The Top 25 Most Influential PPC Experts in 2021

If there’s anything COVID-19 has taught us is the importance of community. As an organization, one of our many goals is to uplift the PPC industry and be a platform to highlight the growing talent in this community. Keeping that in mind, we are excited to present you all with the highly anticipated Top 25 list with the most influential PPC experts of 2021. With everlasting changes in the Digital Marketing scene, all these folks have been able to adapt and continue to be an integral part of the PPC industry. Their work has been explementary and has clearly made a mark on many who practice PPC on a daily basis. For their hard work and dedication, we applaud and congratulate everyone who made the list. We hope this project continues to serve as a driving force of inspiration for those who are coming up in PPC.

Learn More About the Top 25 Finalist

We asked each of the finalists to send us a little bit about themselves, check it out!

Isaac Rudansky | Founder and CEO of AdVenture Media Group, with over 250,000 students enrolled in his online courses globally.

Amalia Fowler | Founder at Good AF Consulting and marketing instructor at BCIT. Passionate about helping small businesses understand search marketing.

Patrick Gilbert | Author of Join or Die: Digital Advertising in the Age of Automation, co-host of the “How To Hide a Dead Body” podcast, and COO at AdVenture Media.

Kirk Williams | Kirk is the owner of ZATO PPC Marketing and in advertising since 2009. He is known for his PPC song parodies on TikTok and Ecommerce PPC articles across various industry publications including the Shopify Retail blog, Microsoft, Moz, and MarketingLand, and has traveled around the world to speak on PPC.

Navah Hopkins | Navah Hopkins is an SMB champion & international speaker with 15 years in digital marketing. Along with her current role as VP of Strategic Marketing at Adzooma, Navah is the “Ask the PPC” for SEJ, an instructor for Semrush, and a founding board member on the Paid Search Association.

Ed Leake | Founder AdEvolver, God Tier Ads & Midas Media

AJ Wilcox | AJ Wilcox is the host of the LinkedIn Ads Show and founder of B2Linked.com, THE LinkedIn Ads agency.

Brad Geddes | Brad Geddes has been involved in PPC since 1998. He is a co-founder of AdAlysis, a PPC recommendation engine. Brad is the author of Advanced Google AdWords, the most advanced book ever written about Google’s advertising program.

Frederick Vallaeys | Frederick (Fred) Vallaeys is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, author, and leading influencer in pay-per-click search marketing. One of Google’s first 500 employees, he helped pioneer PPC marketing as the company’s first AdWords Evangelist.

Gianluca Binelli | Gianluca is the founder of Booster Box, a performance agency specialized in scientific marketing. In the age defined as BBB (Before Booster Box), Gianluca spent over 6 years at Google wearing various marketing hats – from managing online marketing for Google’s products in the EMEA region to becoming an advisor for CapitalG (Google’s equity fund).

Amy Bishop | Amy has over a decade of experience building and implementing digital strategies.

Julie Bacchini | Julie Friedman Bacchini is the president of Neptune Moon LLC and the Managing Director of PPC Chat.

Mark Irvine | Mark leads the PPC team at SearchLab. A former data scientist, he analyzed data across 30,000 clients.

Andrea Cruz López | Andrea Cruz is an Associate Director at KoMarketing, where she leads and executes demand generation programs for clients. Andrea is responsible for driving and implementing SEM, social media, ABM, and content syndication campaigns on platforms including Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, Facebook, LinkedIn, and more.

Joe Martinez | Joe is an international speaker, writer, and Co-Founder of the Paid Media Pros YouTube channel.

Andrew Lolk | Founder of SavvyRevenue, an agency focused on automation scaling eCommerce paid search across Europe.

Anders Hjorth | Anders Hjorth is a digital marketing strategist, author of the Search Strategies Report, the Amazon Marketing Report, and of the ebook “Search Engine Advertising.

Robert Brady | Robert Brady is the founder of Righteous Marketing, a digital marketing agency. He started in pay-per-click marketing during a class project in college and hasn’t stopped learning since. He has worked with a variety of companies, ranging from a small grass-fed beef grower in Idaho to a large B2B data storage provider.

Duane Brown | Duane has lived in 6 cities across 3 continents while working with brands including ASOS, Birdies, Pela Case, Jack Wills, Rose & Rex, and FTD/ProFlowers. He now lives in Canada helping eCom and DTC brands grow through data, strategy, and PPC marketing across search & social ad platforms.

Anu Adegbola | 12+ years of delivering Paid Search campaigns. Producing & hosting the #PPCChat Roundup podcast.

Etgar Shipvak | Co-founder of Fixel (acquired by Logiq). Co-Author of a best-selling digital marketing book.

Jon Kagan | VP, Search & Biddable at 9Rooftops. Conference Speaker. Enjoys family time, NY Jets & raising Chickens

Florian Nottorf | ADFERENCE’ founder & co-CEO, shares PPC insights with his 12k European LinkedIn followers. #ppcflo

Dennis Moons | Dennis helps eCommerce businesses start and scale their Google Ads campaigns.

Mareike Geidies | Co-host of the first-ever German-speaking Amazon PPC podcast & ADFERENCE’ customer success team lead.

The Strategy

You spoke and we listened! This year, we thought it would be best to amplify the voices of the people when finalizing the list. Throughout the voting process, we made sure that the majority of votes were allocated to the responses of our community form which received a whopping 593 submissions. The form consisted of the following questions:

1.) List up to five PPC experts who have helped influence or shape your career.

2.) Are there any platforms (website, blog, podcast) you follow to learn about PPC?

3.) What helps you determine whether or not someone is a ‘PPC expert’?

4.) We want to ensure we’re considering any and every PPC expert for this list… Outside the names already listed, are there any other up-and-coming PPC professionals you think we should know about but who may be flying below the radar? If so, list them.

Other factors we took into consideration were; Twitter engagement, content creation, presentation in podcasts, webinars, virtual and in-person conferences.

We are extremely thankful for those who spread the word via social media and took the time to submit their votes. Be on the lookout for who makes it next year as we will continue to keep the list growing.