Table of Contents
Learning Objectives
- Objective #1 – How much is a PPC professional worth?
- Objective #2 – Differentiating between types of PPC expertise
- Objective #3 – Working with a PPC professional
Part A - The Value of PPC Expertise
A single PPC professional could add millions in additional revenue to your business and spread your organization to a global audience. This person will develop deep insight into how and why your customers buy from you. They will understand what your audiences are searching for and the levers that drive them to buy.
Working in the PPC industry has some of the best pay, nicest benefits, and most flexibility of any industry. Not to mention that the work itself is fascinating. The knowledge and skills are in high demand and all types of organizations are recruiting for PPC roles.
The average PPC salary can start around $55k/year in the US (but remember that this is a global role), that’s in high demand across t’s not rare to see salaries in the $150k range. This very much depends on the size of the budgets and the depth/scope of the role.
Much more can be earned if using PPC to grow our own businesses. Many PPC roles are even remote, meaning that high quality talent can be sourced from anywhere. PPC touches all parts of the globe. It’s a truly international career with no limits to where it can take you.
Part B - Do You Need a PPC Professional?
Finding a new member of your team to handle PPC is a big investment and even bigger decision.
Your PPC champion will build powerful insight into what mediums best influence the shopping journey for your industry.
Hiring the right PPC specialist has a lot to do with which channels dominate your strategy and the kind of PPC expertise you need.
The Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Manager or Paid Search Specialist is what generally comes to mind when people think of hiring for PPC.
The SEM role is for someone who purely deal with search engines, such as Google and Bing. There’s often some cross over with Organic Search, which play by an entirely different set of rules to PPC.
The channel specialist includes a narrow focus with other PPC mediums too, like paid social, display, programmatic, video or affiliate marketing.
There are also people who focus entirely on one platform, like Google Ads or Facebook Ads.
The Paid Media Generalist has a wider scope than the SEM Manager, Paid Social or any other channel specialist.
They are very similar to digital marketing managers except that they tend deal specifically with paid channels, whereas earned and owned channels will usually sit with a different remit.
Because the generalist is usually involved with 2+ channels, they are uniquely positioned to leverage multi-channel attribution tools for a better understand of how storytelling, branding and acquisition is achieved across several mediums.
They are usually one step removed from execution, and tend to lean on agencies, vendors, freelancers, and/or other forms of outsourcing to execute channel tactics.
The Growth Hacker of Growth Marketer has a mandate to quickly scale a business (usually at a reasonable ROI). Others are commissioned to quick capture market share (sometimes at the expense of short term ROI).
They are often found in startup and scale-up organizations looking to grow from $0 to the $10M+ revenue category.
The Growth Hacker also has a wider scope than the channel specialist. They usually understand enough about each channel to launch a test strategy or at least source the right expertise.
Their main value is in creating scalable processes for their organization while testing and finding success on new channels.
They can work across paid and organic, but are most generally most effective when focused on one medium.
Growth Hackers tend to use creative, out-of-the-box thinking to come up with innovative and effective approaches to PPC marketing.
The Performance Marketer is there to improve efficiency in your PPC ad spend. They are passionate about improving the customer journey and enjoy optimizing conversion funnels.
Their impact could mean saving millions in acquisition costs or adding millions to customer life time value.
The Performance Marketer understands the levers of conversion rate optimization. They build systems that enhance the way their organization leverages data, personalization and automation.
They tend look at marketing from the bottom up, focusing on the operations, tactics and technology that move their KPIs.
Performance marketers measure and optimize paid marketing using different dashboards and web measurement tools such as Google Analytics.
They seek to continually improve campaigns performance through running tests, measuring results, learning, and iterating based on outcomes and KPIs.
Digital Marketing Managers generally have the widest scope among the PPC career paths.
They can have some or heavy involvement with PPC (usually determined by how heavy PPC weighs into the customer acquisition strategy), but usually oversee owned and earned media channels as well.
These professionals are driven by metrics and function through developing processes and leveraging team expertise, rather than the direct involvement that you might expect from a Channel Specialist or Paid Media Generalist.
Marketing Managers measure, optimize and report on campaign performance from an ROI and customer lifetime value perspective.
They oversee the short and long-term campaign expansion strategies and day-to-day tactics that increase traffic, leads, and buyers, and are responsible for delivering on revenue goals.
When to Start Looking For PPC Expertise
- You lack the expertise to setup technology and processes
- You need a dedicated person to manage campaigns
- Your budgets are too massive for one person to manage
- You require a deeper level of measurement and analysis
- Your growth or performance is stagnant and you need a refresh
- You’re entering a new market or need localization
- You need a website or landing page designer
- You need a display and/or creative specialist
- You need a video and/or YouTube specialist
- You need to test and implement new approaches
Part C - Hiring a PPC Agency
Hire an agency when you lack internal expertise, need strategic leadership. and/or need to outsource the elements of your PPC tactics. Agencies are generally a lower-cost option (10-15% of ad spend or billable labor hours) versus hiring a full-time PPC professional ($55k+ per year) until you reach certain budgets.
Keeping an agency as a strategic partner can be useful since they usually get a head start on new platform features and techniques, as well has having visibility across several markets and levels of marketing maturity.
Some agencies offer full-service management, meaning that they can handle your entire PPC strategy from A-Z, while others only manage specific functions within PPC, such as only working within search or display, or e-commerce vs. lead generation. The top agencies tend to have a direct relationship with an Account Manager from the major PPC platforms.
Your Account Manager owns the [Discover] process.
Their job is to align the PPC engine with the your business objectives. They understand your organization’s growth ambitions and are critical for translating how PPC can contribute to that success.
They’re constantly exploring opportunities in the industry that you serve and the PPC industry as a whole. Most importantly, they’re on top of your business KPIs.
The Account Manager serves as the bridge between an organization’s needs and how the PPC engine is performing.
They are the navigator of your PPC spaceship.
- Help clients and team members understand the role of various paid media channels in achieving their objectives.
- Maintain an understanding of industry trends and provide relevant insights to teams as to how they might affect client accounts.
- Ensure campaign alignment by collaborating, sharing, and receiving feedback from multiple teams.
- Provide timely updates to direct supervisor on account health and raise concerns about downward trends and client flags.
- Excellent communication, business acumen, and negotiation skills. Experience working in a fast-paced environment and skilled at exhibiting attention to detail.
- Collaborate with strategist to manage marketing tech stack and find opportunities to advance campaign measurement and customer insights.
- Translate business goals into media briefs to guide account strategy and execution teams in the development of campaigns.
- Develop positive rapport with vendors and cross-departmental colleagues
Your Account Strategist owns the [Setup] process.
Their job is to outline the PPC strategy, technology stack and tactical execution.
They are responsible for designing and implementing the pillars (for example, organization, measurement, infrastructure, targeting, content, automation) that will drive your PPC engine.
The Account Strategist can be hands on, but will often outsource elements of the execution to the relevant specialist so they can concentrate on the larger PPC ecosystem.
They are the captain of your PPC spaceship.
- Manage the entire marketing deliverable cycle including initial planning, creative briefing, implementation, monitoring, optimization, analysis and reporting.
- Generate weekly, monthly and quarterly performance reports and dashboards. Recognize and troubleshoot data anomalies.
- Understanding of cross-channel media planning including paid social, paid search, Programmatic, Content Integration, Online Video, High Impact Display, TV, Print, OOH.
- Develop and execute rigorous testing plans, collect data, and craft actionable insights for future testing.
- Seek out opportunities to automate and streamline campaign management and reporting processes.
- Understanding of the different bidding strategies and what best suits the goals of the organization.
- Build spend and return forecasts using internal and external projection tools.
- Research advertising social trends, competitor ads and feed into the digital strategy.
They own the [Optimize] process.
Their job is to maximize the PPC account performance.
They know what levers drive optimization and what levers drive growth.
They are usually directly involved with the website strategy, and play a key role in the ad copy and content development.
Their never-ending quest is to drive a more efficient ROAS while increasing volume.
They are the engineer of your PPC spaceship.
- Execution of PPC campaigns across search and social media platforms including Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, Tik Tok Ads and LinkedIn Ads.
- Responsible for optimizing messaging across audience segments and placement mix.
- Actively monitor paid media spend against budget. Allocate campaign investment according to most effective return on ad spend.
- Analyze performance metrics to diagnose root cause of performance fluctuations and apply necessary optimizations.
- Help review/set up conversion tracking, pixels and tags for proper integration of analytics tools.
- Provide weekly, monthly and quarterly recaps to account team with opportunities for optimization.
- Develop compelling brand and product messages based on storytelling, that connect with consumers through all digital channels. Develop ad copy and brief internal teams on digital assets and content needed.
- Knowledge working with digital/web analytics, A/B testing and marketing conversion practices.
Part D - Hiring a PPC Consultant
Use a consultant when you need an outside perspective or new set of eyeballs. They are best for when you lack specialized knowledge or need to evaluate in-house expertise.
Leverage consultants when there is stagnation in your growth or performance. Consultants generally charge by the hour or as a % of your advertising spend. As with anything in life, you get what you pay for.
Freelancers are best for temporarily fulfilling in `a tactical need, for example someone to write new ads, restructure campaigns, or other one-off optimization tasks. UpWork is an online marketplace where employers can post jobs and freelancers can look for work. Employers and freelancers can negotiate rates, but UpWork takes a cut of the final payment.
Final Thoughts...
Unfortunately, the PPC industry is notorious for its lack of diversity.
So I’m committed to working with partners who advocate fairness, equity and inclusion.
And serving communities who aren’t usually targeted as “valuable” audience, particularly in the Caribbean.
So I leave you with these thoughts:
Your PPC engine will eventually serve millions — for some companies, even billions — of ad impressions.
It’s fair to say that PPC is a conversation with every person who is served your ad.
So, If you could communicate with millions of people at the same time, what would you say?
If you could have several conversations at once, what are things you would talk about?
I have a few thoughts:
- How can we develop meaningful relationships with stakeholders, built delivering value for everyone involved?
- How can we offer more opportunities to vendors, employees and customers from communities generally underserved?
- How can we recruit from more diverse backgrounds and diverse experiences that better represent the world that we live in?
- How can we engage stakeholders with transformative experiences that go beyond monetary value?
- How can we highlight programs that are committed to elevating diversity?
- How can we foster more cooperation between change agents, social enterprises, nonprofits, community organizations, education, corporations and economics?
- How can we strive to empower others with the knowledge, skills and values to contribute to a more inclusive, just and peaceful world?