What Does A PPC Specialist Do?

So you’ve heard of PPC, but what does it really mean - and what does a PPC specialist actually do?

PPC stands for Pay Per Click, meaning you are only charged for the ad when it gets clicked on. Platforms where you will see this style of ad include Google, Bing and Amazon. This also applies to social platforms too, including Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest.

You probably see a PPC ad at least once a day, simply from scrolling anywhere online.

Below is a Google Search ad, but a PPC ad will also come in multiple formats.

A PPC specialist will manage these online paid ad campaigns.

This includes the below aspects to ensure relevant adverts are delivered to target customers, helping you to achieve your goals, with your KPIs in mind.

• Research
• Creation
• Implementation
• Optimisation
  
  

PPC Research: 

Before the creation of the campaign itself, a PPC specialist will dive into research regarding the target audience, current trends and keyword planning - making the delivery of your ad to your customer a seamless process. 

Keyword planning is vital, as keywords will tell Google which search terms you want your ad to appear for.

You want to make sure your keywords are relevant and are covering all possible search terms your future customers may be searching, to avoid missing out on those potential sales. Google has planning tools such as ‘Keyword Planner’ which help you in finding alternative keywords, as well as offering metrics such as average monthly searches.

A PPC specialist will also keep up on trends both within the brands industry and Google Ads itself to ensure campaigns will have the biggest impact. Google Ads is constantly updating and changing, adding new features as well as removing them. Staying up to date and evolving your methods means your ads will consistently stay effective as well as competitive against your competitor brands. 

Ad Creation:

Perhaps the most obvious job of a PPC specialist is creating the ad itself.

There are multiple campaign types on Google, with the most popular being:

• Search
• Performance Max (PMax)
• Display

Choosing which campaign type to use will largely be down to your goals and how you wish to convey your message.

A large part of ad creation is writing the copy. Having the right tone and message is so important as this may be the first interaction someone has with your brand. With small character counts, creating ad copy that speaks to the customer requires the skills of a PPC specialist who knows how to draw your potential customer in and generate conversions.

Building this ad out with image extensions, sitelinks, promo extensions etc. helps to create a more eye-catching ad, to help you stand out in these busy online spaces. A PPC specialist will be able to easily follow best practises laid out by Google themselves, giving you the best chances of seeing conversions come through at a strong efficiency level.

Optimisation:

A PPC Specialist will spend most of their time optimising accounts, which can involve updating copy, performing SQRs to remove any irrelevant search terms, adjusting budgets and more.

Optimising your accounts will help you develop your campaigns and ad groups, making sure they are consistently hitting goals and not creating unnecessary spend.

Performing SQRs is an important step, especially when a campaign is first launched. Removing search terms that are irrelevant to your brand helps to stop unnecessary spend on terms you don’t wish your ad to serve on.

Managing budgets on your campaigns effectively will help you to meet Return on ad Spend (ROAS) / Advertising Cost of Sales (ACOS) targets, helping with the efficiency of your campaigns.

If you fail to keep up with this, you may find yourself wasting budget on campaigns that are not bringing in conversions and revenue, while campaigns with strong ROAS may be limited by budget and missing out on sales.

Experimentation:

Experimentation and trying new things is one of the best ways to progress and better your account.

An example of an experiment would be testing a new bidding strategy and discovering if there's a better way to bring in more conversions and/or revenue to your business.

Other experiments can include trying different ad copy, landing pages or testing different assets in your PMax campaigns. 

With Google Ads and machine learning constantly evolving, continuously experimenting on your account is a valuable step in ensuring your account is fully optimised and performing at the top level. 

How The Role Has Changed:

The landscape of PPC looks completely different to how it did a few years ago, with automatic bidding taking over from manual bidding strategies. With the rise of automatic bidding strategies, you no longer need to be constantly checking figures in regards to bid adjustments, decreasing the amount of manual work needed for bidding.

Not understanding automated bidding and their algorithms is detrimental to the success of your campaigns, and a PPC Specialist understands in-depth how these algorithms work. Applying these strategies correctly will bring strong results that meet the goals of your campaigns, with minimum manual work.

New campaigns have also been introduced such as PMax. Staying up to date with these new updates and knowing how to correctly implement them is a key part of a specialist's role. When used correctly, this new campaign type will help you exceed your targets, which is why it is so important to understand how to set this campaign up correctly for success. 

Looking for support with PPC? Get in touch now.