the Google Network. Impressions can be especially important in branding campaigns because they represent how many customers actually laid eyes on your ad.
Customer engagement: You can use clickthrough rate (CTR) to measure customer engagement for Search Network ads. On the Display Network, however, customers on sites are browsing through information, not searching with keywords, so CTR isn't as helpful. You may want to consider other measurements like conversions for Display Network ads.
Conversions: Conversions can help you see whether your ads are driving branding-related visitor behavior you think is valuable, such as sign-ups or page views.
Reach and frequency: Reach is the number of visitors exposed to an ad. Increased reach means that an ad is exposed to more potential customers, which may lead to increased awareness. Frequency is the average number of times a visitor was exposed to an ad over a period of time.

Alright then, with this we finish our this lesson on these important metrics. In our next final lesson we will be enumerating the final tips that would help season you your AdWords campaign. So no wonder, it'd be the most important one of the whole series. With this, I take leave. Goodbye and take care :)

The 3 Tools You Must Use to Measure your Google AdWords Campaign Performance

2015-06-11T19:38:00.000+05:30

Hello Everyone!

As you get your campaign up and running, you'll want to consider several different tools that can help you measure and optimize your ad performance. Below we'll go over a few tools — Conversion Tracking, Google Analytics, and Campaign Experiments — that you can use to start measuring your Google AdWords online marketing campaign performance.

Conversion Tracking

Basic statistics like clicks, impressions, and clickthrough rate can tell you how well your ads attract visitors to your site. But by measuring conversions, you can see how many of these visitors become your customers.

Conversion tracking is the simplest way to measure your conversions. It's a free tool that can measure what happens after a customer clicks on your ads — for example, whether they purchased your product, signed up for your newsletter, or filled out a contact form.

By tracking these actions, known as "conversions," you can identify which ads, keywords and campaigns bring you business or see how customers interact with your ads across devices. This helps you invest more wisely in the best ones and, ultimately, boost your return on investment.

How it works

To use conversion tracking, you'll need to put a small snippet of HTML and JavaScript code on the page your customers see after they've completed a conversion on your site. When a customer clicks your ad and reaches the page with your conversion code, AdWords records a successful conversion for you.

With conversion tracking, you have the flexibility to count all conversions that happen after a click (a good choice if you'd like to track and improve your sales), or only unique conversions that happen after a click (a good choice if you're interested in whether a certain kind of lead was generated).

You can also assign values to your conversions — the same value to all conversion actions of a certain type or different values. Conversion values help you track and optimize your campaign's return on investment, which we'll go over in more detail later.

Once you set up conversion tracking, you'll have access to set of reports, called Search Funnels, that show you the funnels through which your customers complete a conversion. For example, you'll be able to see all the clicks leading up to a conversion —except for the last click—for each keyword or the ads that showed but weren't clicked by a customer as they searched.

For more understanding, see the video below which explains how you can track your Return on Investment (ROI, an Online Marketing metric that we will learn in the next lesson) with Conversion Tracking.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free Google product that provides in-depth reporting on how people use your website. It shows you how people found your site and how they explored it, giving you ideas for how to optimize your website.

You can also link Google Analytics and your AdWords account to get an entire view of your customers' behavior, from when they click your ad or see it to what they do on your site. This information can shed light on how much of your website traffic or sales comes from AdWords, in turn helping you improve your ads and website.

Here are some of the benefits of linking Google Analytics and AdWords:

Import Analytics goals and Ecommerce transactions directly into your AdWords account.
Import valuable Analytics metrics — such as bounce rate, percentage of new sessions, and pages/session — into your AdWords account.
Take advantage of enhanced remarketing capabilities.
Get richer data in the Analytics multi-channel funnels reports.
Use your Analytics data to enhance your AdWords experience.

Campaign experiments

AdWords Campaign Experiments allow you to test changes to your account — such as your keywords, bids, ad groups, or placements — on a portion of the auctions that your ads participate in.

How It Works

When you create an experiment, you decide what sort of change you want to test. For example, you could test adding new keywords, raising a bid, trying new ads, or using different placements. Then, you decide what percentage of your auctions should have this experimental change.

Keep in mind that AdWords Campaign Experiments are random-auction, meaning that every time a user conducts a search on google.com or on a search partner website, or a new user loads a webpage on our Content partners, we'll randomly decide to make either your control or experimental split active for the auction (based on the percentage you set within experiment settings).

After the experiment has been running for a short while, you can view the results in the same table you use to view performance for your campaigns and ads. These tables will also tell you if your experimental changes are performing significantly better or worse than the ads without changes.

While your experiment goal will depend on your business, some common goals for advertisers include:

Increasing conversions
Increasing clicks or impressions
Improving return on investment
Improving ad text

With this we end our this lesson. Hope you all keep in mind while planning your next campaign in mind. In the next lesson we will deal with some metric that need to be kept in mind while evaluating performance and goal completion in online marketing. Till then Goodbye and take care! :)

How to Evaluate your Online Marketing Performance in Google AdWords?

2015-06-09T18:55:00.000+05:30

Hello everyone!

Now that you've learnt everything related to campaign/ad creation, it's time to measure your ad performance! You can analyze basic account, campaign, and ad group information using different data and reports available in AdWords. There are also advanced reports that go beyond the number of clicks or impressions you're getting, allowing you to see the impact AdWords has on your business.

See the video below to make yourself at ease.

Customize your data

You'll want to think about your AdWords goals and decide which statistics are most important for measuring progress toward those goals. Then, you can customize the data in your statistics table to see how your campaigns, ad groups, ads and keywords are performing. Customizing your data to see only what interests you can make managing your campaigns faster and easier, too.

There are several ways that you can customize your data — adjusting date ranges, columns, segments, filters, and graphs. But let's take a closer look at segments as a way to analyze and improve your performance.

Segments allow you to split your data into rows based on the information that matters to you most, such as periods of time, click type, or device. There are multiple segments that you can use and your choices vary depending on which tab of your AdWords account you're viewing.

When using segments, you'll want to prepare your data by choosing the account level at which you want to look at your data (such as a campaign or ad group) and a date range that's long enough to give you meaningful data.

Here are some insights you can gain about your data with segments:

Click type: See which clicks resulted in visits to your website, or clicks on your phone number when your ad is shown on a mobile device (also called click-to-call).
Device: Compare performance across devices: computers, mobile devices with full browsers, and tablets with fulls browsers. This can help you figure out whether you're getting a better return on investment from ads showing on different types of devices.
Top vs. Other: Find out where your ad appeared on Google's search results pages and search partners' pages. Segmenting your data by "Top vs. Other" can help you optimize your search campaigns to serve your ads on the parts of the page that perform best for you.
Time: Isolate changes in your performance using the time segment options (day, week, or day of week, month, quarter, or year). If you segment your data by day, for example, you'll be able to identify differences in ad performance on different days of the week and make changes to your campaign accordingly.

Since there are a variety of segments that you can choose from, give each a try to see which segments give you meaningful insights into your ad performance.

Dimensions Tab

You can use the Dimensions tab to look at data across your entire account, an individual campaign, or an ad group. Use the different dimensions, such as different times of the day or days of the week, to gain more insight into your ad performance and help you identify opportunities for optimization.

Here are a few ways to use the Dimensions tab to filter your data:

Time: Use the Time view to see how ads in your ad group performed during a specific time period. For example, you might want to track an ad’s performance on an hourly basis to see how well it's performing at different times throughout the day. Then you can use these insights to schedule your ads for the hours when they're most likely to receive the greatest number of impressions and clicks.
Geography: Another useful view is the Geographic and User locations views. You can see individual regions where your clicks came from and use the information to refine your location targeting.
Landing page: The Destination URL view lets you see what page your customers are going to on your website when they click your ads. Make sure that the destination URL you use for each ad directs customers to the most relevant page within your website. Ideally, that webpage will be dedicated to the specific product or service that's highlighted in your ad.

Search terms report

The Search terms report allows you to see the terms people were searching for when your ad was shown. You can also see the performance metrics for those searches.

Here are some ways you can use your search terms data to optimize your keywords and ads:

New keywords: Add well-performing search terms to your ad group as keywords. You'll want to consider adjusting your bids and ad text as well, to help make sure you capture the traffic that these search terms are already receiving.
Negative keywords: If there are search terms that aren't performing well or helping you meet your goals, add them as negative keywords. This will prevent your ad from showing to people who are looking for something you don't sell, helping you increase your profitability and better controlling the flow of traffic to your account.
Match types: Find the correct match type (broad, phrase, exact) for existing keywords. The "Match type" column shows how closely the search terms that triggered your ads are related to the actual keywords in your account. You can use this information to refine the match types for your keywords to show your ads to the right customers.
Ad text: Get a better understanding of what potential customers were looking for or interested in when they searched for terms that include your keywords. That way, you can make your ad text more relevant to what people are looking for.

Top movers report

The top movers report lets you see which campaigns have the biggest changes (increases or decreases) in clicks, costs, and conversions, and shows you some possible causes for those changes. The report compares performance for two consecutive time periods of equal length, and find the campaigns and ad groups that experienced the largest change between the two periods.

You can use the report to identify which campaign and ad groups you need to take action on, and see the impact of changes that have been made to your account. The report can also help you notice whether your overall account metrics have moved in unexpected way — if your costs go up or clicks go down, you'll want to know why. And even if your overall performance metrics don't appear to be changing too much, you can regularly review the report to identify changes that might have been overlooked.

Here are a few things to keep in mind about the data:

Top movers are the campaigns and ad groups (up to 10) that saw the largest change up or down as measured by the size of the change — not the percentage change.
Changes will only be attributed once. For example, if a campaign has only one ad group, and that ad group sees a huge increase in clicks, the campaign will, too. However, only the ad group will show in the report as a top mover.

Paid & organic report

With the paid & organic report, you can see how often pages from your website are showing in Google search results, and which queries triggered those results to show on the search results page. Keep in mind that in order to use the paid & organic report, you'll need to have a Webmaster Tools account for your website, and you'll need to link that Webmaster Tools account to your AdWords account.

This information helps you understand how paid and organic search work together to help you reach people searching online, identify new, potentially valuable keywords, and gain an overall view of how your online presence is performing overall in terms of attracting views and clicks.

Below are a few uses for the paid & organic report.

Discover additional keywords

Use the report to look for queries where you only appear in organic search with no associated ads.

Identify queries with a low number of paid impressions by adding a filter for "ad impressions = 0" or "ad impressions < X" (if you have multiple accounts, all organic search data will be imported in each account).
Downloading a paid & organic report in a My Client Center (MCC) manager account will allow you to find duplicate organic queries and identify queries that have no paid impressions across any accounts.
Add an additional filter to identify queries containing specific text, like your brand name or your most important products and services.

Optimize your presence on high-value queries

Improve your presence in paid results and monitor your high value queries for organic results.

Identify relevant queries for your business that have low organic traffic volume and target these queries to strengthen your paid search presence.
Tailor your ad text and use ad extensions to show a more useful, prominent, and differentiated message from your organic listings.

Measure changes holistically

Monitor the impact of changes to your website, bids, budgets, or keywords across paid, organic, and combined traffic.

See how changing your keyword bids increases or decreases overall combined clicks for related queries, and work to cost-effectively increase your overall traffic for your most important queries.
Understand how ads may impact your combined performance for certain queries by comparing the "organic only" and "both shown" segments for the same query. See how your clicks/query differ when you have both types of listings on the page, compared to when you just have one or the other.

Auction insights

Use the Auction insights report to compare your performance with other advertisers who are participating in the same auctions that you are. With the Auction insights report, you can see how often your ads rank higher in search results than those of other advertisers, and how your share of total possible impressions compares with theirs.

You can use the information in the Auction insights report to help you make strategic decisions about bids, budgets, and keyword choices by showing you where you are succeeding and where you may be missing opportunities for improved performance. You'll also want to consider using the report to identify significant competitors in the auction, or benchmark your performance against other competitors.

And with this we can call an end to this lesson. Meet you in the next one where we would discuss about the tools you can use to measure your and your online marketing campaign performance. Goodbye and take care :)

Tools you must use to build your AdWords Online Marketing Campaign

2015-06-06T17:19:00.000+05:30

Hello once again everyone! As we have already seen all the campaign and ad creation tips in the previous lessons, I'll be focusing on some tools that'll greatly help you make more effective and targeted campaigns. Hence lets get started!

AdWords offers several tools to help you build your campaigns and achieve your advertising goals, like the Keyword Planner and Display Planner.

You can use Keyword Planner to build your Search Network campaigns, getting keyword and ad groups ideas along with search traffic estimates. Or, you can use the Display Planner to plan your Display Network campaigns, getting targeting ideas along with impression estimates. Both tools allow you to add your plan to new campaigns or existing ones, or download your plan to share with clients and colleagues.

Let's look at how you can use Keyword Planner and Display Planner to build better campaigns.

Keyword Planner

Think of Keyword Planner like a workshop for building your Search Network campaigns. If you're just getting started, you might use Keyword Planner to help you set up a well-structured campaign. You can also use Keyword Planner to help you develop a campaign around an advertising goal.
For example, if you want to drive sales, you could use Keyword Planner to get additional keyword ideas based on your existing, well performing keywords.

Here are some of the benefits of Keyword Planner:

Research keywords: You can get keyword ideas based on terms that are relevant to your product or service, your landing page, or different product categories. The tool will automatically organize related keyword ideas into ad groups. You can also multiply two or more list of keywords, saving the time of manually combining keywords.
Get historical statistics and traffic estimates: Keyword Planner will show you statistics, like keyword search volumes, to help you decide which keywords to use for your campaign. You can also get traffic estimates, like estimated clicks, for a given bid and budget to get an idea of which bids and budgets to set.

Display Planner

Like Keyword Planner, Display Planner is a free AdWords tool that you can use to plan your Display Network campaigns. If you're using Display Planner to develop a new campaign, you'll want to think about a few basic details, like your customers' interests or your landing page. You can also use Display Planner to expand the reach of your existing campaigns, finding new websites, mobile applications, and video channels where you can show your ads.

Here are some of the benefits of Display Planner:

Research targeting methods: You can get ideas for keywords, placements, and all other Display Network targeting methods to help you plan your campaign.
Get impression estimates and historical costs: See how your targeting ideas may perform based on past results and get historical costs to help guide your budget and bid decisions.

With this you can consider yourself equipped with the knowledge required to set up a soon to be successful online marketing campaign using Google AdWords. But how to run it successfully? The next series of posts will aim to do exactly that. Stay tuned for the next series of posts to learn more about campaign optimisations and for tools you can use to measure your current performance so as to plan your future strategy. Till then goodbye and take care! :)

How to create the ads that matter?

2015-06-05T20:08:00.000+05:30

Hello everyone!

Once you've organized your campaign and decided on your campaign settings, the only thing you should be worried about are your ads or ad groups. Now as we've read in the previous lessons,

An account is subdivided into several campaigns
A campaign is subdivided into several ad groups
Each ad groups further contains several ads that are derived from the same theme

Hence in this lesson, the words "ad group" and "ads" would be used simultaneously and many times in place of each other since they both convey the same thing.

What applies for one apple will apply for a bunch of apples too right? In the same way "ad" and "ad group" will mean one and the same thing here and will be used interchangeably.

Coming back to the lesson, as a general best practice, you'll want to create a separate ad group for each theme or product that you offer.

Each ad group contains a set of keywords, ads and bids that you manage. For your Display Network campaigns, your ad groups can include other targeting methods, like demographics or remarketing lists.

Now, let's take a closer look at some of the main components of ad groups for campaigns that you'll run on the Search or Display Network.

Keywords

Building a good keyword list can help you show your ads to the customers you want. Below are some tips for creating your keyword list.

Choosing and organizing your keywords

Think like a customer: Think about the main categories of your business and the terms or phrases that would fit into each of those categories. Include terms or phrases that your customers would use to describe your product or service.
Align your keywords with your goals: If you want to get the most bang for your buck, you might want to select specific keywords that directly relate to your ad's theme. Or, if you'd prefer to reach as many people as possible, choose more general keywords. No matter how general or specific your keywords are, they should always be as relevant to your ads and website as possible. Also, keywords of two or three words (a phrase) tend to work most effectively.
Group similar keywords into themes: Follow the structure of your ad groups, and bundle similar keywords together in one ad group based on your products, services, or other categories. For your Display Network campaigns, you'll also want to make sure your keywords are related to the websites your customers visit.

Researching new keywords

Use the Keyword Planner or Display Planner: For your Search Network campaigns, you can use the Keyword Planner to get keyword ideas and related data, like the average number of times people searched for certain terms. For your Display Network campaigns, you can use the Display Planner to get keyword ideas and related data, like how many times ads could show for those ideas based on a week-long or month-long period.
Review your Search terms report: You can use the Search terms report to see what people were searching for when they saw your ad and clicked it. This information can help you identify new keywords and poorly performing ones that you'll want to remove from your keyword list.

Optimizing your keywords

Use keyword match types: Keyword match types are settings for each of your keywords that give you greater control over who sees your ad.
For example, you might use the phrase match type to show your ad for searches that include the exact phrase with additional words before or after. Or, you might use the exact match type to show your ad for searches that include the exact phrase without any additional words. Both the phrase match and exact match types expand to show your ad for close variations — including misspellings, singular and plural forms, and acronyms — of your keywords.
Include negative keywords: You can also use negative keywords, which prevent your ad from showing for terms that aren't relevant to your product or service. Adding negative keywords can help you reduce costs and make your ad appear only for the search terms you want. You can identify negative keywords with the Keyword Planner or Search terms report, using both to find terms that aren't relevant to what you offer.

Now that we have seen the options and strategies available to us for making our ads more targeted, let us take a look at the different ad types itself.

The text ads that appear alongside Google search results are just one of several ad formats you can create. Other ads format that you can use to promote your products or services include video ads, image ads, app or digital content ads, and more.

Depending on the type of campaign you create, different types of ads formats and ad extensions will be available for you to use.

Keep in mind that all ads go through an approval process — Google wants ads to be useful, varied, relevant and safe for users when serving them across the Google Network. They will review your active and paused ads, keywords, and website according to their advertising policies.

With this let us look at the different ad types available to us.

Format	Description	Main Benefits
Text	Words only. For Example Boston's Best Bonsais Ad www.example.com Florist And Indoor Plant Nursery. Spruce Up Your Desk Today!	Maintain ads quickly and easily. Reach customers when they search on Google.
Ad Extensions	Extends your ads with more information, such as additional links to your website, store address, or phone number. These formats usually appear only across the Search Network. However, location extensions and call extensions may also appear across the Google Display Network. For Example Amherst Ice Cream Parlour Ad www.example.com (413) 123-4567 Our specialty is pistachio. English majors, buy 1 get 1 free. 100 Dardanelles Rd, Amherst MA	Provide additional details and contact information that can make your ads more relevant to customers. You can opt to extend your ad for mobile devices differently than how you extend your ad for tablets and computers.
Image	Static or interactive graphics. Animated ads in .gif and Flash format can be used.	Showcase your product or service in a visual way. Reach customers on websites that partner with Google.
WAP mobile	Create text or image ads for WAP mobile devices. Note: Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) is a standard for accessing information over a wireless network for mobile devices.	Connect with customers on-the go, targeting your ads based on their location.
App promotion ads	Drive app downloads and engagement with app promotion ads.	Send your customers to download your app from an app store, or include a deep link directly into your app. Note: Ads will appear only on devices compatible with your content.
Video	Video ads that show online. Run standalone video ads or insert them in streaming video content.	Deliver a rich and engaing experience to customers. Reach customers on websites that partner with Google.
Product Listing Ads	Text ads that contain product features and pricing information. Goes to a product purchase page on your website.	Encourage your customers to learn about the products that you sell before they click to your website.
Call-only ads	For example Call:(555)555-555 Ad www.example.com Description Line 1 Description Line 2	Drive phone calls to your business with ads that include your phone number. People can click on these ads and then call your business directly. These ads will only appear on devices that can make phone calls, and any field in these ads can be hidden to fit on smaller screens.

You should however take note that text ads might look different on the Display Network.

Ad Extensions and Types

While your original text ad has been made to the best of your efforts, it still might lack the punch to convince your potential customer to have a click on it. For this Google AdWords has something called Ad Extensions.
Ad Extensions are extra bits of information that carry themselves with your ad and enhance either the usability of that ad or give that important relevant and related extra information to your customer that makes him/her click your ad.

While some ad extensions can be added manually, others are automated. Here's an overview of the different types of ad extensions that you can use:

Manual Extensions

App Extensions: Show a link below your ad text that sends people to the app store or begins downloading your app. See the image down below for an example.
Call Extensions: Let people click a button to give you a phone call. Give your ad a call button. See the image example below.
Location Extensions: Help people nearby find your nearest storefront or give you a call. Add a map pin, navigation assistance and a call option to your ad.
For Example

Amherst Ice Cream Parlour
Ad www.example.com (413) 123-4567
Our specialty is pistachio.
English majors, buy 1 get 1 free.
100 Dardanelles Rd, Amherst MA
Review Extensions: Showcase positive, third-party reviews from reputable sources. Start adding reviews.
For Example:

Mushroom Foraging Tours
Ad www.example.com
Find chanterelle, porcini, oyster mushrooms with a fungi guide!
"So impressed. Brought home a pound of ceps." - exampleblog.com
Sitelink Extensions: Add links to help people find what they're looking for. Choose your sitelinks.
For Example

Walter's Bakery for Dogs
Ad www.example.com
Artisanal Biscuits and Cakes. Doesn't your dog deserve it?
• Hours
• Specials
• Biscuits
• Special diets
Callout Extensions: Add descriptive text to your ad to help people learn more about what you have to offer. See how callout extensions work below.

Acme Electronics
Ad www.example.com
Shop ACME Electronics for laptops, smartphones, video games and more!
Free shipping
• 24-7 customer service
• Price matching

App Extensions

Call Extensions

Automated Extensions

Consumer Ratings: Show off what customers appreciate with high-quality survey data.
For Example

Example Brokerage
Ad www.example.com
Explore The Advantages of Our Brokerage Account
Ratings: Selection 9.5/10 - Sign Up 10/10 - Fees 9/10
Previous Visits: Show people if they've clicked through to your website from Google Search results before.
For Example

Aunt Lynn's Jewelry
Ad www.example.com
Dangly earrings, bangles, and rings. All handmade!
You've visited example.com 7 times. Last visit: today
Social Extensions: Show how many Google+ followers you have. Add social extensions.
For Example

Anna's Pet Supplies
Ad www.example.com
Variety of hamster wheels, personally chosen by Anna!
Anna's Pet Supplies has 136,864 followers on Google+
Seller Ratings: Show your online business ratings with your ad.
For Example

Sarah's Designer Shoe Store
Ad www.sarah-shoes.com
4.0 ★★★★★ rating for sarah-shoes.com
Free Shipping, Free Returns on Large Selection of Discount Shoes

Creating effective ads

As you can see, your ads are the face of your products and services. Ads that are more relevant and engaging to your customers are likely to get more clicks.

Best Practices for Creating Effective Ads

Connect Your Ads and Keywords: Include at least one of your keywords in your ad text to show potential customers that it's relevant to what they're looking for. You want make sure that your ad text is readable, however, so don't include too many keywords in your ad.
Highlight What Makes You Unique: Include the products, services, or offers that make your competitive, like discounts, promotions or exclusives. For example, if you offer free shipping, tell your customers that. You'll also want to consider including your brand or company name so your customers see a name they recognize.
Include a Call-to-Action: Whether you're selling a something or offering a service, tell people how they can buy your products or contact you. Call to actions like purchase, call today, order, or get a quote make clear what the next steps are.
Match your Ad to your Landing Page: Look at the page that you're linking to from your ad (the landing page), and make sure that the promotions or products in your ad are included in there. You can also look for call-to-action phrases on your landing page.
Tailor your ads for mobile: People looking at mobile ads are more likely to want to know where you're located, or to call you. Create mobile-preferred ads with mobile call-to-actions like "Find nearby stores" and send people to mobile optimized landing pages.
Use ad extensions: Show extra information about your business with ad extensions, like sitelinks, location, and call extensions. Ad extensions, which "extend" from your text ads, tend to improve your ad's visibility and can help improve the clickthrough rate (CTR) of your ads. Keep in mind that the expected CTR from ad extensions is one factor that AdWords uses to calculate your Ad Rank.
Experiment: Create three to four ads for each ad group, and use different messages for each to see which does the best. AdWords rotates ads automatically to show the best-performing ads more often.

And with this we can end our this lesson on creating meaningful and resourceful ads. Our next lesson will focus on two tools that'd help you during your campaign and ad creation, namely Keyword and Display Planner. Till then goodbye and take care! :)

Deciding Bids and Budgets for your AdWords Campaign

2015-06-04T19:41:00.000+05:30

Hello everyone! With the previous post focusing on targeting your ad campaigns, this one will lay emphasis on deciding bids and budgets for your AdWords campaigns. Hence lets get started!

Once you decide which networks you want to show your ads on and who you want to show them to, you're ready to think about your budget. As you learned in the previous lessons, there are two things that you'll want to consider:

Your budget
Your bidding strategy

Hence let us study about them individually one by one!

Your Budget

Your daily budget is the amount that you set for each campaign to indicate how much, on average, you're willing to spend per day.

New AdWords advertisers might want to start small — between $5 and $50, for example — and then run their campaign for a few weeks before re-evaluating. You should choose a daily budget for each campaign based on your advertising goals and the general amount you're comfortable with spending each day.

If you're used to working with a monthly advertising budget, you can calculate the average amount you might budget per day by dividing your monthly budget by 30.4 (the average number of days per month).

Here are a few things to keep in mind about your budget:

In general, the AdWords system will aim to show your ads as much as possible until your daily budget is met. Because customer traffic fluctuates from day to day, AdWords can allow up to 20% more clicks in a day than your budget specifies. However, our system makes sure that in a given billing period, you're never charged more than the monthly charging limit — 30.4 multiplied by your average daily budget amount.
When your average daily budget is reached, your ads will typically stop showing for that day. You'll want to consider your campaign's ad delivery method, which determines how quickly your ads are shown and how long your budget lasts during a given day, when setting your daily budget. The "Accelerated" delivery method is like jet fuel — it uses your budget more quickly; the "Standard" delivery method is more like a slow-burning candle — it spreads your budget throughout the day.

Your Bidding Strategy

As you learned in a previous module, AdWords offers several bid strategies that are tailored to different types of campaigns. Depending on which networks your campaign is targeting, and your advertising goals, you can determine which strategy is best for you.

To refresh your memory, here are the bid strategies you can choose from:

Cost-per-click (CPC) bidding: Use if you want to drive customers to your website.
Cost-per-impression (CPM) bidding: Use if you want to make sure that customers see your message.
Cost-per-acquisition (CPA) bidding: Use if you want to maximize conversions on your website.
Demographics: Use if you want to maximize conversions on your website.

You can also use more advanced strategies like bid adjustments to bid more or less competitively across devices, locations, time of day, and more, or flexible bid strategies to automatically set bids to optimize for your performance goals.

In general, the higher your bid and the more relevant your ads and keywords, the more likely your ad will show at a higher position on the page. By managing your bids, you can influence the amount of traffic your ads receive.

Let us learn more about each of the above bid strategies.

CPC Bidding

With CPC bidding, you can set a maximum amount that you're willing to pay for a click on your ad — this is a maximum cost-per-click bid, or simply "max. CPC." This bidding method can be a good value because you pay only when a viewer is interested enough to click your ad and learn more.

If you use CPC bidding, you'll have the option to use manual bidding and choose your own bid amounts or automatic bidding and let AdWords set your max. CPC bid for you to get as many clicks as possible given your overall budget.

Manual bidding gives you more control over your bids — for example, you can set different bids for individual keywords or Display Network targeting methods. With automatic bidding, you don't have to spend a lot of time setting and managing your bids.

When setting a max. CPC, you can figure out your bid amount based on what you know about your business and the value of a sale or customer lead.

For example, if you sell US$5000 diamond rings, one new customer is probably worth more than if you sell US$0.99 packs of gum.

You'll also want to use Keyword Planner to help you set CPC bids — the tool shows you how often some keywords get searched and gives you cost estimates at a glance.

CPM Bidding

With CPM bidding, you bid for your ad based on how often it appears on the Display Network. Why use CPM bidding? If your advertising goal is to get your business' name in front of more people, for example, you might care more about ad impressions than clicks and visits to your website.

When you set a CPM bid, you set the maximum amount you're willing to pay per 1,000 ad impressions (we call this "max CPM").

One thing to keep in mind is that ads with different bid types can compete for the same Display Network placements. When CPC and CPM ads compete for the same placement, the two types of ads are compared apples-to-apples on how much they're effectively willing to pay for the impression. For a CPM ad, the max CPM bid represents how much the advertiser is willing to pay for each 1000 impressions; with a CPC ad, Google estimates how many clicks the ad might receive in 1000 impressions to get the comparison.

CPA Bidding

CPA bidding is a bidding method that lets you tell AdWords the amount you're willing to pay for a conversion. It can help you reach customers who are likely to take action on your website.

To use CPA bidding, you'll need to either set up conversion tracking, cross-account conversion tracking, or be importing data from Google Analytics. You'll also need to turn on Conversion Optimizer. Conversion Optimizer uses historical information about your campaign, and automatically finds the optimal equivalent CPC bid for your ad each time it's eligible to appear.

You'll also need to set a maximum CPA bid, which is the maximum amount you'd like to pay for a conversion, or a target CPA bid, which is the average amount you'd like to pay for a conversion. We recommend using target CPA since it's easier to track your average conversion costs, and people using this option tend to get more conversions.

When you set up Conversion Optimizer, we provide a recommended bid that's based on your historical performance. It's best to start with the recommended bid, then monitor your performance and adjust as necessary.

Bid Adjustments and Flexible Bid Strategies

Once your campaigns are up and running, you'll want to consider setting bid adjustments to gain more control over when and where your ad is shown, helping you to improve your return on investment.

Bid adjustments allow you to increase or decrease every bid in your campaign to bid more or less competitively for searches across devices, locations, time of day, and more. You can also use bid adjustments for campaigns that target the Google Display Network, setting bid adjustments for specific targeting methods like topics or placements, to show your ad to the most relevant audience.

How do bid adjustment works? Bid adjustments are set by percentages.

Say that you know your campaign performs well on mobile devices, you can set a +20% bid adjustment, for example, for searches on mobile devices to increase your bids for mobile to try to capture all available traffic.

More advanced bidding options that you can use are flexible bid strategies, which automatically set your bids to optimize your performance based on different advertising goals. Flexible bid strategies give you automated bidding exactly when, where, and how you want it — across multiple campaigns, or within a single part of a campaign.

Here are the different types of strategies:

Maximize clicks: Automatically sets your bids to help you get the most clicks within a target spend amount that you choose.
Target search page location: Automatically adjusts your bids to help you get your ads to the top of the page or the first page of search results.
Target cost-per-acquisition (CPA): Automatically sets your bids to help you get as many conversions as possible, while reaching an average cost-per-acquisition goal that you set.
Enhanced cost-per-click (ECPC): Automatically adjusts your manual CPC bid up or down based on each click's likelihood to result in a conversion.
Target return on ad spend (ROAS): Automatically sets your bids to maximize your conversion value, while trying to reach an average return on ad spend.
Target outranking share: Automatically raises or lowers your bids to help your ads outrank ads from another domain.

With this we finish our lesson on deciding bids and budgets for your AdWords Campaigns. Hope you could grasp it well. We will meet in the next lesson on creating ad groups. Till then goodbye and take care! :)

Targeting your Audience for Online Marketing

2015-06-03T13:34:00.000+05:30

Hello everyone! This is one of the most important lessons for your AdWords Certification Examinations I can tell you, hence pay attention to this lesson and read everything very carefully. With this, lets start with the lesson as it's going to be one long one.

Showing your ads to the right customer is a key part of a successful advertising campaign that helps you reach your goals. Below, we'll review the different ways of targeting that you can use with AdWords to show your ads.

Keyword targeting

As you learned in a previous module, on the Search Network, AdWords will use your keywords — words or phrases that relevant to your product or service — to show your ads to people searching for similar terms. On the Display Network, when your keyword matches a webpage's concepts or its central theme, your ad is eligible to show on that webpage (called an automatic placement).

You'll want to choose high quality, relevant keywords can help you reach the customers you want, when you want. We'll go over more tips on how to build a great keyword list later, but below are a few important details about keywords.

Keyword match types

You can use keyword match types to control which searches trigger your ad. Each match type, which is specified by a special symbol, will trigger your ad to show for a customer's search in different ways.

The chart below serves as an introduction to the different match types, ordered from broad to narrow.

You can use broad match, for example, to show your ad to a wide audience or you could use exact match to show your ad to specific groups of customers. In general, we typically recommend using a "broad-to-narrow" strategy — start with broad match keywords and then monitor your keywords' performance over time to make your keyword match types more specific if you find that you are is showing for too many irrelevant variations of your keywords.

Keep in mind that you can use match types with campaigns that show ads on the Search Network. On the Display Network, keywords are treated as broad match.

Negative keywords and keyword exclusions

You can also add negative keywords for campaigns that shows ads on the Search Network or keyword exclusions for campaigns that show ads on the Display Network. Negative keywords prevent your ads from showing to people searching for those terms or visiting sites that contain those terms. When you choose negative keywords, you'll want to choose terms that are similar to your keywords, but signal that people are looking for a different product or service.

Display Network targeting

In addition to keywords, you can use different targeting methods to match your ad to places or audiences on the Display Network.

Let’s take a look at three categories of targeting methods:

1. Contextual targeting: Match relevant site content

You can target based on relevant website content in two ways:

Keywords: AdWords looks for sites with content related to your keywords, to show your ads. Your ad may also show on websites that someone visits after they've visited another site that is related to your keywords.
Topics: Similar to keywords, this lets you place your AdWords ads on website pages about the topics that you choose. Instead of developing a list of words or phrases, you choose categories of information, such as “Autos and Vehicles.”

With keywords and topics, Google selects relevant placements on the Display Network based on website content and other factors, to show your ads.

2. Audiences: Reach specific groups of people

You can target your ads based on audiences in these ways:

Audiences: Depending on your advertising goals, you can choose the audience that best matches your customers. To drive brand awareness, use affinity audiences to reach TV-like audiences on a broad scale. To reach as many potential customers as possible with an affinity for a specific product area, you might try adding custom affinity audiences. To reach specific audiences actively shopping for a product or service, use in-market audiences instead.
Interest categories: This allows you to reach people interested in products and services similar to those your business offers. When you target interest categories, you can show your ad to people who demonstrated specific interests, regardless of whether your ad correlates with the particular topic of the page or app they're currently on. You'll find interest category targeting alongside remarketing in your account.
Remarketing: This option can help you reach people who have previously visited your website while they visit other sites on the Display Network. You'll find remarketing alongside interest categories in your account.
Demographics: This option allows you to reach people who are likely to be within the age, gender, and parental status demographic group that you choose.

With audiences, you don't manually select places to show your ads.

3. Managed placement targeting: Select specific websites and apps

Managed placement targeting allows you to pick individual sites, or mobile apps where you want to show your ads.
For example, if your typical customer spends a lot of time on a specific website and you want your ads to appear there, you can add it as a managed placement.

Location and language targeting

With location settings, you can target the geographic areas where your ads can appear. You can select entire countries (like the United States or France), individual regions or cities within a country (like the state of California or city of Paris), or certain distances around your business location (like 20 miles around San Francisco).

Why use location targeting?

It help you focus your advertising on the areas where you'll find the right customers, and restrict it in areas where you don't. It's a good idea to choose the region where your customers live and where your business can serve them.

For example, if you run an ecommerce business in the United States that ships to certain states, you can only target those places. Or, if you own an Italian restaurant in San Francisco, you can choose to only show your ads to customers within a few miles of your restaurant.

If you're trying to communicate with customers who don't speak the same language, you can use language targeting to show your ads to customers who speak a particular language. Your ads can appear for customers who use Google products (such as Search or Gmail) and third party websites that are part of the Display Network.

Language targeting helps make sure your ads will appear on sites that are written in the language of the customers you'd like to reach. Keep in mind that our ads and keywords should be written in the language that you target — AdWords doesn't translate ads or keywords.

Let's say you're an international women's apparel retailer, and you want to show your ads to Spanish-speaking customers. You can create a campaign that's targeted to the Spanish language, and show your Spanish language ads to customers with a Google interface language set to Spanish when they search for dresses.

Device targeting

You can also reach your customers while they're on the go by showing your ads when people are searching or visiting Display Network sites on their mobile phones with full browsers, like iPhones and Android devices. Depending on your goals, you might want to target one or multiple devices.

Mobile devices with full internet browsers, such as smartphones, can display websites similar to the ones you'd see on a desktop computer and mobile optimized sites. High-end mobile devices can also host apps, which people can download from the app store in their device or from a website. This wide variety of media available on mobile devices means that you can show your ads in many different ways, and tailor your message to be compelling to customers on mobile devices.

With this we are done with our lesson on audience targeting. Hope you could grasp everything. With this I'll meet you in the next lesson which will help you give budgets and set bids for your campaigns. Take care and goodbye! :)

Structuring and Organizing Your Campaign

2015-06-02T14:17:00.000+05:30

Hello Everyone! Welcome to this lesson on structuring your AdWords Campaign. It is very important that before you begin creating your campaign, it's important to learn how AdWords is structured. A well-organized account can help you create effective campaigns that target the right audience and, ultimately, help you reach more of your advertising goals.

AdWords is organized into three layers:

Account: Your account is associated with a unique email address, password, and billing information.
Campaigns: Each campaign in your account has its own budget and settings that determine where your ads appear.
Ad groups: Each ad group within a campaign contains a set of similar ads and keywords that you want to trigger your ads to show.

With this, lets see into structuring your AdWords campaign.

Structuring Your Campaign

With AdWords, you'll organize your account into separate campaigns, with each campaign focusing on a single business goal, such as driving traffic to your website, or offering, like a particular product or service. If your business serves several geographic areas, you might want to create a separate campaign for each location.

One effective approach is to organize your campaigns to reflect the structure of your website. This allows you to create campaigns around specific themes or products.

For example, an electronics retailer might create campaigns for specific product categories, such as televisions and cameras, as below.

You control the following at the campaign level:

How much you're willing to spend on clicks, impressions, or conversions from your ads
Networks and geographical locations where you want your ads to show
Other top-level settings that affect your ad groups

Organizing your ad groups

Each campaign contains one or more ad groups. An ad group allows you to organize your campaign into sets of ads and keywords that directly relate to each other, which can improve your Quality Score and help boost your return on investment. For Search Network campaigns, this helps you show ads that are relevant to the searches of people you're trying to reach. For campaigns targeting the Display Network, you can create relevant ads to show to customers browsing websites about similar topics.

Similar to your campaign structure, you'll want to create separate ad groups for each theme or product that you're advertising. Again, consider creating ad groups that are based on the sections or categories that appear on your website.

For example, the same electronics retailer might create ad groups for sub-categories, like compact cameras and SLR cameras, as below.

With this we finish our today's lesson on structuring and organizing your AdWords campaign. Of Course these advices are not binding on anyone and one may wish to design his campaigns and ad groups according to his own whims and wishes. However these are the standard industry-tested advices that you would do well to take advantage of.
With this I take leave. Goodbye and take care :)

Choosing an AdWords Campaign Type

2015-06-01T19:39:00.000+05:30

Hello everyone!
With this topic itself, we will be starting off with learning the more finer details of Google AdWords, having covered the introduction to the same comprehensively in the earlier articles. Let us begin with the study of campaign creation in AdWords!

When you start setting up your AdWords campaign, you'll need to choose a campaign type and a campaign sub-type.

The campaign type determines things like where your ads can show to customers on Google’s advertising networks, and what format they can be in, like text or video.
The campaign subtype determines how many settings and options are available to use for your campaign, or you can choose a specific campaign sub-type if you want to accomplish a specific goal with your ads, like driving more installs of your mobile app.

With these options, you can tailor your campaign to match your business goals and focus on the features most relevant to you.

Types of Campaigns

Rather than getting lost in all the different words and phrases explaining the concept, first have a look at this video to get an understanding of what we are talking about.

Applying what you've learned in previous modules about Google's advertising network, let's take a look at the most commonly used campaign types:

Search Network only
Display Network only
Search Network with Display Select

Search Network Only

If you create a Search Network Only campaign, your ads can appear throughout sites on the Google Search Network.

This campaign type works by linking your AdWords keywords to the words or phrases someone uses to search on Google, then showing relevant text ads on search results pages.

This campaign type is useful for advertisers who want to connect with customers right when they're searching their products or services.

For example, a small home repair business that earns most of its revenue from plumbing repairs might create a “Search Network only” campaign to target its ads to high-potential customers searching for plumbing services.

Display Network Only

With a Display Network only campaign, your ads can show throughout the Google Display Network. This campaign type works by matching your ads — including text, image, rich media, and video ads — to websites and other placements, like YouTube and mobile apps, with content related to your targeting.

What kind of business might create a “Display Network only” campaign?

Say you're a jewelry store wanting to increase awareness of the engagement rings you sell. With a “Display Network only” campaign, you can reach people visiting wedding-related sites, such as blogs about wedding planning.

Search Network with Display Select

A Search Network with Display Select campaign allows you to show your ads — including text, image, rich media, and video ads — with search results on the Google Search Network and relevant placements within the Display Network. With this option, your budget is shared across both networks.

Say you're a newer advertiser wanting to promote your car repair service. You might create a “Search Network with Display Select” campaign to reach people in more places who are seeking your services, whether they're looking on Google Search or checking out a car service review site.

Campaign Subtypes

Further, when you create any of the above campaign types, you'll also need to choose a more specific campaign sub-type. The most common are the

Standard, or
All features

subtypes. Let us as study them in some detail, just like we studied the different types of campaigns above.

Standard: If you prefer a simpler overview of your campaign and feature options, consider using the "Standard" sub-type. With "Standard" campaigns, you can use basic location and language targeting, bidding and budget settings, and common ad extensions. You won't be able to use the more advanced options that are available to "All features" campaigns and described below.
All features: If you want to use all available campaign and feature options, consider using the "All features" sub-type. You'll be able to use more advanced options, such as social and experimental settings, ad scheduling and ad delivery methods, and advanced location options.

Also, there are specialized campaign subtypes you can use to reach more potential customers. Here are some examples of why you might choose a specialized campaign sub-type:

Remarketing: Show text, image, or video ads to people who already visited your website when they browse other sites on the Display Network.
Ads in mobile apps: Reach the growing audience of people using mobile phones and tablets by showing your ads in apps. Your ads will get matched to apps through the Display Network.

With this we finish our this lesson on AdWords Campaign Types. Hope you enjoyed it! The next lesson will help give tips to organize your campaigns efficiently. Till then goodbye and take care! :)

Giving A Budget To Your Campaign

2015-05-28T20:35:00.000+05:30

Hey there! In this lesson you'll be getting an idea as to what and for what do you pay at AdWords! Hence let's get started!

AdWords gives you control over your advertising costs and there's no minimum amount that you have to spend. Instead, you set a daily budget and choose how you'll spend your money.

Choosing a bidding strategy

Choosing how you'll spend your money means choosing how you'd like to bid. Try choosing a bidding strategy based on your goals, such as whether you want to focus on getting clicks, impressions, or conversions.

We'll go over your bidding options in more detail later, but here's an overview of the strategies:

Cost-per-click (CPC): If you want to focus on clicks on your ads and drive traffic to your website, you'll want to use CPC bidding.
Cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM): If you want to focus on impressions — the number of times your ad shows — and increase awareness of your brand, you'll want to use CPM bidding. Note that CPM bidding is available for Display Network campaigns only.
Cost-per-acquisition (CPA): If you want to focus on conversions — which is when people take a specific action on your website after clicking one of your ads — you'll want to use CPA bidding.

Setting a daily budget

Your daily budget is the amount you're willing to spend each day, on average, for each ad campaign in your account. The amount is entirely up to you, and you can edit it whenever you like.

When you set your bids, you set the maximum amount you're willing to pay for either 1 click on your ad, 1,000 ad impressions, or 1 conversion. Your actual costs will likely vary from auction to auction. But even though your actual costs may vary, your daily budget puts a limit on how much you can accrue in costs over the average number of days in a month (30.4).

For more guidance on setting the right budgets and bids, check out this video:

How much you're charged

The final amount you're charged depends on what type of bidding strategy you choose.

If you're using CPC or CPM bidding, the actual amount you'll be charged is no more than what's needed for your ad to appear higher than the advertiser immediately below you.

If you're using CPA bidding, the actual amount you'll be charged might exceed your specific bid because the actual amount depends on factors outside of Google's control, such as changes to your website or ads, or increased competition in ad auctions. Keep in mind that Google's systems are designed to adjust over time, so the longer you use CPA bidding, the less likely it is that your actual CPA will exceed your specific bid.

With this we have finished our article on an introduction to budgeting your campaign on AdWords. Moreover if you've read through all of the articles preceding this one along with this, you've covered the entire introduction to Google AdWords. The subsequent topics will be advanced and will deal with finer topics. Thank you and Goodbye! :)

How Google Calculates Quality of Your Ad

2015-05-28T17:52:00.000+05:30

Welcome back everyone!
In this article we are going to study about the parameters Google studies about your ad to rank in competitively in the advertising market, to make it rank higher or more often than other advertisers' ads. Surely you didn't assume that you were the only advertiser in the market, did you?

To make it clear in a sentence, I'd say higher quality ads can not only be triggered to show more often (making it gain more impressions) or be shown on quality pages like towards the first search page of a user's search results, it can also help you save your budget by making you pay less for your impressions. How is that done? Take a look at the video below.

Now that you have a positive understanding of what we are talking about from the above video, let us go over it comprehensively.

To give you a better understanding of how ad quality works on AdWords, we'll go over Quality Score and Ad Rank.

The Quality Score reported in your account is an estimate of the quality of your ads and landing pages triggered by that keyword in auctions throughout the day.
Ad Rank determines the order in which your ad shows up on the page (also known as ad position).

Let us go more into each of these in detail below.

Quality Score

The components of Quality Score are

Expected Clickthrough Rate (CTR): The number of times Google expects your ad to be clicked by the user for that keyword irrespective of any other parameter.
Ad Relevance: A measure that indicates how close are your keywords to your ad's theme.
Landing Page Experience: refers to how good we think someone's experience will be when they get to your landing page (the webpage they end up on after clicking your ad).

Further even your ad's keywords get ranked too! Each keyword gets a Quality Score on a scale from 1 to 10, where 1 is the lowest score and 10 is the highest.

Why does your ad quality matter?

The more relevant your ads and landing pages are to the user, the more likely it is that you'll have a higher Quality Score and benefit from having higher quality components of your Ad Rank, such as a higher ad position or lower cost-per-click (CPC).

Keep in mind that Quality Score is intended to give you a general sense of the quality of your ads, but doesn't take into account any auction-time factors, such as someone's actual search terms, type of device, language preference, location, or the time of day.

Ad Rank, however, does take into account auction-time factors and determines where your ad appears on the page or whether it appears at all. Every time one of your ads competes in the auction, AdWords calculates your Ad Rank using your bid amount, the components of Quality Score (expected CTR, ad relevance, and landing page experience), and the expected impact of extensions and other ad formats.

Does this mean that a higher bid can always lead to a higher ad position? No. Even if your competition has higher bids than yours, you can still win a higher ad position at a lower price by using highly relevant keywords, ads, and ad extensions.

With this we end this lesson here. I hope you understood this lesson because it'll prove to be a very important lesson for the future. Goodbye! :)

The Google Display Network

2015-05-27T21:01:00.000+05:30

Hello everyone! Now that we have seen into Google Search Network we are ready to learn about the Google Display Network! Hence here we go!

Placements, Topics and the Google Display Network

As we discussed in the last lesson, using Google Search Network you can only show ads when a user is actively searching for the product or service that relates to what you are advertising. However you can also choose to show your ads to people as they browse the web using the Google Display Network. Your ads can appear on specific websites or placements that you choose, or on websites based on the targeting methods that you choose, such as keywords, placement, audiences, and topics. Keywords can trigger your ad to show on placements, which are sites across the Internet where your ads can appear. Google automatically determines where your ads appear by matching your keywords to these placements, or you can pick specific placements yourself for greater control over where your ads appear.

View the following video to give yourself an idea of The Google Display Network.

In addition to keywords, you can use different Display Network targeting options to show your ads to specific groups of people based on their interests, age or gender, or whether they've previously visited your website. We'll go more into these when we study more about campaign targeting.

Here's a list of ad formats you can use on the Display Network:

Text ads
Image ads
Rich media ads
Video ads

You generally see Google Display Network Ad Placements like

Google Display Network Ad Placements

So what should you learn from all the things we have discussed above to make your campaigns better?

Think and look for important keywords and add them to your campaign.
Think and look for popular websites, blogs and any kind of web property you find that you can potentially use to advertise your product/service that would widen your market horizons and place them as placements.

Showing your ads on mobile phones

You need to understand that the Google Display Network brings your visual ad content into a wider customer reach like nothing else. Using the Google Display Network you have access to even mobile audiences, be it those surfing using mobile devices or be it those using apps because Google Display Network even enables you to market to in-app audiences.

Hence use Google Display Network to reach potential customers as they search or visit websites on the go — researching or completing purchases on their mobile phones, for example. Here are the different places your ads can appear:

Text ads can appear when people search on Google and other Search Network from their mobile devices.
Text, image, and video ads can appear on Display Network websites when people visit these sites from high-end mobile device (such as iPhones, Android devices).

Targeting your ads

Further, you can also show your ads to people in selected locations, who speak a certain language, or to specific groups of people.

If you have text ads, you can choose to show them to customers in an entire country, a certain geographic location, and even to customers who use names of locations in their searches. You can also target your campaigns to the languages that your potential customers speak.

With this we finish our lesson on Google Display Network. With the next lesson we will learn more about how the quality of your ads determine the amount you need to pay to serve them. Take care and goodbye! :)

The Google Search Network

2015-05-27T18:31:00.000+05:30

Hey!
So today we will be learning about Google Search Network, in continuation with our introduction about the Google Search and Display Networks we had in our previous lesson. In case you missed our previous lesson, I'd highly recommend you switch over and first read the introduction from the link below and then come back here.

The Google Advertising Network

So proceeding with today's lesson, to understand how your ads are shown on the Google Search Network, let's take a closer look at

Keywords

You'll use keywords — words or phrases that describe your product or service — to target your ads. When someone searches for terms that are similar to your keywords, your ads can appear alongside or above search results on sites that are part of the Search Network. Your ad could be eligible to appear based on the

Similarity of your keywords to their search terms
Keyword match types (which we'll explain in more detail later)

Keywords also help determine how much you pay. Each of your keywords has a maximum cost-per-click bid amount (or "max. CPC"), which specifies the maximum amount you're willing to pay each time someone clicks your ad.

With this we have a bit of an idea as to when and what will trigger our ad in front of a user when they browse a site part of the Google Search Network. Now we shall learn how will our ad look like when it appears online and in what ways we can improve its appearance.

Search ad formats

It's also important to think about the different types of ads that can appear on Search Network sites, which are:

Text ads: The simplest and most common kind of search ad, text ads are made up of a headline, a display URL that shows the address of your website, and a description.
Ads with extensions: Ad extensions are visual enhancements to search ads that more prominently display information about your business, such as a phone number, location, or links to other pieces of relevant content from deeper within your sitemap. You can add these enhancements, which often appear in ads above search results, manually or they can be added by our automated formatting systems.

Google Search Network Ad Placements

We will learn more about each of these when we start with articles teaching campaign creation. So worry not, just keep taking in the bits you see, slowly and steadily. :)

It is however important to keep in mind that these ads will be shown only at the time when someone searches for your or related product or service that you are advertising. To show your advertisement on the mainstream internet you'll want to use The Google Display Network which we will see in the next article. Till then take care and goodbye! :)

The Google Advertising Network

2015-05-25T21:05:00.000+05:30

Greetings to everyone!
Today we will be learning more about the Google's Advertising Networks, which, as you would notice is in a direct conflict with the topic of our lesson. The reason is that Google does not have a single advertising "network" but rather advertisers can implement two different advertising "networks" as below:

Google Search Network
Google Display Network

With AdWords, your ads can show on one or both of Google's advertising networks: the Google Search Network and the Google Display Network. The campaign type you choose determines which of these networks your ads will appear on.

To get a brief idea of what we are about to discuss in this lesson, take a look at the video below:

Let us learn about both of these distinct advertising networks, each with its own merits and applications.

Google Search Network

The Search Network includes Google Search, other Google sites such as Maps and Shopping, and hundreds of non-Google search partner websites (like AOL) that show AdWords ads matched to search results. The Search Network can help advertisers do the following:

Show their text ads next to Google search results
Reach customers actively searching for their specific product or service

Example of where you see Google Search Network Ads

In very simple words, if you want to reach people actively searching for something which is in relation to what you want to advertise AND that you want to do text ads, the Google Search Network will be the best bet for you.

Google Display Network

The Display Network includes a collection of Google websites (like Google Finance, Gmail, Blogger, and YouTube), partner sites, and mobile sites and apps that show AdWords ads matched to the content on a given page.

The Display Network can help advertisers do the following:

Use appealing ad formats to reach a wide range of customers with broad interests
Build brand awareness and customer loyalty
Increase engagement with customers
Choose more specifically where their ads can appear, and to what type of audience

Example of where you see Google Display Network Ads

This is more of something like TV advertising. People aren't searching for what you are advertising but just because you think what you are advertising might interest the people who will see your advertisement to your product or service, which you are advertising, you choose to use the Google Display Network.

In the next article we will learn about these two advertising networks separately. Till then, goodbye and take care! :)

Benefits of Online Advertising and AdWords

2015-05-25T17:37:00.000+05:30

Hello everyone! As promised in the last post, let us start with our studies for Google AdWords Fundamentals Exam! In this lesson we would be learning the benefits of online advertising and how AdWords can help you achieve those in the most simple and effective ways possible.

Benefits of Online Advertising

Online advertising allows you to show your ads to the people who are likely to be interested in your products and services, while filtering out folks who aren't.

Browsers and websites store our browsing information, our online interactions and much more. This data is used for targeting potential customers with relevant ad data so that ads do not come out as a nuisance for the people using Google and rather a very good source of third party interaction that proves to be very much relevant and useful for them in the end.

Hence not surprisingly, I'm treated with ads displaying sound systems after I recently did a search on buying a sound system.

And you can track whether those people clicked your ads.

And also if they further performed some other action on your website (which is called a conversion) like signing up for a newsletter or purchasing a product.

Online advertising also gives you the opportunity to reach potential customers as they use multiple devices — desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones.

You may also choose to serve your ads in a variety of ad formats that can be targeted towards users depending upon their device. For example mobile users can be targeted through in-app ads unique to a mobile platform.

Let us now begin to understand how AdWords can help you achieve your online marketing ambitions.

Benefits of Google AdWords

Before you get lost in even more words, watch this video below to get an understanding of Google AdWords:

Now that we have an idea of what we are talking about, we can look more into AdWords as below.

AdWords allows you to take advantage of the benefits of online advertising: show your ads to the right people, in the right place, and at the right time. AdWords offers several benefits, but here are the key ones:

Target your ads: Targeting gives you the ability to show your ads to reach people with specific interests — namely, people who are interested in your products and services — and show them relevant ads.
AdWords offers different ways of targeting, which we'll go over in more detail later. For now, here's a look at the choices that you have with online ads that can make your marketing campaigns even more targeted:

Keywords: Words or phrases relevant to your products and service, which are used to show your ads when customers search for those terms or visit relevant websites.
Ad location: Show your ads on search engines, commercial sites, or personal sites.
Age, location, and language: Choose the age, geographic location, and language of your customers.
Days, times, and frequency: Show your ads during certain hours or days of the week, and determine how often your ads appear.
Devices: Your ads can appear on all types of devices, and you can fine-tune which devices your ads appear on and when.

Control your costs: AdWords gives you control over how you spend your money. There’s no minimum. And you can choose how much you spend per month, per day, and per ad. You'll only pay when someone clicks your ad.
Measure your success: With AdWords, if someone clicked your ad, you’ll know. If they clicked your ad and then did something valuable to your business - purchased your product, downloaded your app, or phoned in an order - you can track that, too.
By seeing which ads get clicks and which ones don’t, you’ll also quickly see where to invest in your campaign. That, in turn, can boost the return on your investment.
You can get other valuable data, including how much it costs you, on average, for advertising that leads to your customers’ online purchases or phone calls. And you can also use analytical tools to learn about your customer’s shopping habits - how long, for instance, they tend to research your product before they buy.
Manage your campaigns: AdWords also offers you tools to easily manage and monitor accounts.
If you manage multiple AdWords accounts, a My Client Center (MCC) manager account is a powerful tool that could save you time. It lets you easily view and manage all of your AdWords accounts from a single location.
You can also manage your AdWords account offline with AdWords Editor, a free, downloadable desktop application that allows you to quickly and conveniently make changes to your account. With AdWords Editor, you can download your account information, edit your campaigns offline, and then upload your changes to AdWords. You can use AdWords editor to manage, edit, and view multiple accounts at the same time, copy or move items between ad groups and campaigns, and undo and redo multiple changes while editing campaigns.

With this we have completed this lesson, which was aimed at giving you the basic understanding of what are the benefits of online advertising and how AdWords helps you achieve them. I hope you understood the lesson as these very objectives of Online Marketing are what helps us achieve our objectives in the end. Hope to see in our next lesson. Take care :)

Introduction to Online Advertsing and Marketing

2015-05-24T17:48:00.000+05:30

Hello Everyone! How are you all? My 2nd year semester exams just finished and I'm just too bored to continue with the the old topics again. So lets learn something new this summer! The fundamentals of Online Advertising/ Marketing!

The idea to launch a website section for this topic came last week when I decided that I would like to earn my Google AdWords Partner Certification as soon as possible this vacation. Now that I've earned it already

The spirit inside me asked me to help the fellow others who would also maybe like to earn one for themselves too. Keeping in line, the Online Marketing section will give you everything you need to know to earn the fundamentals certification first and video (YouTube) advertising certification later. Since the Google AdWords Fundamentals is the MUST exam everyone needs to pass we would be starting our study with the same subject. Hence lets get started!

Google AdWords is the advertising platform of Google that you can use if you are an aspiring advertiser. You can be anything or anyone; the local plumber who wants people in the neighbourhood to know of his services or a startup or an already existing business looking to extend its services in a new area or wanting to please customers with a new product. The reasons can be endless. The only motive required here is that there should be a want to advertise. And there can be no one better than Google to help you at that. Hence people who appear and clear Google AdWords Certification Exams can be taken in by these advertisers as the tested and assessed helping hands to assist them with creating successful online advertisement campaigns. Since the money of the advertisers depends upon your skill and caliber of analysing the market and making use of its reach and potential, Google AdWords certification exams are by no means easy exams to pass, since Google wants only the best to come out as "Google Certified AdWords Professionals", as you'll see later.

To begin with, let me give you a brief look of what is going to be covered in our lessons. Our lessons are directly derived from the study material that Google itself provides. These lessons might be an extension of those in some ways as I'll try my best to provide a more personal touch to everything as the way I have experienced, but since Google has a very comprehensive study material by itself available, I'll try and deviate very less. It is so because I've seen a number of online experts with lessons and lessons of explaining and demonstrating things but with a disclosure that "We cannot be held responsible if you do not clear the exam after studying from us." I guess this is just bull****. If you teach someone you MUST take the credit for their success or failures at what YOU taught them. I promise you that if YOU study from here, YOU WILL PASS the exams. This is just what I came up when I myself was looking for sources to study from and something I wanted to make clear right from the start.

Once that you've gone through the AdWords Fundamentals articles, you'll have learnt how AdWords works along with the knowledge of:

How online advertising and AdWords can help your clients meet their advertising goals.
Google Search Network and Google Display Network campaign creation and management.
How to measure ad performance and optimize campaigns.
Industry best practices and strategies.

While talking about the exam,

Time: You'll have 120 minutes to complete the exam.
Pass rate: You need to get a score of 80% or higher to pass.
Retake period: If you don't pass the exam, you can take it again after 7 days.

With this we will be kicking off the study with the next lesson! Hope you guys remain tuned in!

Queues, Deques and Priority Queues

2015-04-02T06:20:00.000+05:30

Hello! How are you?
As we discussed in the previous post on stacks,

The linear arrays discussed in the previous posts allows one to insert and delete at any position in the list – at the beginning, at the middle or at the end. There are certain frequent situations in computer science when one wants to restrict insertions and deletions so that they can take place only at the beginning or at the end of the list, not at the middle. Two of the data structures that are useful in such situations are queues and stacks.

As we completed our analysis of stacks in the previous post, here, in this post we will continue it with our analysis of queues. Hence lets get started!

Introduction

A queue is a linear list of elements in which deletions can take place only at one end, called the FRONT, and insertions can take place only at the other end, called the REAR. The terms "FRONT" and "REAR" are used in describing a linear list only when it is implemented as a queue.

Queues are also called First-In-First-Out (FIFO) lists, since the first element in a queue will be the first element out of the queue. In other words, the order in which elements enter a queue is the order in which they leave. This contrasts with stacks, which are Last-In-First-Out (LIFO) lists.

Queues abound in everyday life. The automobiles waiting to pass through an intersection from a queue, in which the first car in line is the first car through; the people waiting in line at a bank from a queue, where the first person in line is the first person to be waited on; and so on. An important example of a queue in computer science occurs in a time sharing system, in which programmes with the same priority from a queue while waiting to be executed.

Representation of Queues

Queues may be represented in the computer in various ways, usually by means at one-way lists or linear arrays. Each of our queues will be maintained by a linear array QUEUE, two pointer variables: FRONT, containing the location of the front element of the queue; and REAR, containing the location of the rear element of the queue. The condition FRONT=NULL will indicate that the queue is empty.

In the diagram shown, a queue is stored in memory using an array QUEUE with N elements. Whenever an element is deleted from the queue, the value of FRONT is increased by 1, as below

FRONT := FRONT + 1

Similarly, whenever an element is added to the queue, the value of REAR is increased by 1; shown below

REAR := REAR + 1

This means that after N insertions, the rear element of the queue will occupy QUEUE(N) or in other words eventually the queue will occupy the last part of the array. This occurs even though the queue is itself may not contain many elements. While the queue is empty

FRONT := REAR := NULL

With this we are ready to study Insertions and Deletions in a queue. Hence lets start with those two data structure operations in queues.

Insertion and Deletion Algorithms for Queues

To insert an element into our QUEUE, follow the below algorithm:

Insertion Algorithm

This procedure inserts an element ITEM into a queue.

QINSERT(QUEUE, N, FRONT, REAR, ITEM)

1. If REAR>=N then print: "OVERFLOW" & return. [Checking for Overflow Condition]
2. If FRONT=0, make FRONT=1 [Checking for an Empty Queue]
3. REAR=REAR+1 [Make space for the new element to be inserted]
4. QUEUE[REAR]=ITEM [Put the new element into the queue]
5. Return.

Deletion Algorithm

This procedure deletes an element from a QUEUE and assigns it to the variable ITEM.

1. If FRONT=0, then print: "UNDERFLOW" [Checking for the underflow condition]

2. ITEM = QUEUE [FRONT] [Initialize ITEM, which stores the element to be deleted.]

3. If FRONT = REAR, then FRONT=REAR=0 and Return. [Checking if Queue is empty.]

4. FRONT=FRONT+1 [increment FRONT Pointer.]

5. Return. [Exit.]

Having covered all the fundamental concepts of linear queues, we can move on towards its code implementation.


//Shubham Mehta, Write a program to perform insertions and deletions in a queue.
#include &ltstdio.h>
void main()
{
    int i=0, choice=0, choice1=0, choice2=0, arr[10], top=-1, bottom=-1, element=0;
    do
    {
        printf("%s", "Please enter the correct choice for the operation you want to perform: \n\n");
        printf("%s", "Enter 1 to insert into the queue\n");
        printf("%s", "Enter 2 to delete from the queue\n");
        printf("%s", "Enter 3 to display the current queue status\n");
        printf("%s", "Press any other key to exit\n\n");
        printf("%s", "Your choice: ");
        scanf("%d", &choice);
        if(choice==1)
        {
            printf("\n\nProceeding to insert the element...\n\n");
            if(top==10)
            {
                printf("%s", "OVERFLOW! EXITING!");
                goto a;
            }
            printf("Enter the element to be inserted into the queue: ");
            scanf("%d", &element);
            ++top;
            arr[top]=element;
            printf("\n\nElement inserted successfully!\n\n");
            goto a;
        }
        else if(choice==2)
        {
            printf("\n\nProceeding to delete the element...\n\n");
            if(bottom==top)
            {
                printf("%s", "UNDERFLOW! EXITING!");
                goto a;
            }
            printf("%s%d", "The element to be deleted from the queue is: ", arr[bottom]);
            printf("\n%s", "Are you sure you want to delete this element? (Press 1 for yes, any other key for no)\nYour Choice: ");
            scanf("%d", &choice2);
            if(choice2==1)
            {
                ++bottom;
                printf("\n\n%s\n\n", "Element deleted successfully!");
            }
            else
                printf("\n\n%s\n\n", "Fine then.");
            goto a;
        }
        else if(choice==3)
        {
            printf("\n\n%s\n\n", "Proceeding to display the current queue status...");
            printf("The current queue status is:\n");
            for(i=(bottom+1); i &lt=top; i++)
                printf("%d\t", arr[i]);
            printf("\n\n%s\n\n", "Elements displayed successfully!");
        }
        a:
        printf("%s", "Do you want to perform any operations once more? (Press 1 for yes, any other key for no)\nYour choice: ");
        scanf("%d", &choice1);
    }while(choice1==1);
    getch();
}

Now that we have seen both the theoretical aspects of queues as well as its code implementation, we can perhaps spend some time towards learning other type of linear queues. We shall cover Deques and Priority Queues in this lesson, with Circular Queues to be covered in the next lesson.

Deques

A deque is a linear list in which elements can be added or removed from either end but not in the middle. The term deque is a contraction of the term double-ended queue.

Let us see a diagram illustrating its function:

There are two variations of a deque - namely an input restricted deque and an output restricted deque, which are intermediate between a queue and a deque. Specifically an input restricted deque allows insertions only at one end of the list, but allows deletions at both of its ends. Similarly, the output restricted deque allows deletions only at one end of the queue while allowing insertions at both of its ends.

Priority Queue

A priority queue is a collection of elements such that each element has been assigned a priority and such that the order in which elements are deleted and processed comes from the following rules:

An element of higher priority is processed before any element of a higher priority.
Two elements with the same priority are processed according to the order they were added in the queue.

A prototype of priority queue is a time-sharing system: programs of a higher priority are processed first while programs of a same priority form a standard queue.

And hence, with this we finish our lesson on linear queue. I hope you'd have had a good experience of it. With this we can move on and start with our next lesson on Circular Queues. Take care till then :)

Stacks in Data Structure

2015-03-30T21:40:00.000+05:30

Hello everyone!
The linear arrays discussed in the previous posts allows one to insert and delete at any position in the list – at the beginning, at the middle or at the end. There are certain frequent situations in computer science when one wants to restrict insertions and deletions so that they can take place only at the beginning or at the end of the list, not at the middle. Two of the data structures that are useful in such situations are queues and stacks. In this lesson, we are going to study more about stacks!

Introduction

A stack is a linear structure in which items may be added or removed only at one end. A visual representation of a stack is given as below:

In a stack insertions and deletions occur only at one end; at the top of the stack. The first item to be added on a stack is the last item to be removed and vice versa. Hence stacks are called List-In-First-Out lists (LIFO).Although stacks may seem to be a very restrictive type of data structures, they have many useful applications in computer science.

Stacks: In detail

A stack is a data structure in which insertions and deletions of elements (data) occurs only at one place: called the TOP of the stack. This means in particular that elements are deleted in a reverse order as to the manner they are inserted into the stack.
Special terminologies are used for two basic operations performed on stacks:

Push is the term used to insert an element into the stack
Pop is the term used to delete an element from the stack

These terms are used only with stacks, not with other data structures.
Before learning more about stacks, let us see and understand its representation in computer.

Array Representation of Stacks

Stacks may be represented in the computer in various ways usually by means of a one-way list or a linear array. Each of our stacks will be maintained by a linear array STACK: a pointer variable TOP, which contains the location of the top element of the stack; and a variable N which gives the maximum number of elements that can be held by the stack. The condition TOP=0 or TOP=NULL will indicate that the stack is empty.
The figure below pictures such an array representation of a stack.

PUSH and POP Operations in Stack

The operation of adding (inserting) an item onto the stack and the operation of removing (popping) an item from a stack may be implemented, respectively, by the following procedures, called PUSH and POP. In executing the procedure PUSH, one must first test whether there is room in the stack for the new item; if not, then we have the condition known as overflow. Analogously, in executing the procedure POP, one must first test whether there is an element in the stack to be deleted; if not, then we have the condition known as underflow.

Hence let us see the

Algorithm for PUSH Operation in a Stack

This procedure pushes an ITEM onto a stack.

PUSH(STACK, TOP, N, ITEM)

1. If TOP=N, then print: OVERFLOW and return. [Stack already fill, overflow condition]

[End of If Structure]

2. Set TOP := TOP+1 [Increase TOP by 1]

3. Set STACK[TOP] := ITEM [Inserts ITEM in the new TOP position]

4. Return.

Algorithm for POP Operation in a Stack

This procedure deletes the top element of the STACK and assigns it to the variable ITEM.

POP(STACK, TOP, ITEM)

1. If TOP=0, the print: UNDERFLOW and return. [Stack is empty, there is nothing to remove, underflow condition.]

2. Set ITEM := STACK[TOP]. [Assigns TOP element to ITEM]

3. Set TOP=TOP-1. [Decrease TOP by 1.]

4. Return.

With this we complete our analysis of stacks and its corresponding data structure operations. Let us look at the following code snippet which illustrates the C code for the above explained PUSH and POP operations in Stacks.


//Shubham Mehta, Write a program to perform Push & Pop in a stack.
#include &ltstdio.h>
#include &ltprocess.h>
void main()
{
 int choice2=0, choice1=0, i=0, choice=0, stack[10], size=10, top=0, element=0;
 do
 {
  printf("%s", "Please enter the correct choice for the operation you want to perform: \n\n");
  printf("%s", "Enter 1 to push into the stack\n");
  printf("%s", "Enter 2 to pop from the stack\n");
  printf("%s", "Enter 3 to display the current stack condition\n");
  printf("%s", "Press any other key to exit\n\n");
  printf("%s", "Your choice: ");
  scanf("%d", &choice);
  if(choice==1)
  {
   if(top==size)
   {
    printf("\n\n%s\n\n", "OVERFLOW! EXITING!");
    goto a;
   }
   printf("\n\nProceeding with pushing of element...\n\n");
   printf("%s", "Please enter the element to be pushed: ");
   scanf("%d", &element);
   ++top;
   stack[top-1]=element;
   printf("\n\n%s\n\n", "Element pushed successfully!");
  }
  else if(choice==2)
  {
      if(top==0)
            {
                printf("\n\n%s\n\n", "UNDERFLOW! EXITING!");
                goto a;
            }
            printf("\n\nProceeding with popping of element...\n\n");
            printf("%s%d\n\n%s\n%s", "The element to be popped is: ", stack[top-1], "Are you sure? (Press 1 for yes, press any other key for no)", "Your choice: ");
            scanf("%d", &choice2);
   if(choice2==1)
   {
                --top;
                printf("\n\n%s\n\n", "Element popped successfully!");
   }
   else
                printf("%s\n\n", "Fine then.");
            goto a;
  }
  else if(choice==3)
  {
      printf("\n\nThe current stack status is displayed as below: ");
      for(i=0; i &lt top; i++)
                printf("%d\t", stack[i]);
            printf("\n\n");
  }
  else
  exit(0);
  a:
  printf("%s", "Do you want to perform any more operations? (1 for yes, press any other key to exit)\nYour choice: ");
  scanf("%d", &choice1);
 }while(choice1==1);
 getch();
}

Now that we have completely analysed stacks and their functioning, let us have a final look at a deeper programming concept related to stacks as below.

Minimisation of Overflow in Stacks

There is an essential difference between underflow and overflow while dealing with stacks. Underflow depends exclusively upon the given algorithm and the given input data, and hence there is no direct control by the programmer. Overflow, on the other hand, depends upon the arbitrary choice of the programmer for the amount of memory space reserved for each stack, and this choice does influence the number of times overflow may occur.

Generally speaking, the number of elements in a stack fluctuates as elements are added to or removed from a stack. Accordingly, the particular choice of the amount of memory for a given stack involves a time-space tradeoff. Specifically, initially reserving a great deal of space for each stack will decrease the number of times overflow may occur; However, this may be an expensive use of the space if most of the space is seldom used. On the other hand, reserving a small amount of space for each stack may increase the number of times overflow occurs; and the time required for resolving an overflow, such as by adding space to he stack, may be more expensive than the space saved.

Various techniques have been developed which modify the array representation of stack so that the amount of space reserved for a stack may be efficiently utilised. One such technique is using pointers within the array representation of stacks, also known as the linked list representation of stack. We will study that later.

And with this we finish our lesson on stacks. Hope you enjoyed it! See you later :)

Searching in Data Structures

2015-03-29T11:56:00.000+05:30

Hey Guys! How're you doing?
Today we would look at another data structure operation, performed on linear arrays; Searching. This operation can be imagined as a person trying to search for a record amongst a list of records. Naturally we would also try to perform our search in the fastest possible time. Hence let us study more about searching in data structure, along with the two different approaches we can follow to perform searching in data structures, namely Linear Search and Binary Search.

Introduction to Searching

Let DATA be a collection of data elements in memory, and suppose a specific ITEM of information is given. Searching refers to the operation of finding the location LOC of ITEM in DATA, or printing some message that ITEM does not appear there. The search is said to be successful if ITEM does appear in DATA and unsuccessful otherwise.

Frequently, one may want to add the element ITEM to DATA after an unsuccessful search for ITEM in DATA. One then uses a search and insertion algorithm, rather than simply a search algorithm. This would amount to searching and insertion operations combined. Hence we can see that apart from the search operation being used just for the sake of searching, it is also a prerequisite operation to various other useful data structure operations.

Now there are many different searching algorithms that can be used for the same purpose. The algorithm that one chooses generally depends on the way the information in DATA is organized. In this lesson, we shall study two different search algorithms, both with their own independent strengths and weaknesses, namely Linear and Binary Search.

The complexity of searching algorithms is measured in terms of the number f(n) of the comparisons required to find ITEM in DATA where DATA consists of n elements. We shall show that while linear search is a linear time algorithm, but that binary search is a much more efficient algorithm, proportional in time to log n with the base 2.
On the other hand, we will also discuss the drawback of relying only on binary search algorithm.

Linear Search

Suppose DATA is a linear array with n elements. Given no other information about DATA, the most intuitive way to search for a given ITEM in DATA is to compare ITEM with each element of DATA, one by one. That is, first we test whether DATA[1]=ITEM, and then we test whether DATA[2]=ITEM, and so on. This method, which traverses DATA sequentially to locate ITEM, is called linear search or sequential search.
The algorithm for the same is given as following:

Algorithm for Linear Search

A linear array DATA with N elements and a specific ITEM to be found are given. This algorithm finds the location LOC of ITEM in the array DATA.

1. Set K=0, LOC=0 [Initialize]

2. Repeat steps 3 & 4 while LOC=0 and K<N

3. If ITEM=DATA[K], then set LOC:=K

4. Set K=K+1 [Increment counter]

5. [Start of If Structure]
If LOC=0, then write ITEM is not in the array
Else write LOC is the location of ITEM [Successful]
[End of If Structure]
6. EXIT

Now that we have a clear idea about Linear Search, let us spare some minutes to understand how its complexity is found out.

Complexity of Linear Search

Wait, wait.

Comes out that we have already discussed the complexity through an example in a previous post. You can see it here. However, for the sake of continuity and in my pursuit to have every lesson complete in all terms, I'll repeat myself here.

Suppose we are implementing an algorithm that helps us to search for an record amongst a list of records. We can have the following three cases which relate to the relative success our algorithm can achieve with respect to time:

Best Case: The record we are trying to search is the first record of the list. If f(n) is the function which gives the running time and/ or storage space requirement of the algorithm in terms of the size n of the input data, this particular case of the algorithm will produce a complexity C(n)=1 for our algorithm f(n) as the algorithm will run only 1 time until it finds the desired record.

Worst Case: The record we are trying to search is the last record of the list. If f(n) is the function which gives the running time and/ or storage space requirement of the algorithm in terms of the size n of the input data, this particular case of the algorithm will produce a complexity C(n)=n for our algorithm f(n) as the algorithm will run n times until it finds the desired record.

Average Case: The record we are trying to search can be any record in the list. In this case we do not know at which position it might be. Hence we take an average of all the possible times our algorithm may run. Hence assuming for n data, we have a probability of finding any one of them is 1/n. Multiplying each of these with the number of times our algorithm might run for finding each of them and then taking a sum of all those multiples, we can obtain the complexity C(n) for our algorithm f(n) in case of an average case as following:

Hence in this way, we can find the complexity of our linear search algorithm. Lets move on to Binary Search now.

Binary Search

Suppose DATA is a sorted linear array. Then there is a very efficient searching algorithm that exists for these kind of arrays, by the name Binary Search. Let us get an idea of the same through an example.

Suppose one wants to find the location of some name in a telephone directory (or some word in a dictionary). Obviously, one does not perform a linear search. Rather one opens the directory in the middle to determine which half contains the name being sought. Then one opens that half in the middle to determine which quarter of the directory contains the name. Then one opens that quarter in the middle to determine which eighth of the directory contains the name. And so on. Eventually one finds the location of the name, since one is reducing the number of the possible locations for it in the directory. Binary Search follows the same approach in practise.

The Binary Search Algorithm applied to our array DATA works as following.

During each stage of our Algorithm, our search for ITEM is reduced to a segment of elements of DATA.

DATA[BEG], DATA[BEG+1], DATA[BEG+2],..., DATA[END]

Note that variables BEG and END denote, respectively, the beginning and end location of the segment under consideration. The algorithm compares ITEM with the middl element DATA[MID] of the segment, where MID is obtained by

MID=INT((BEG+END)/2)

(We use INT(A) for the integer value of A)

If DATA[MID] = ITEM, then the search is successful and we set LOC := MID. Otherwise a new segment of DATA is obtained as following:

If ITEM < DATA[MID], then ITEM can appear only in the left half of the segment. So we reset END := MID-1 an begin searching again as below:

DATA[BEG], DATA[BEG+1],...,, DATA[MID-1]

If ITEM > DATA[MID], then item can only appear in the right half of the segment. So we reset BEG := MID+1 and begin searching again as below:

DATA[MID+1], DATA[MID+2], ... , DATA[END]

Initially we began with the entire array DATA, ie. we begin with BEG=1 and END=n, or, more generally, with BEG=LB and END=UB.

If ITEM is not in DATA, then eventually we obtain

END < BEG

This condition signals that the search is unsuccessful.

Hence let us see the algorithm for Binary Search.

Algorithm for Binary Search

Here DATA is a sorted array with lower bound LB and upper bound UB, and ITEM is a given item of information. The variables BEG, END and MID denote, respectively, the beginning, end and middle locations of a segment of elements of DATA. This algorithm finds the location LOC of ITEM in DATA or displays an "Element Not Found" message.

BINARY(DATA, LB, UB, ITEM, LOC)

1. Set BEG := LB, END := UB and MID = INT((BEG+END)/2). [Initialize segment variables.]

2. Repeat steps 3 and 4 while BEG <= END and DATA[MID] != ITEM.

3. If ITEM < DATA[MID], then

Set END := MID - 1

Else

Set BEG := MID + 1

[End of If Structure]

4. Set MID := INT((BEG+END)/2)

[End of Step 2 Loop]

5. If DATA[MID] = ITEM, then set LOC := MID.

Else display a "Element Not Found" message.

[End of If Structure]

6. EXIT.

Now that we have a fair idea of Binary Search Algorithm, let us calculate its complexity.

Complexity of Binary Search

The complexity is measured by the number f(n) of comparisons to locate ITEM in DATA where DATA contains n elements. Observe that each comparison reduces the sample size in half. Hence we require at most at most f(n) comparisons to locate ITEM where

That is, the running time for the worst case is approximately equal to log n with the base 2. Consequently, as this algorithm works, one might also understand the running time for the average case is approximately equal to the running time for the worst case, the complexity for which we just calculated above.

Now that we have studied both the algorithms and their respective complexities, let us have a look at their respective advantages and disadvantages.

When NOT to use Binary Search?

Since the binary search algorithm is very efficient ( eg. it requires only about 20 comparisons with an initial list of 1,000,000 elements), why would one want to use any other search algorithm? Observe that the algorithm requires two conditions:

The list must be sorted
One must have direct access to the middle element in any sublist

This means that one must essentially use a sorted array to hold the data. But keeping data in a sorted array is normally very expensive when there are many insertions and deletions. Accordingly, in such situations, one may use a different data structure, such as a linked list, which take very less time for insertions or deletions and also have their middle element directly accessible.

With this let us have a look at their codes (implementation) in computers.

Linear Search in C


//Shubham Mehta, Write a program to perform linear search on an array
#include &ltstdio.h>
void main()
{
 int arr[100], i=0, num=0, digits=0, element;
 printf("%s\n", "Please enter the numeric array (PRESS 10101 TO TERMINATE) : ");
 for(i=0; num!=10101; i++)
 {
  scanf("%d", &num);
  arr[i]=num;
  ++digits;
 }
 --digits;
 printf("\n\n%s\n", "So the entered numeric array is as following: \n");
 for(i=0; i<digits; i++)
 printf("%d\t", arr[i]);
 printf("\n\nPlease enter the element you want to search for: ");
 scanf("%d", &element);
 for(i=0; i<digits; i++)
 {
  if(arr[i]==element)
  goto a;
  else
  continue;
 }
 printf("%s", "The entered element is not found, exiting!");
 getch();
 exit(0);
 a:
 printf("%s%d", "The entered element is found at index ", (i+1));
 getch();
}

Binary Search in C (using loops/ iteration)


//Shubham Mehta, Write a program to perform binary search using iteration on an array.
#include &ltstdio.h>
#include &ltprocess.h>
void main()
{
 int arr[100], i=0, num=0, digits=0, j=0, temp=0, element=0, beg=0, mid=0, last=0, index=0, flag=0;
 printf("%s\n", "Please enter the numeric array (Enter 10101 to terminate) : ");
 for(i=0; ; i++)
 {
  scanf("%d", &num);
  if(num==10101)
  break;
  else
  {
   arr[i]=num;
   ++digits;
  }
 }
 printf("\n\nSorting the numeric array...");
 for(i=0; i &lt (digits-1); i++)
 {
  for(j=(i+1); j<digits; j++)
  {
   if(arr[i]>arr[j])
   {
    temp=arr[j];
    arr[j]=arr[i];
    arr[i]=temp;
   }
  }
 }
 printf("%s", "\nHence the entered numeric array is: \n\n");
 for(i=0; i<digits; i++)
 printf("%d\t", arr[i]);
 printf("\n\nEnter the element you want to search for: ");
 scanf("%d", &element);
 printf("\n\nPerforming binary search...\n\n");
 beg=0, last=digits, mid=(beg+last)/2;
 while(beg &lt =last)
 {
  if(element &lt arr[mid])
  last=(mid-1);
  else if(element>arr[mid])
  beg=(mid+1);
  if(element==arr[mid])
  {
   index=mid;
   goto a;
  }
  mid=(beg+last)/2;
 }
        printf("%s", "Element not found, exiting!");
        getch();
        exit(0);
 a:
 printf("%s%d\n\n", "Hence the element being searched for lies at index number ", (index+1));
 getch();
}

Binary Search in C (using recursion)


//Shubham Mehta, Write a program to perform binary search on an array using recursion.
#include &lt stdio.h>
#include &lt process.h>
int arr[100];
int retindex(int, int, int);
void main()
{
 int i=0, num=0, digits=0, j=0, temp=0, element=0, beg=0, mid=0, last=0, index=0, flag=0;
 printf("%s\n", "Please enter the numeric array (Enter 10101 to terminate) : ");
 for(i=0; ; i++)
 {
  scanf("%d", &num);
  if(num==10101)
  break;
  else
  {
   arr[i]=num;
   ++digits;
  }
 }
 printf("\n\nSorting the numeric array...\nHence the entered numeric array is: \n\n");
 for(i=0; i &lt (digits-1); i++)
 {
  for(j=(i+1); j <digits; j++)
  {
   if(arr[i]>arr[j])
   {
    temp=arr[j];
    arr[j]=arr[i];
    arr[i]=temp;
   }
  }
 }
 for(i=0; i<digits; i++)
 printf("%d\t", arr[i]);
 printf("\n\nEnter the element you want to search for: ");
 scanf("%d", &element);
 printf("\n\nPerforming binary search...\n\n");
 beg=0, last=digits, mid=(beg+last)/2;
 index=retindex(element, beg, last);
 if(index==-1)
        printf("%s", "Element not found, exiting!");
 else
        printf("%s%d\n\n", "Hence the element being searched for lies at index number ", (index+1));
        getch();
}
int retindex(int ele, int be, int la)
{
        int mid=(be+la)/2;
        if(ele &lt arr[mid])
        return retindex(ele, be, (mid-1));
        else if(ele>arr[mid])
        return retindex(ele, (mid+1), la);
        return mid;
}

With this we finish our lesson on Searching as a Data Operation on Linear Arrays. Hope you learnt something that'll help you in life. Take care and stay tuned for the next lesson :)

Traversal, Insertion & Deletion in Arrays

2015-03-24T09:03:00.000+05:30

Hello people! How are you?
In this lesson we would be performing insertion, deletion and traversal in an array. These are pretty straight forward data structure operations which I do not think you guys would have much difficulty in understanding. Hence lets get started!

Traversal

Let A be the collection of data elements stored in the memory of computer. Suppose we want to print the contents of each element of A or suppose we want to count the number of elements of A with a given property. This can be achieved by traversing A, that is, by accessing and processing each element of A exactly once.

The following algorithm traverses a linear array LA. The simplicity of algorithm comes from the fact that LA is a linear structure. Other linear structures such as linked lists can also be easily traversed. On the other hand, the traversal of non-linear data structures such as trees and graphs is considerably more complicated.

Algorithm: Traversal of a Linear Array

Here LA is a linear array with lower bound LB and upper bound UB. This algorithm traverses LA applying an operation PROCESS to each element of LA.

1. Set K:=LB [Initialize counter]

2. Repeat steps 3 and 4 while K<= UB

3. Apply PROCESS to LA[K]. [Visit element]

4. Set K:=K+1 [Increase counter,]

[End of Step 2 Loop]

5. Exit.

Insertion & Deletion

Let A be a collection of data elements in the memory of computer. "Inserting" refers to the operation of adding another element to the collection A, and "Deleting" refers to the operation of removing one of the elements from A. This section discusses inserting and deleting when A is the linear array.

Inserting an element at the "end" of the linear array can be easily done provided the memory space allocated for the array is large enough to accommodate the additional element. On the other hand, suppose we need to insert an element in the middle of the array, then, on the average, half of the elements must be moved upwards to new locations to accommodate the new element and keep the order of the other elements.

Similarly, deleting an element at the "end" of an array presents no difficulties, but deleting an element somewhere in the middle of an array would require that each subsequent element be moved one location downwards in order to "fill" up the array.

Algorithm: Insertion in a Linear Array

Here LA is a linear array with N elements and K is a positive integer such that K<=N. This algorithm inserts an element ITEM into the Kth position in LA.

INSERT(LA, N, K, ITEM)

1. Set J:=N. [Initialize counter]

2. Repeat steps 3 & 4 while J>=K.

3. Set LA[J+1]:=LA[J] [Move Jth element upwards]

4. Set J:=J-1. [Decrease counter]

[End of Step 2 Loop]

5. Set LA[K] := ITEM. [Insert element]

6. Set N:=N+1 [Reset N]

7. Exit.

Algorithm: Deletion in a Linear Array

Here LA is a linear array with N elements and K is a positive integer such that K<=N. This algorithm deletes the Kth element from the LA.

DELETE(LA, N, K, ITEM)

1. Set ITEM:=LA[K].

2. Repeat for J=K to N-1.

Set LA[J]:=LA[J+1] [Move J+1st element upward.]

[End of Step 2 Loop.]

3. Set N:=N-1. [Reset the number N of elements in LA.]

4. Exit.

Now that we have completed the theoretical analysis of all the three operations, let us have a look at the code for the three operations!


//Shubham Mehta, Write a program to perform insertion, deletion and traversal on an array.
#include &ltstdio.h>
#include &ltconio.h>
void main()
{
 int i, choice1, no, arr[500], choice2, operation, index, dummy;
 clrscr();
 printf("%s", "Please enter the appropriate code: \n\nEnter 1 for Traversal\nEnter 2 for Insertion\nEnter 3 for Deletion\n\nYour Choice: ");
 scanf("%d", &choice1);
 printf("%s", "\nPlease enter the number of elements you want to enter in your array: ");
 scanf("%d", &no);
 printf("%s", "\nPlease enter the elements of the array: \n\n");
 for(i=1; i<=no; i++)
 scanf("%d", &arr[i]);
 if(choice1==1)
 {
  printf("%s", "\n\nPerforming Traversal\n\n");
  printf("%s", "Which Operation do you want to perform with the array? (Enter the respective code)\nEnter 1 for Addition\nEnter 2 for Subtraction\nEnter 3 for Multiplication\nEnter 4 for Division\n\nYour Choice: ");
  scanf("%d", &choice2);
  if(choice2==1)
  {
   printf("Enter the number to be added: ");
   scanf("%d", &operation);
   printf("%s", "\n\nHence the revised array is: \n");
   for(i=1; i<=no; i++)
   {
    arr[i]=arr[i]+operation;
    printf("%d\n", arr[i]);
   }
  }
  else if(choice2==2)
  {
   printf("Enter the number to be subtracted: ");
   scanf("%d", &operation);
   printf("%s", "\n\nHence the revised array is: \n");
   for(i=1; i<=no; i++)
   {
    arr[i]=arr[i]-operation;
    printf("%d\n", arr[i]);
   }
  }
  else if(choice2==3)
 {
   printf("Enter the number to be multiplied: ");
   scanf("%d", &operation);
   printf("%s", "\n\nHence the revised array is: \n");
   for(i=1; i<=no; i++)
   {
    arr[i]=arr[i]*operation;
    printf("%d\n", arr[i]);
   }
  }
  else if(choice2==4)
  {
   printf("Enter the number to be divided by: ");
   scanf("%d", &operation);
   printf("%s", "\n\nHence the revised array is: \n");
   for(i=1; i<=no; i++)
   {
    arr[i]=arr[i]/operation;
    printf("%d\n", arr[i]);
   }
  }
  else
  {
   printf("%s", "Wrong choice entered, exiting!");
  }
 }
 else if(choice1==2)
 {
  printf("%s", "\n\nPerforming insertion\n\n");
  printf("%s", "Enter the element you want to insert: ");
  scanf("%d", &operation);
  printf("%s%d%s", "\nEnter the index you want to enter this number at (smaller than or equal to ", no, "): ");
  scanf("%d", &index);
  for(i=(no+1); i>index; i--)
  {
   dummy=arr[i];
   arr[i]=arr[i-1];
   arr[i-1]=dummy;
  }
  arr[i]=operation;
  no++;
  printf("%s", "\n\nHence the revised array is: \n\n");
  for(i=1; i<=no; i++)
  printf("%d\n", arr[i]);
 }
 else if(choice1==3)
 {
  printf("%s", "\n\nPerforming deletion\n\n");
  printf("Enter the index at which you want to delete (smaller than equal to ", no, "): ");
  scanf("%d", &index);
  for(i=index; i<=no; i++)
  arr[i]=arr[i+1];
  no--;
  printf("%s", "\n\nHence the revised array is: \n\n");
  for(i=1; i<=no; i++)
  printf("%d\n", arr[i]);
 }
 else
 {
  printf("Wrong choice entered, exiting!");
 }
 getch();
}

And with this we finish our analysis of three of the data structure operations on linear arrays. Stay tuned for even more operations like searching and sorting. Take care :)

Algorithms, Complexity and Space-Time Tradeoff

2015-03-22T21:15:00.000+05:30

Hey guys! How're you doing!
Today we will go through another conceptual topic of Algorithms and the related terminologies like Space-Time Tradeoff and Complexity of an algorithm. Hence lets get started!

Algorithms

An algorithm is a well defined list of steps for solving a particular problem. Starting from an initial state, an algorithm states the instructions needed to describe a computation that proceeds through a well-defined series of successive states, eventually terminating in a final ending state. There may be more than one algorithm to solve a particular problem.
Given below is an algorithm gives the required steps required by a temperature sensor to measure and display temperature on an attached LED screen.

Complexity and Space-Time Tradeoff

The complexity of an algorithm is the function which gives the running time and/ or space in term of input size. In simple words, the complexity of an algorithm refers to how fast or slow a particular algorithm performs. We define complexity as a numerical function T(n) - time versus the input size n.
Further, each of our algorithm will involve a particular data structure. Accordingly we may not always be able to use the most efficient algorithm, since the choice of data structure depends on many things including the type of data and the frequency with which various data operations are applied.

How to find the complexity of an algorithm?

Let us understand this with the help of an example. Suppose we are implementing an algorithm that helps us to search for an record amongst a list of records. We can have the following three cases which relate to the relative success our algorithm can achieve with respect to time:

Best Case: The record we are trying to search is the first record of the list. If f(n) is the function which gives the running time and/ or storage space requirement of the algorithm in terms of the size n of the input data, this particular case of the algorithm will produce a complexity C(n)=1 for our algorithm f(n) as the algorithm will run only 1 time until it finds the desired record.
Worst Case: The record we are trying to search is the last record of the list. If f(n) is the function which gives the running time and/ or storage space requirement of the algorithm in terms of the size n of the input data, this particular case of the algorithm will produce a complexity C(n)=n for our algorithm f(n) as the algorithm will run n times until it finds the desired record.
Average Case: The record we are trying to search can be any record in the list. In this case we do not know at which position it might be. Hence we take an average of all the possible times our algorithm may run. Hence assuming for n data, we have a probability of finding any one of them is 1/n. Multiplying each of these with the number of times our algorithm might run for finding each of them and then taking a sum of all those multiples, we can obtain the complexity C(n) for our algorithm f(n) in case of an average case as following:

Hence in this way, we can find the complexity of an algorithm.

The time and space it uses are two major measures of the efficiency of an algorithm. Sometimes the choice of data structure involves a space-time tradeoff; by increasing the amount of space for storing the data one may be able to reduce the time needed for processing the data or vice versa. Hence let us look over them in detail:

Space Complexity: It is also known as memory requirement. The space complexity of an algorithm is the amount of memory it needs to run to completion. We would usually want our algorithm to take the least possible memory for operation, however in more powerful machines more resources are usually allocated for the operation in order to reduce the time taken.
Time Complexity: It is also known as performance requirement. Time Complexity is calculated of referred in instances when we may be interested to know in advance whether the program will provide a satisfactory real time response or not. There may be several possible solutions to a problem with different time requirements or with different time complexity. Time complexity is heavily taken care of in cases when an algorithm needs to be modeled to be run on even the least powerful machines.

How to balance the two then?

The best algorithm to solve a given problem is one that requires less space in memory and takes less time to complete its execution. But in practice it is not always possible to achieve both these objectives. As we know there may be more then one approach to solve a particular problem. One approach may take more space but takes less time to complete its execution while the other approach may take less space but takes more time to complete its execution. We may have to sacrifice one at the cost of the other. If space is our constraint, then we have to choose a program that requires less space at the cost of more execution time. On the other hand if time is our constraint then we have to choose a program that takes less time to complete its execution at the cost of more space.

And with that, we finish our today's lesson. I hope you learnt something with that. Stay tuned for more and take care :)

Data Structures | Introduction and Types

2015-03-22T16:46:00.000+05:30

Hello everyone! Today we are going to start with a new topic in general. Data Structures! Hence lets get started with an introduction!

What is a Data Structure?

While Data refers to values or simply a set of values, Information refers to meaningful or processed data. Data may be organized in many different ways. The logical or mathematical model of a particular organization of data is called a data structure. The choice of a particular data model depends upon two considerations, as following:

It must be rich enough in structure to mirror the actual relationship of data in the real world.
The structure should be simple enough that one can process the data when necessary.

Types of Data Structures

Data Structures can be classified into the above subgroups. Lets us know more about the what and why of the above classification.

Primitive Data Structures

These are those data structures that fit the base architecture of a given computer. Primitive data are only single values that don't have any special capabilities. Primitive Data Types can further be classified into:

Integers: represents integral data type, the mathematical integers that you might already be familiar with. Integral data types may be of different sizes and may or may not be allowed to contain negative values.
Float: represents decimal numbers. The level of precision (number of digits that can be stored behind the decimal point) varies from system to system again.

To represent 2, you'd choose an integer data type. To represent 2.3, you'd choose a float data type.

Characters: represent the set of alphabets and special characters.
Pointers: are used to point to another value stored elsewhere in the computer memory using its address. A pointer references a location in memory, and obtaining the value stored at that location is known as dereferencing the pointer. As a result, pointers store memory addresses.

As an analogy, a page number in a book's index could be considered a pointer to the corresponding page; dereferencing such a pointer would be done by flipping to the page with the given page number.

Non-Primitive Data Types

These are those data structures that are derived from Primary/Primitive Data Structures. Non -Primitive Data Types are used to store a group of values. They can be further classified into:

Arrays: This is the simplest type of Data Structure. By a linear array we mean a list of finite members n of similar data elements referenced respectively by a set of n consecutive numbers. Usually 1, 2, 3...n. If we choose the name A for the array, then the elements of A are denoted by the subscript notation a₁, a₂, a₃…a_nor by the bracket notation A[1], A[2], A[3]...A[n].
Linked Lists: are Data Structures consisting of a group of nodes which together represent a sequence. Each node is composed of a data and a reference to the next node in the sequence. This structure allows for a very efficient insertion or removal of elements from any positing in the sequence.
Trees: Data frequently contains a hierarchical relationship between various elements. The Data Structure which reflects this relationship is called a Tree.
Stacks: A stack, also called a Last In First Out (LIFO) Data Structure, is a linear list in which insertions and deletions can take place only at one end. This structure is similar in its operation to a stack of dishes as shown below. Note that new dishes are inserted only at the top of the stack and dishes can be deleted only from the top of the stack.
Queue: A queue, also called a First In First Out (FIFO) Data Structure, is a linear list in which deletions can take place only at one end of the list, the FRONT of the list and insertions can take place only at the other end of the list, the REAR of the list. The structure operates in much the same way as a line of people waiting at a bus stop as pictured in the figure. The first person in line is the first person to board the bus.
Graphs: Data sometimes contains a relationship between pairs of elements which is not necessarily hierarchical in nature. For example

Data Structure Operations

The data appearing in our Data Structure is processed by means of certain operations. In fact, the particular Data Structure that one chooses for a given situation depends largely on the frequency with which specific operations are performed. Given below are some of the most frequently given Data Structure Operations:

Traversing: Accessing each record exactly once so that certain items in the record may be processed.
Searching: Finding the location of the record with the given key value, or finding the location of all records which satisfy one or more conditions.
Inserting: Adding a new record to the structure.
Deleting: Removing a record from the structure.

Sometimes two or more of the operations may be used in some situations. For example we may want to delete a record with a given key, which may mean we first need to search for the location of the record and then delete it.

The following two operations which are used in special situations should also be considered.

Sorting: Arranging the record in some logical order. Can be alphabetical, numerical, etc. order.
Merging: Combining the record in two different sorted files into a single sorted file.

And with this, we finish our basic introductory lesson in data structures. I really hope you enjoyed it. I'll be looking forward to seeing you again in a new related lesson soon in the future. Take care :)

Bresenham’s Circle Algorithm

2015-03-19T06:43:00.000+05:30

Hey guys!
Today we will be learning another approach to drawing circles in Computer Graphics. Basically another approach to the same task we tackled in the previous post. Bresenham’s Circle Algorithm follows the footsteps of Midpoint Circle Algorithm, both working for the same purpose in slightly different ways. Let us see how.

Let us start with the equation of the circle, as here

One thing we must keep in mind is that a circle can be assumed to be symmetrical among octants. Hence we could (and do) calculate pixel coordinates for only one octant to plot and the rest could be obtained via symmetry. We can see the diagram for the same here:

Hence in this lesson, we will perform all our operations for the quadrant lying between 45 to 90 degrees. The slope is < 1 in this region. Hence we will have to introduce unit increments along X Axis at every iteration while calculating the increment along Y for the same.

Further, this algorithm is based on the fact that

the value of the Y coordinate remains the same for the subsequent iteration

the value of Y coordinate is decreased by unit amount

Hence if the initial points for a calculation are (x_k, y_k), the subsequent points we can have according to our subsequent calculations, can only be either

(x_k+1, y_k), or
(x_k+1, y_k-1)

Hence, the magnitude of the two distances of the two different pixel positions from the projected path of circle, according to the following diagram

leaves us with the following two equations for the subsequent points at each iteration we could choose

Now to obtain a decision parameter p_k, we add up the above two equations and obtain the expression

Now that we have the expression for p_k, we can obtain the expression for p₀. We would do so by replacing x_k, y_k by (0,r), as we start plotting our circle from this coordinate. By doing so, we get

So now we have the initial coordinates needed to plot, the initial decision parameter to decide upon the subsequent coordinates to be plotted. Let us make some decisions then!

if p_k(or p₀) < 0, d₁is lesser than d₂. Hence the subsequent pixel coordinates for the next point to plot will be (x_k+1, y_k) and the expression for the subsequent decision parameter will be
if p_k(or p₀) > 0, d₁is greater than d₂. Hence the subsequent pixel coordinates for the next point to plot will be (x_k+1, y_k-1) and the expression for the subsequent decision parameter will be

And with that we complete our theoretical analysis of Bresenham's Circle Algorithm. Let us see its code implementation.

//Shubham Mehta, Write a program to implement Bresenham's Circle Algorithm.
#include <stdio.h>
#include <conio.h>
#include <graphics.h>
void main()
{
 int gd=DETECT,gm;
 int radius, x0, y0, x, y, pk;
 initgraph(&gd, &gm, "C:\\TC\\BGI");
 printf("%s", "Enter the radius of the circle: ");
 scanf("%d", &radius);
 printf("%s", "Enter the coordinates of the center...\nX: ");
 scanf("%d", &x0);
 printf("%s", "Y: ");
 scanf("%d", &y0);
 pk=3-2*radius;
 x=0;
 y=radius;
 while(x<=y)
 {
  if(pk>0)
  {
   x++;
   y--;
   pk=pk+4*x-4*y+10;
   putpixel(x+x0,y+y0,WHITE);
   putpixel(y+x0,x+y0,WHITE);
   putpixel(-x+x0,-y+y0,WHITE);
   putpixel(-x+x0,y+y0,WHITE);
   putpixel(-y+x0,-x+y0,WHITE);
   putpixel(x+x0,-y+y0,WHITE);
   putpixel(-y+x0,x+y0,WHITE);
   putpixel(y+x0,-x+y0,WHITE);
  } 
  if(pk<0)
  {
   x++;
   y=y;
   pk=pk+4*x+6;
   putpixel(x+x0,y+y0,WHITE);
   putpixel(y+x0,x+y0,WHITE);
   putpixel(-x+x0,-y+y0,WHITE);
   putpixel(-x+x0,y+y0,WHITE);
   putpixel(-y+x0,-x+y0,WHITE);
   putpixel(x+x0,-y+y0,WHITE);
   putpixel(-y+x0,x+y0,WHITE);
   putpixel(y+x0,-x+y0,WHITE);
  }
 }
 getch();
 closegraph();
}

With that, we complete our lesson on Bresenham's Circle Algorithm. You may see the references here. Hope I made some things clear. For any doubts, feel free to contact me in the comments. See you later :)

Graphic Design | Midpoint Circle Algorithm

2015-03-16T14:38:00.000+05:30

Hi guys! How're you doing?
If you've been following me, we have studied of two methods that help us in drawing a line; The DDA and Bresenham Line Algorithm. We would now want to hence extend our knowledge and draw different things, more complex than a line, isn't it? Here you have it, today we would learn about a method to draw circle. The Mid-Point Circle Algorithm!
First let us possibly stop and imagine at this point how we would like to proceed.
A circle is defined as the set of points that are all at a given distance r from a centre position (x, y). The equation for the same is as following:

Just as we did in the last two methods, where we drew a line, we can use this equation, the characteristic equation of the curve we want to plot again and assuming values for one variable, derive values of the other in the following manner:

Also, another possible manner in which we might proceed is by using the polar coordinates for plotting a circle. Recall them from your High School lessons.

So right here, you looked at two possible methods on plotting a circle and still I demand that we do not plot using either of them. Rather its not not even I, anyone who is sensible enough will demand the same. Why?
Determining pixel positions along a circle circumference using either Method 1 or 2 still requires a good deal of computation time. The equation from Method 1 involves multiplications and square root calculations, while the parametric equations in Method 2 contain multiplications and trigonometric calculations. More efficient circle algorithms are based on incremental calculation of decision parameters, as in the Bresenham line algorithm, which involves only simple integral addition or subtraction operations,
Hence we find and take a Method 3, which will not involve the disadvantages we discussed above.

Midpoint Circle Algorithm

To form a brief introduction of the algorithm we are about to study, we perform unit increments along one axis while calculating the respective increment for the other axis, in accordance with the closest pixel position to the specified circle path at each step. Initially we assume the centre of the Cartesian plane, the origin, as the centre of our circle. Hence for a given radius r and screen centre position ( x , y,), we can first set up our algorithm to calculate pixel positions around a circle path centred at the coordinate origin (0,0).
Now as we now have performed the required calculations, we then need to move each calculated position (x, y) to its proper screen position by adding x, to x and y, to y. Along the circle section from x = 0 to x = y in the first quadrant, the slope of the curve varies from 0 to -1. Therefore, we can take unit steps in the positive x direction over this octant and use a decision parameter to determine which of the two possible y positions is closer to the circle path at each step. Positions in the other seven octants are then obtained by symmetry as shown here:

To apply the midpoint method, we define a circle function:

Just like we did in the earlier algorithms, after the point where we have the initial coordinates and the equation of the curve we wish to plot, we look forward to obtaining a simple binary variable called the decision parameter. Any point (x , y) on the boundary of the circle with radius r satisfies the above equation. If the point is inside the circle, the above circle function is negative. If the point is outside the circle, the above circle function is positive. To summarize, the relative position of any point (x, y) can be determined by checking the sign of the circle function as below:

Now maintaining an analogy with our previous lessons, what we achieved just above was the expression for the initial decision parameter. For performing subsequent calculations, we need to calculate the expression for subsequent decision parameters. To do so, we perform the following derivation using the following image for reference:

Assuming we have just plotted the pixel at (x_k, y_k), we next need to determine whether the pixel at position (x_k+1, y_k) or the one at position (x_k+1, y_k-1) is closer to the circle. The above diagram shows the midpoint between those two candidate pixels at sampling position x_k+1. Our new decision parameter is the circle function evaluated at the midpoint between these two pixels:

At this point as you might be able to see, we have the expressions for both p_k and p_k+1. Let us finish this up.

To find the decision parameter for the initial calculation, p₀, we substitute x_k=0 and y_k=r in the expression for p_ksince we plotted our first point at the coordinates (0,r). Hence:

Having the initial coordinates to plot and the initial decision parameter to decide future points to be plotted, we know are left with only finding the requisite decision parameter for each subsequent calculation and the appropriate increment in X and Y axes. Hence:

if p_k (or p₀) < 0 we increment along X Axis keeping the Y Coordinate the same. So x_k+1 = x_k + 1 while y_k+1 = y_k. The expression for p_k+1 is
if p_k (or p₀) > 0 we increment along both the X and the Y Axes. So x_k+1 = x_k + 1 and y_k+!=y_k+1. The expression for p_k+1 is

Having obtained all of the required coordinates for the circle we wanted to form, the only thing left now is translating these very same coordinates to the required location. This is done by adding the distance we want to shift each point of the circle with in the original coordinate. Hence assuming the circle coordinates to be of the form (x,y) and (x_c, y_c) being the coordinates of the centre about which our actual circle is meant to be produced, we perform this last set of manipulations

With this we finish the conceptual and theoretical part of Midpoint Circle Algorithm. Let us revise the algorithm before moving on to see its implementation.

Moving on towards its implementation in C, we can use the code as following and see it for ourselves how it performs.


//Shubham Mehta, Write a program to implement Midpoint Circle Algorithm.
#include <iostream.h>
#include <conio.h>
#include <graphics.h>
void main()
{
 int gd=DETECT,gm;
 initgraph(&gd, &gm, "C:\\TC\\bgi"); 
 float r,x0,y0,x,y,pk;
 cout<<"Enter the radius of the circle: ";
 cin>>r;
 cout<<"Enter the center...";
 cout<<"X Coordinate: ";
 cin>>x0;
 cout<<"Y Coordinate: ";
 cin>>y0;
 pk=1.25-r;
 x=0;
 y=r;
 while(x<=y)
 {
  if(pk>0)
  {
   x++;
   y--;
   pk=pk+2*x-2*y+1;
   putpixel(x+x0,y+y0,WHITE);
   putpixel(y+x0,x+y0,WHITE);
   putpixel(-x+x0,-y+y0,WHITE);
   putpixel(-x+x0,y+y0,WHITE);
   putpixel(-y+x0,-x+y0,WHITE);
   putpixel(x+x0,-y+y0,WHITE);
   putpixel(-y+x0,x+y0,WHITE);
   putpixel(y+x0,-x+y0,WHITE);
  }
  if(pk<0)
  {
   x++;
   y=y;
   pk=pk+2*x+1;
   putpixel(x+x0,y+y0,WHITE);
   putpixel(y+x0,x+y0,WHITE);
   putpixel(-x+x0,-y+y0,WHITE);
   putpixel(-x+x0,y+y0,WHITE);
   putpixel(-y+x0,-x+y0,WHITE);
   putpixel(x+x0,-y+y0,WHITE);
   putpixel(-y+x0,x+y0,WHITE);
   putpixel(y+x0,-x+y0,WHITE);
  }
 }
 getch();
 closegraph();
}

With that, we complete our lesson on Midpoint Circle Algorithm. Hope you really learned something. You may see the references here. See you later. Take care :)