PPC is the bee’s knees. It’s trackable, scalable and profitable. PPC can also be incredibly frustrating at times because the work is never done, the credit isn’t always forthcoming and consistent stellar results have led to excellence blindness.
After a few long weeks of a lot of lever pulling and client meetings I stepped back and thought about why I do it. Here’s my top 10.
10. Constant updates by Google and Bing insure industry viability.
Stop optimizing and growing your PPC accounts by adapting to changes, updates and enhancements by the search engines and your CPC could double year-over-year and your CPA could become unsustainable, sometimes practically overnight.
9. PPC is a “measure twice cut once” industry.
It’s perhaps annoyingly common that as an adult you get to take some of those annoying bits of advice your dad gave you growing up and apply it to real life. PPC is no exception. It’s an industry where you measure results once, twice, perhaps three times and then cut what doesn’t work, keep what does and use the data to find more things to test.
8. The PPC industry lives by the mantra, “a rising tide raises all ships”.
I’m always amazed at how quickly people at other agencies or who work on PPC in house are to get back to me and help out with a question I have. We all compete against each other but it’s a fair and honest competition where we understand that as we do better as an industry it becomes easier to do better as an agency/individual.
7. Your results smack you in the face everyday.
When I interview new people I am always tell them that my favorite thing about PPC is that your results are always right in front of you. I also ask them a handful of questions to make sure they can handle that. Of course when things are going good it’s awesome and when things are going back it’s pretty painful but more than that having your results always right in front of you makes it so you can see what the problems are, create solutions and implement them to the amazement of your peers, boss and clients.
6. The levers we pull get more complex/exciting.
Cross channel attribution modeling. Bid management platforms. Dynamic reporting tools. These are buzzwords to some degree but show that the industry is both becoming more complex and yet easier to maximize results with. It’s also becoming harder to differentiate yourself which means to be considered a world-class PPC agency you have to take these tools and apply them at an expert level.
5. There’s always work to be done.
Maybe this would be on the Top 10 PPC Frustrations list as well. For me, I love my job, my clients and my agency. That makes it easy for me to plug away on some nights and weekends enjoying the fact that there is always just one more thing to do before I shut the laptop and call it a night.
4. We’re driving innovation in EVERY marketing channel.
Remember when that article went around about how the web knew a teenage girl was pregnant before he father was? Remember how you were like, “yeah, that’s remarketing. Pretty cool, right?” when you friends talked about it at parties, etc.? These tools are now used in other marketing efforts and scores of other PPC innovations are used across multiple channels. The best part is that PPC has created a new breed of CMO’s that expect measurable, profitable, no nonsense results.
3. Business insights can be plucked from the headlines.
We sat down with a client for a quarterly review and pulled up the top converting messages and call to actions based on the impressions until conversion metric. They immediately started writing down the top performers and I thought, “that’s cool, they really like it.” Actually they had just been discussing what they felt their top USP was and the first headline was on that list.
2. The budgets are unlimited.
Well, this may be a bit of hyperbole. But if you are in ecommerce or have a sophisticated lead to sale tracking system then many clients lift the caps and let things run as long as they maintain an acceptable ROAS.
1. You get to be a technician, statistician and artist all in one.
The best part about being in PPC is that you get to stretch every part of your brain because you will be asked to be creative when writing ads, precise when making changes and calculating when assessing data.
