Become A PPC Expert in 5 Simple Steps

It is not easy to run a successful pay per click marketing campaign. It's not for everyone because it requires many hours of testing and optimization. However, with various pay per click networks available to people of all backgrounds, practically anyone may enter the PPC game. To launch your first campaign, you do not need any professional qualifications or degrees.

Indeed, many of the top PPC gurus entered the industry knowing nothing and learned everything through trial and error. Fortunately, with the abundance of learning tools available today, you won't have to go through the same agonizing procedure. If you're prepared to put in the effort, you can become a PPC consultant.

To help you on your journey to becoming a PPC expert, we’ve got plenty of helpful tips that will significantly reduce your learning time. Having been in your shoes when we first started, it’s safe to say we know a thing or two about what it takes.

So get out your notepad and pay close attention, the first lesson of PPC school is about to begin.

Focus on One Network

The first important step to becoming a PPC expert is to decide on a network. Although many PPC networks are very similar, they all have their unique differences that take getting used to. If you want to become an absolute pro in pay per click marketing, then picking one network and sticking to it is crucial.

Jumping around from network to network is not a good idea and will ultimately increase the time it takes you to become an expert. If you want to stand the best chance of making it in the PPC world, then you’ll stick to one network.

No matter if its AdWords, Bing or Facebook ads, picking one network and sticking with it will significantly reduce the learning time. Once you’ve mastered a specific network you can always master another one, there’s no rush!

By sticking to one network and using it every single day, you’ll eventually get the hang of it no matter how confusing it seems.

Understand The Most Important Metrics

Once you’ve decided on which network you’re going to master, it’s time to make sure you understand the metrics. It’s no secret that pay per click marketing involves lots of numbers and stats, but with so many to choose from, which are the most important?

To recap, these metrics are:

• Click-through rate
• Cost per click
• Quality score
• Cost per conversion
• Return on ad spend

All of these metrics help you determine how successful your campaign is and if you should be adjusting them. There’s no point running a PPC campaign if it’s not making money. By understanding the metrics involved in PPC, you can get a great insight into if your campaign is a success, or where it is failing.

Although these are the most important PPC metrics, there are hundreds of others out there. If you want to become a PPC expert, then understanding the workings of these metrics is essential.

Consider Doing PPC As a Career

If you’re looking to turbocharge your PPC knowledge, then there’s nothing better than doing it as a career. Not only do you get to immerse yourself in PPC every day, but you also get to learn from several other experts. Now you might be thinking, how can you get a job as a PPC manager without being an expert? Well, the truth is that not all companies are looking for experts.

They understand that creating PPC experts takes time and lots of training. That’s why many companies will have job roles for junior PPC managers that will sit under experienced PPC managers while they are trained.

It’s also possible for people from other careers to transition into PPC jobs where the end game is to become an expert PPC manager. For example, copywriters and print marketers often find themselves transitioning to PPC. If you can write good headlines for print ads and websites, then you can probably learn how to do it for PPC ads too.

The point is, just because you have no current experience in pay per click doesn’t mean you’ll never get a PPC job. There are plenty of ways to get your first PPC job; you just need a solid grasp of the basics and enough to impress the interviewer.

Take Inspiration from Competitors

When studying to become a PPC expert, you can save yourself a lot of time by seeing what your competitors are doing. No matter what industry you are in, there will always be competitors competing against your ads. This might sound like a bad thing, but it’s really not. As an aspiring PPC expert, these competitors provide you with lots of valuable PPC information.

Think about it; if your competitor is a multi-million dollar company then the chances are they have a huge marketing team. If not then they’ll be outsourcing it to a huge digital marketing agency. Either way, you know for a fact that whoever is managing the ads is a seasoned professional.

By studying their ads, you can get a great insight into their PPC strategy and how they are creating their ads. This information will not only help you improve your ads, but also teach you plenty of tips and tricks.

Become A Google Sheets / Excel Whizz

When it comes to managing and manipulating data, there’s are two tools for the job. Microsoft Excel or Google sheets. With countless features and functions, managing thousands of rows of data in these programs is a breeze. Since you’re likely to be using these programs regularly while managing your PPC campaigns, it only makes sense that you become a master of one of them.

If you’ve used Excel before in the past, then you should already have a solid understanding of how it works. However, if you don’t then it’s best to start now rather than leave it for later.

The most important things to learn are the shortcuts as they’ll save you a tremendous amount of time. Nobody wants to trawl through the various menus and options to make something happen, it’s much faster if you can just use the shortcut instead.

There are also plenty of Google Sheets PPC formulas that are not available in Excel that will make any PPC manager’s life easier.

Not only will learning these shortcuts save you a huge amount of time, but they’ll also remove all the tedious of manually selecting everything. Have you ever seen a PPC expert use their mouse to click everything manually?

Of course not, they all use the shortcuts! If you want to join the prestigious expert’s club then so should you..

Practice Your Writing

One of the most common tips when studying to become a PPC expert is to always practice your writing. Since you’ll be writing hundreds (maybe even thousands) of headlines and descriptions, it makes sense to practice.

This means working on your creative headline writing skills just like a copywriter would. Having dull and weak headlines can set your campaign up for failure before it’s even begun. If you want to give the strongest message possible, then you need to research the key buzz words.

If you’re short on time or don’t really know where to start, then you can always check your competitors for inspiration. They’ll give you a good idea of the words you should be using and how you entice users to click your ads.

When you do become a PPC expert, the changes are you won’t just be writing headlines and ads but also landing pages. Whether it’s writing the entire landing page yourself or just the main highlights and structure, improving your writing is essential for all areas of PPC.

Protect Your Valuable Ads

The final step of becoming a PPC expert is to protect your hard work. As you probably understand, creating a successful campaign from scratch can be very hard and time-consuming. With so much time and money invested into a campaign, the last thing you want is it to go to waste.

However, thousands of PPC marketers let this happen every single day, and most of them don’t even realize. For those of you that don’t know, click fraud is becoming an increasing trend in pay per click marketing. Its increase has been so dramatic that currently, 1 in 4 clicks on pay per click ads are fraudulent. This means your precious PPC budget could be wasted by malicious bots and users who have no intention of ever purchasing your product or services.

To save your money and protect your budget, you need click fraud prevention.

After experiencing the devastating effects of click fraud first hand, we built Lunio from the ground up to block click fraud. Having spent the last few years refining our software and algorithm, we now protect thousands of client’s ads from fraudulent clicks.

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