What Does a PPC Specialist Do?

There are thousands of ways to advertise online, but pay-per-click (PPC) advertising brings some of the highest returns in the shortest amount of time. For this reason, PPC Specialists are highly sought after in the digital marketing world.

But the role of a PPC specialist is not as easy as it would seem. There are a lot of pitfalls to avoid to have success with your campaigns. Knowing the right mindset, goals, and realities of this role can help you achieve more success in PPC marketing. This is true whether you are currently planning on becoming a PPC specialist or if you are going to hire one soon.

In this article, we will discuss the crucial topics and show you how to get the most out of this role to achieve your advertising goals. Without further ado, let’s get started:

What is a PPC Specialist?

A PPC specialist is an expert in pay-per-click advertising. They need to have a well-rounded set of skills. PPC campaigns involve soft sciences, hard sciences, and creativity. If you can apply psychology, math, and art on a consistent basis, you can be successful with PPC.

As a critical thinker, a PPC specialist effectively plans campaigns, solves problems, and ultimately generates profit for the business they’re promoting.

What Does a PPC Specialist Do?

The most important part of being a PPC expert is to take complex problems and make them simple. The biggest mistake is trying to do too much at once.

Let’s look at some examples of dealing with complexity:

Complexity Bias

Complexity bias is the tendency for people to entertain more complex solutions to a problem before acting on simple ones.  While it’s useful to have more information, you need to simplify the way you view it so that you don’t chase unimportant numbers. Simplicity is key.

“Simple can be harder than complex. You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.” – Steve Jobs

Here are some examples of complexity bias to be aware of:

• Using jargon instead of explaining your position in basic terms – If you can’t explain your idea in a simple, easily-understood way, you likely don’t have clarity about why you believe in it logically.
• Aiming for complex math solutions – While some statistical analysis equations will come in handy, you can often automate their calculation and spend more time on the marketing side of PPC.
• Leaning too much on software – Software can be excellent for automating many aspects of your advertisements and campaigns. Sometimes, a simple pen and paper approach is sufficient for the initial planning and number crunching.

Where can complexity pop up in the daily life of a PPC specialist?

Relationships

Even once you understand what complexity bias is and where it can pop up, there is still the complexity of the industry itself. So not only do you need to resolve complexities on the ad technology and execution side of things, but you also need to navigate relationships.

PPC is a field that non-specialists seem to think they understand, which doesn’t seem to happen in other complex areas such as programming. For this reason, you might need to help key stakeholders like clients or partners to understand why a specific strategy is better than their suggestions. After all, the PPC specialist should be the go-to person for PPC advice in their organization or team.

Opportunity

Finding the right opportunity is essential to the world of online marketing. And really, what is a PPC specialist but a person who can identify and execute on these opportunities?

However, there are some obstacles to achieving these opportunities.

The Challenges a PPC Specialist Will Face

Doing digital marketing requires a variety of strengths, skill sets, and experiences. As an idea, digital marketing seems easy. In execution, it’s quite a challenge. Let’s take a look at some common obstacles you could deal with:

A Lot of Data Available

You can get to know your target market better than ever before, thanks to the wealth of information available online today. However, there is a limit to how much you should invest in learning about your market before getting started.

Eventually, you need to select an opportunity to serve a particular target audience and pull the trigger on your ads. Of course, as you go on, you will want to learn more about this market continually.

Transparency

The ability to have multiple stakeholders view vital information in seconds is a game-changer for businesses everywhere. You can automate reports, share dashboards, and maintain control of key account settings and spending parameters.

While you want certain team members to have full access to reading the data about your ads, not everyone needs to overanalyze it. You may want to consider using an NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement) when sharing certain information with more external team members.

Creative Tools

The amount of digital innovation happening is unprecedented. Ultimately, technology will not make a successful campaign every time. You need to use technology according to your goals and let it serve you instead of the other way around.

A Word About Chaos

Answering the question of “what is a PPC specialist?” could perhaps be simplified to “a person who thrives in chaos.” If there is one thing that is certain in PPC marketing, it is change.

Get comfortable embracing change. Read up on industry best practices and stay sharp. This way, your strategies will be more profitable for you and your clients.

Not Enough Data

Sometimes the data is not enough, while you need to restrict the amount of data you consume, you should also make sure you’re getting the information you need about key campaign goals. If you’re struggling to get information about keywords, it might make sense to purchase a third-party tool that specializes in that.

Looking At Your Campaign From a Higher Level

Innovation is key. But it only happens if you give yourself the time and space to sit down and brainstorm. You want to implement meetings or reserved times where you and team members can creatively plan campaigns. By doing this consistently, some great ideas will eventually come out of it.

How Can You Eliminate Complexities

Let’s talk about cutting the complexities out of data and reporting. It is tempting to start looking for every piece of data possible. After all, you want to have a competitive edge in your market. Still, there are limits to how you want to set it up:

Scope

Understanding what you can access and what you can’t is the scope. It can be vast or small, depending on your goals. However, if in doubt you should go for a smaller scope at first. If you are truly serving a market with a strong desire for your product or service, then simple advertising messages should work. But often, it pays to have more than one campaign.

Testing Your Campaigns

At the top of your list, as a PPC specialist, you should always have campaign testing. Create multiple variations of headlines, ad copy, and landing pages. Then, run them at the same time to gauge any significant conversion factors that the data suggests.

Looking at Competitors

While you shouldn’t obsess over the competition, a little research goes a long way. PPC competitor analysis is important in digital advertising. Use tools to see the top impression and who is consistently reaching the top. You might want to analyze their campaigns and see if you can emulate some aspect that seems to be working better for them.

Understanding the Auction

Occasionally, your ad will win the auction. However, keep in mind that your competition is also bidding for the same keywords. They only need to bid a penny higher to win. However, your Quality Score will also determine how highly your ad ranks.

Understanding the Quality Score

With a better Quality Score, a competitor could rank higher than the highest bidder. It’s an essential part of running Google Ads campaigns, which comprises the majority of PPC campaigns on search engines.

It’s calculated by taking the relevance and quality of your ads, keywords, and landing page. This score is multiplied by the maximum bid you chose to come up with your ad rank in the auction.  Historical account performance and click-through rate (CTR) also play a factor.

In other words, Google wants you to send relevant advertisements to interested people that were actively looking for that solution. When you understand this, many of Google’s policies — while frustrating — will begin to make much more sense. If you can play the game right, you’ll get lower costs and more clicks.

Optimizing Your Budget and Campaign

Make sure you’re checking on your budget on a daily or weekly basis. A lot can change within a few days if certain events affect your market. So understand that your budget may improve as time goes on. You must know how to plan your campaign budget.

Regardless of the size of your budget, here are some key tips to help you get more out of your campaign:

• Generating Alerts – You can set up weekly notifications to alert you of opportunities to increase your account profits.
• Optimize Keywords Bids – Get suggestions on bid changes to take advantage of the auction.
• Pause Keyword Alert – Tips regarding keywords that aren’t performing to a high level for your campaigns.
• Optimize Ads – Continue to review your ads from a copywriting perspective. Are your headlines compelling? Do you have strong persuasion elements in the right sequences? If you have a genuinely great product, it should be fairly straightforward to communicate your brand to your target market.
• Keyword Tools – Continue to research keywords. As you dig, you’ll begin to find nuggets of gold that you would never have considered otherwise. Remember that these tools are using real data from millions of users. You can get a competitive edge if you apply this information correctly to identify niches that have yet to be tapped. Likewise, you can stop using keywords that simply don’t produce the necessary return on time, money, and effort.

Getting Simplicity from Complex Reports

So complexities are everywhere in the campaign but you can reduce these complexities by generating different reports, which are tough to create manually but through automation process when you will see the results they are easier to understand and help you in understanding your performances, and making you a good PPC specialist.

So difficulty with reports is not generating them. It is getting to the point where you can analyze them quickly using only the most critical metrics. Ultimately, as a PPC specialist, you need to be able to handle data, and have excellent marketing, communication, and organizational skills. That way, you can take the needs of the business and execute them within the PPC environment.

Wrap Up

While there are many other aspects of PPC that need to be understood, we hope this article has sufficiently answered the question of “what is a PPC specialist?”

PPC is not as easy as some people may claim. It takes a smart approach and applying best practices to succeed. But if done correctly, these principles can be applied to a multitude of campaigns and industries. So whether you are looking to become a PPC specialist or simply hire one, don’t let the complexities overwhelm you.

Keep your final goals in mind and select the most important metrics to assess from the beginning, and you will be able to maximize the opportunity that PPC provides for your business or client.