7 Skills Every PPC Marketer Should Have (+6 Extras)

Bidding on your branded keywords is typical practice in pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. For example, if you Google the stationary bike brand Peloton, the top organic search result is Peloton's homepage — but above that, searchers get not one, but two rows of PPC advertising. From Peloton (for the most part).

That may seem obvious, but advertising on brand name searches made sense for Peloton. Many PPC firms and qualified PPC professionals endorse this defensive strategy. However, purchasing advertisements for branded keywords is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of what PPC marketers can accomplish.

These marketers know paid search inside and out. They’ve mastered the Google Ads platform — including Google Adwords, and of course Google Shopping, if they work in e-commerce — and can buy Bing ads, too. They can also optimize PPC marketing campaigns at a micro and macro level. That means they can tinker with keyword bids and perfect overall account structure, building interlocking PPC campaigns that propel customers through your funnel.  

People searching “Peloton,” for instance, are already pretty low in the funnel. They’re likely in the consideration phase — they’ve heard of the brand already.

If you’re confused right now, it might be because you know PPC marketers by a different name. They’re also known as:

• Search engine marketers (SEM)
• Paid search advertisers
• Paid search marketers
• Paid digital advertisers
• Paid digital marketers  
• Paid media marketers
• Paid media advertisers
• Performance marketers  

Whatever you call them, they’re key to most digital marketing teams.  And especially now, as Apple’s privacy update makes search engines’ first-party data increasingly valuable, it’s important to have an expert leading your PPC programs.

7 mandatory skills for expert PPC specialists

No marketer should be expected to do everything. It’s a trap! Still, to make your PPC program truly pop, these are the skills you need to vet for, according to our experts.  

1. Creative strategy.

Though PPC ads don’t allow as much room for innovative visuals as Facebook ads (or YouTube ads!), a knack for creative strategy is still essential for PPC marketers. They need to make sure that their ad copy aligns with brand guidelines and coheres with the messaging in other types of online advertising campaigns. (Otherwise, your customers could go on a downright confusing path to purchase.)
An understanding of creative strategy also helps PPC marketers pair ad copy with appropriate landing pages, and tailor their messaging to keyword intent.  

2. Campaign structuring and budget allocation.

This is one of the most important and fundamental parts of PPC work. Once a PPC marketer knows their goals and how to measure them, they need to create and fund paid search ad campaigns.

This involves three sub-skills:

• Constant keyword research. Every day, roughly 15% of Google searches are for keywords never seen before!
• Deep knowledge of multi-keyword ad groups (MKAGs). These are groups of ads associated with a group of keywords, and they’re the current best practice in paid search.
• A flexible, data-driven approach to budgeting. Though they’re paying per click, expert PPC marketers never lose sight of their core KPI: conversions.  

3. Campaign optimization.

Here, experts rely on A/B testing — at warp speed. A/B testing ads is relatively cheap and easy.
You can also use A/B testing to refine your retargeting strategy. Lower in your funnel, it’s usually smart to spend some of your PPC budget retargeting customers who have already shown interest in your brand.   But how should you define the audience you retarget? By people who’ve visited your homepage before? People who’ve visited specific product pages? This is where A/B testing can come in handy.

4. Campaign attribution.

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It’s very easy to launch an ad on Google. What [many] people lack is the foundation. How do we measure ads and use them to scale growth in the account? Experts have the foundation. They know how to track PPC campaign performance, optimize their campaigns, and attribute revenue back to their work.

They rely on a few key tools for this:

• Google Ads’ search term report: This tool helps advertisers keep tabs on the search terms triggering their ads.
• Google Ads’ last-click attribution: This tool credits attributes conversions to the last stage in the customer’s journey, a.k.a. the link they clicked right before purchase.

5. Competitive analysis.

Studying the PPC strategies of major competitors can help brands hone in on their own value proposition and distinguish their digital marketing channels from the competition.  It can also help diagnose problems. For example: If you’re spending more than you’d like to, it might mean you’re focusing your PPC campaigns too much on what Moz terms “fat head” keywords — obvious, high-volume terms.  

These can be prohibitively expensive in hotly-contested niches, so expert PPC marketers use competitor research (mixed with creativity) to track down lower-volume, high-intent keywords to advertise on. They often use tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console (similar to what SEO experts might use), and even set up pivot tables in excel to help with this analysis.

If performance abruptly tanks, that might mean your competitor has tweaked their strategy, or a hot new competitor has entered the fray.  

6. Incrementality testing.

Setting up incrementality testing is an important PPC skill. It helps marketers scale up spending — and avoid wasting money.  It basically means A/B testing your PPC spend. If you spend $60K, do you get better performance than if you spend $50K? $30K? $0?

Turning off PPC spend entirely, even for a test period, might sound crazy. But eBay famously did just that in 2013, turning off all paid search ads for a third of the country.  It didn’t lead to any major dip in sales for the online auction site.   Now, that might be because eBay’s PPC strategy stank. Maybe they bid on too many keywords, or ran bad ad copy, MobileMonkey founder Larry Kim argued  — the results didn’t necessarily indict paid search in general. (It seems eBay agreed. They only cut their billion dollar paid search budget by about 10% after the results came in, Steve Tadelis, the test’s architect, told the Freakonomics podcast.)

Still, eBay’s study shows that incrementality testing PPC strategies can lead to major insights, especially for big brands that have already attained high levels of brand awareness.

Expert PPC marketers know how to do it on a smaller scale, too. They might steadily scale up spend on high-performing keywords until ROAS drops, noting incremental performance shifts.

7. Experience with a budget like yours.

You’ll want your brand’s PPC marketer to have as much experience as possible managing a budget like yours, whether it’s under $50K or over $1M. The ideal PPC approach varies based on the budget available, and what stage of growth a company is in. For instance, with smaller budgets, marketers have less data to analyze, and no need to look at your data on a daily or hourly basis. (With bigger budgets, frequent check-ins are a must.)
With bigger budgets — think over $50K — Yang recommends finding PPC marketers who already have experience buying search for businesses that are slightly larger than yours.
Someone used to smaller budgets can get intimidated when faced with a huge pool of money.

6 nice-to-have PPC expert skills

Our experts identified a handful of other skills that are great to have when it comes to setting and executing a successful PPC strategy.

1. Copywriting.

Awesome copywriting is an important part of PPC advertising. However, it’s not a top priority.  

2. Experience with shopping networks.

Experience with shopping networks like Google’s own Shopping ads or Amazon advertising, for instance, is important for e-commerce brands that are selling a product, but this skill is not necessary for B2B companies.  For shopping networks, experts like Lally often identify a brand’s highest value SKUs, and bid on them individually.

3. Experience with agency management.

Experience managing an agency can help a PPC strategist a lot, because the best agencies will be very data-oriented. It’s a red flag if you’re working with an agency and the account manager isn’t producing robust reporting and walking you through metrics and the strategy regularly.  Agencies often set a brand up with weekly or bi-weekly performance phone calls — and expert PPC freelancers should be doing the same for your brand.  After all, a mix of analytical skills and communication skills is crucial for PPC management.  

4. Experience with display ad networks.

Google's Display Network works to place ads on websites — either sites Google selects based on keywords you choose, or sites you hand pick.  Since targeting the right audience is key, experience buying through the Display Network is not always as valuable as experience buying paid search ads. Your brand’s target audience will just be more concentrated on a SERP than a media site.  

5. Landing page optimization.

PPC marketers don’t always manage paid ad landing pages, but if you find one with landing page design chops, that’s a bonus. In fact, it was found that the right landing page, can nearly cut your customer acquisition cost (CAC) in half.  

6. Knowledge of programmatic marketing.

Programmatic marketing can be an important part of a brand’s growth, but it’s not usually a good place to start when building a PPC strategy.  

If you’re a mid-sized brand, though, a PPC marketer who can handle programmatic, too, comes in handy.  

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