Table of Contents
Learning Objectives
- Objective #1 – `The skills required to do PPC well
- Objective #2 – PPC career and professional growth
- Objective #3 – Developing your PPC knowledge
Part A - Knowledge, Skills, Values & Attitudes
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads are running every second of every day. They reach billions of people globally. They generate billions in revenue for Google, Facebook, Amazon, YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn, Microsoft, and many of your other favorite websites and apps. Thousands of advertisers are leveraging the power of PPC to grow their business.
Whether you own a business, develop an app, run a charity, teach a skill, sell a product, or play an instrument, PPC can help you reach a global audience.
The PPC professional has a diverse and profound skill set. They are strategist, executive, analyst, designer, developer and support all-in-one. I outlined the following ‘pillars’ to cover the range of skills that are required to execute PPC well.
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Research
The skill to conduct research that uncovers insights about the functions, phenomena, and systems that drive your business (discovery, funnels, maturity) and macroeconomic trends that impact your industry (seasonality, demand, competitiveness).
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Funnels
An understanding of the way that people shop for products and services online (awareness, consideration and conversion) and offline (lead, opportunity, customer), and how to impact that journey.
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Strategy
The processes and systems that go into a deeper and wider scope of understanding and execution. I encourage every business that I work with to take the free digital maturity assessment offered by Google and Boston Consulting Group.
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Analytics
How to capture, store, process, analyze, and most importantly leverage data to make critical marketing and business decisions. In the information age, measurement is the key to digital success and knowing how to use an analytics software like Google Analytics 4 is an essential skill.
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Attribution
Literally, this refers to your ability to 'attribute' credit to the parts and interactions of your marketing engine (and organizational processes as a whole) that have the most impact. Weighing the touch points of your marketing funnel helps identify where best to allocate resources and energy.
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Accounts
Familiarity with the software and configurations needed to make PPC work. Even as PPC platforms lean towards more automation and simplicity, knowledge of what goes into the building blocks of a PPC engine is likely to remain an essential skill for the foreseeable future.
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Targeting
This is the who, what, where, when, why and how of your target audiences. Not just how to get to the right audience, but also how to segment and offer them a personalized funnel and shopping experience.
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Content
The art and science of developing the type of website content and creative assets that enlighten, educate and entertain your stakeholders. This extends beyond marketing and sales content. How your content resonates with employees, vendors and partners is equally important.
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Automation
The knowledge and skill to manage the automation that powers PPC technology, like event tagging, conversion tracking and smart bidding. This is also the power to automate key processes and functions.
Part B - PPC Professional Career Growth
Many start their PPC journey as a trainee, apprentice or intern in an agency. Agencies are one of the best places to start a PPC career since there’s a heavy emphasis on tactics and execution. Wider strategy and internal systems are more of a focus as a trainee/intern on an in-house marketing team for an organization.
The PPC Trainee is in heavy learning mode, focused on building essential PPC research, optimization and reporting skills. They usually start with 1 or 2 marketing channels, such as paid search or paid social.
- Research – Basic research skills and tools, usually starting with keyword and competitor research.
- Funnels – An intuitive understanding of the customer journey and how people shop for products/services.
- Strategy – You start to recognize some of the levers of digital maturity, such as organizational capacity and infrastructure.
- Analytics – Belief in the importance of data-driven decision making, but no real experience with measurement yet.
- Attribution – A vague understanding that certain parts (processes, creatives, channels, etc…) of your marketing engine contribute more value than others.
- Accounts – Basic familiarity with key PPC platforms. Google Ads or Facebook Ads for most people.
- Targeting – You learn the fundamentals of targeting for your respective channel, whether that be audiences or keywords.
- Content – Entry experience with content management system, such as WordPress. Most start out with updating headlines and descriptions, or updating webpage content.
- Automation – Intuitive understanding that machine learning and automation has an influence on PPC and marketing.
The PPC Executive can handle basic account management tasks. They understand the fundamentals of conversion tracking, campaign setup, bid optimization, and reporting KPIs.
The PPC Executive has a basic understanding of the technology and software that’s essential for running a PPC engine. The PPC Executive also starts to develop a better understanding of how PPC impacts the customer journey
- Research – You’re become more skilled at using research to make decisions, but these are usually limited to tactical moves, such as bid management or ad feedback.
- Funnels – Your proper introduction to the marketing funnel usually starts with search intent. You recognize how certain words like “near me” and “fast shipping” are commercial charged.
- Strategy – You pickup on more key categories of digital maturity: organization, measurement, infrastructure, content, targeting, and automation.
- Analytics – Belief in the importance of data for making tactical PPC decisions, like bid management, but no real experience with building measurement systems or using analytics to make bigger strategic decisions yet.
- Attribution – Start to recognize ‘touch-points’ and attribution models, such as last-click, first-click, and data-driven.
- Accounts – Experience setting up the systems and processes that enable PPC, not just the platforms, but the tracking, CRMs, and quite possibly the discovery.
- Targeting – Often one of your first tasks is to optimize the targeting mechanism for your respective channel. Whether that’s via audience segmentation or negative keywords.
- Content – A bit more experience optimizing landing pages, writing copy, and overseeing ad creation and design.
- Automation – Your experience with automation just about covers tracking, integrations, bid management, reporting, email funnels, workflows and account auto features.
- Research – You regularly conduct and lead discovery sessions. You understand what information is crucial at a strategic and tactical level.
- Funnels – Your experience with PPC should have exposed you to almost every stage of the funnel by now: awareness, consideration, conversion, L2S, customer, evangelism.
- Strategy – You believe that growth at the expense of marketing maturity means wasted spend (and impact). You understand the tactics that enhance digital maturity.
- Analytics – Experience with setting up and using analytics packages like Google Analytics. Regularly using KPIs to inform decisions.
- Attribution – Deeper knowledge of how channel and multi-channel attribution models impact bidding and budgets.
- Accounts – Your role is to effectively oversee the construction of the PPC engine…setup and configuration.
- Targeting – You’re responsible for translating discovery and research into an effective PPC targeting strategy.
- Content – You understand the importance of developing content that addresses the shopping funnel.
- Automation – You’re the ‘mechanic’ when it comes to PPC account and campaign automation. You know exactly what automation levers impact performance and growth.
The PPC Lead has mastered what drives PPC performance and growth. They excel at c-level stakeholder management and client relationship building. They generally oversee multiple PPC accounts and teams.
The PPC Lead usually has oversight for millions in advertising spend and understands the importance of building PPC engines that drive deeper business outcomes on top of capturing traffic, leads and sales.
- Research – You fully understand the power of insights. You seek to uncover the type information that can enable scalable processes.
- Funnels – You respect the funnel for its innumerable micro and macro steps. You grasp this at an intra-channel and cross-channel level as well. You understand that AI and machine learning is best positioned to fill those gaps.
- Strategy – You’ve mastered the systems that enhance digital maturity, but you also understand that the benchmark for maturity is always evolving.
- Analytics – Regularly uses analytics to make strategic and tactical decision. Sources 3rd party technology and vendors when in need of deeper insights.
- Attribution – You’ve a great understanding of the technology and configurations that enable attribution, for example call tracking systems, web analytics and CRMs.
- Accounts – You’ve a great understanding of the technology and configurations that enable attribution, for example call tracking systems, web analytics and CRMs.
- Targeting – You’ve a great understanding of the technology and configurations that enable attribution, for example call tracking systems, web analytics and CRMs.
- Content – You have experience building content engines (or soliciting the right expertise). Your use of content goes beyond funnel penetration.
- Automation – You’re the go-to person for PPC automation strategy initiatives. Your aim to build processes that facilitate automation for your team.
- Research – You are so far removed from the day-to-day strategy and tactics that you likely 100% rely on your ability to uncover information from your team, processes, and market in order to make decisions.
- Funnels – Your practical experience with targeting funnels diminishes at this stage, but that only because you’re more focused on sourcing the technology and enabling the processes for better funnel penetration at company-wide level.
- Strategy – You understand fundamentally that any process and/or system can be enhanced, so you seek to evolve maturity at every level.
- Analytics – You’re on top of the technology and industry news that impacts your teams’ ability to leverage analytics. You build/sources systems to capture and process data at an organizational and market level.
- Attribution – The application of attribution principles goes beyond marketing. You seek to value touch points and channels within all of your systems, HR, Operations, Support, etc…
- Accounts – Your main job title is to build systems and processes at a company-wide level. This goes way beyond the scope of marketing.
- Targeting – Your knowledge or targeting backslides as you become less familiar with the mechanisms of targeting for each PPC engine, and instead focus on the strategic importance of targeting effectively.
- Content – You’ve mastered the art of storytelling across channels, mediums, creatives, funnels and audiences.
- Automation – You seek to automate systems and processes. Your ambition is to automate yourself out of a job.