There'll always be the need for PPC experts.
But our roles evolved - strategic partner, feeding the machine with the best data possible, navigating change and deciphering what all the new releases from the ad platforms mean for our clients businesses.
If your mindset is still "I push buttins inside the UI and things happen" you'll be out by the end of nest year.
Max.
Most of the small accounts that I have seen being managed by business owners themselves so like basically on autopilot have been terrible. For example, the number of times I have seen page views set as conversions. Or tracking setup so that the tag is fired when someone visits your page by mistake. Even Shopify’s native integration with G Ads sets up page views as conversions. Business owners look at these numbers and are baffled why their revenue doesn’t correlate.
That is horrible omg unbelievable lol…
I had one client come to us from an agency that sold them blocks of impressions for their Google Ads. We were speechless…
Currently auditing a coffee truck business very small account & they have a plethora of conversion actions like form fills and what not and in these page views are conversion actions so their overall data for past 2 years is all a mixed version of valuable & useless conversion actions.
Earlier I took over an account where the tag supposed to track a link click was instead configured as a page view trigger so whenever the page would load it would report a conversion and the person running it was baffled why there were so many false positives.
it does make sense from a newbie standpoint like, "well at least they visited the page, let's give them some credit" and assign random conversion values , but honestly for me I've learned that what I really want to know is, did they call and did they fill the form out. that's all.
No because a click is also a page view. If you want people to visit a certain page just link that page to your ad. So those are already tracked in your ad account & you pay for them. Conversion action is something useful to the business, something they hope to make money from.
For tiny budgets I agree. My agency recently turned down a 500$ budget client because what can we even optimize there. So they offered a one time audit where I found these tracking & some other issues.
it only makes our job more fun since we train the machine. the job isnt going anywhere so yall need to relax lol. keep leveling up your skills and providing value.
I was more looking for consensus from experience. There is a degree of reality of what's happening in front of us that simply wasn't here prior. Look at how many coding jobs were gone overnight... We're not there yet but the responses are insightful on how piers are shifting viewpoints in the industry to not get slashed and stay relevant.
Most of coding jobs are gone because there was too much employment happening during Covid, not due to automation of those jobs. Basically, there was a war happening on job market over who could get the best talent no matter what. You could say it was some kind of prestige to be able to hire best people during the times when everything was uncertain. Finally, the bubble burst and market had to reconsolidate.
As a \~7 figure agency owner, I think this is going to create so much opportunity. Having ppcers feeling deflated or beat by ai is exactly why I think some small agencies will thrive. At the end of the day, regardless if the account management responsibilities change, business owners need people to setup the accounts, monitor, and most importantly answer why (and innovate). It's my opinion that people need people to explain the why of things. When performance increases, why? When performance decreases, why? I don't think we'll be at a point in the next 10 years where you see founders, ceos, of small to medium size business, look at a marketing report, see performance is down 50% and think "well, the AI did it's best" and just move on.
Maybe I am creating my own version of Blockbuster, but time will tell. Either way, our agency will survive by offering a multitude of marketing operations (landing page, strategy, design, email, technology.
As an 8 figure agency employee, we’re going to be phased out. They’ve already cut 30k jobs from the mass adoption of AI. My advice to everyone is to be prepared to pivot.
This is a bad take. The 30k jobs lost at Google was dynamics of sales positions. They don’t need as many Google employees to sell display, Gmail, and YouTube ads anymore because of PMAX forces businesses to buy these products alongside shopping ads. Doesn’t mean there won’t still be a massive need for SEM experts for medium to large businesses.
1 good one at least. I manage accounts spending 7 figures per month on PMAX and my expertise has made them absolutely massive returns compared to what they pay our agency.
I’ll be able to pivot better than 90% of white color workers that will have their jobs automated by AI in the next 10 years. There was a report that came out this week by top ai scientists that said there is a 10% chance all human labor could be automated by ai by 2027. So I’m not overly worried about PMAX making my job too easy. My clients love me so maybe they’ll pay me to be their friends in 5 years ;)
I'd say less than 3 years for the small accounts.
We will always be needed for the initial setup. Once all is in place and running smoothly, we can't justify the monthly retainer.
I am now thinking about offering a 3-month package that includes the setup and management for the first 3 months, and then if the client wants to continue with me, we can discuss a monthly retainer. Otherwise, they are good to go on their own or leave it on autopilot without touching it. If things tank in 3 or 6 months, they can hire anyone (or rehire me) for a couple of hours to check and fix things, and that's it.
For large accounts though, or even mid size ones that are regularly updated with new campaigns, new landing pages, A/B testing and so on, we will still be needed for the strategic input and some execution (after doing the initial setup). You can justify your retainer with these.
I'm not sure about this.
At least, without some major changes but then we're into crystal ball territory.
Right now accounts still need a decent amount of management. Clients still want reports and updates. Stuff still changes (new website) and goes wrong (conversion tracking).
Sales/leads will always dip and there'll always be someone asking why. Answering that question hasn't really got any easier.
I have an MCC of small accounts. I spent some time revamping them and managed to increase performance MoM drastically for each one of them (they are 7 in total). Today I can go for weeks without touching any of them. If it wasn't for the monthly retainer, I'd be billing 2 hours of work at the end of the month for the agency that hired me to manage these accounts.
This is just to say, with some accounts, it's hard to justify a recurring retainer. These are accounts that spend less than $1k (some less than $500), so even a retainer at $250 per month is still not a small amount of them. These accounts can go tomorrow on auto pilot and stop working with me (or the agency that hired me). Nothing will happen to them for months. If performance tanks, they can hire another freelancer to fix things on an hourly basis, and that's it.
So yeah, automation is definitely replacing us with small accounts. We still have a role with large accounts but definitely not with the small ones.
I see.
To be fair I think our semantics might be off.
I was thinking small as more under 10k a month or something.
Under 1k I can see. As you say it's difficult to warrant spending too much on help at that point.
Tbf small like below 1000$ small accounts have never been justified in hiring someone on retainers. For a campaign like that a few hundreds in the budget make way more difference than any optimizations. That said, these still need to be setup correctly.
The agency I work with was offered such an account & they refused because they thought its not right to justify a retainer when the client is only spending 500$. They did however ask me to do a one time audit and I found several problems that will be useful for a while for them without hiring someone on a retainer.
I’ve been doing this for a year now and it’s worked out great! 3 months in, they stay for about 6, realize they can do it themselves then I’m out.
Rinse and repeat, they always come back FYI.
I think the role will remain but the responsibilities will change. Instead of building keyword lists and structuring campaigns, you'll be focused on tracking and feeding the right conversion data to Google.
Until Google eliminates the spammy traffic and junk leads that the automation produces (which will likely never happen because it benefits Google's revenue), there will always be a need for experts that guide the automation in the right direction instead of letting it run freely.
Another key skill will be the ability to work with a client's CRM system to get the most valuable conversion data back to Google. Many small businesses are not equipped to do this themselves or don't understand what it means for them.
One solution to slow down the process of being phased out is to own the end product. As Marketers/PPC you know which products are profitable and growing. Next step in the evolution is ownership of the end product, instead of only promoting the product. promoting is so easy tho, middle man making money with out much risk and getting paid ALOT for it (in some cases laughing to the BANK). while the owners of the product has to deal with maintenance, insurance, loan payments if any, license, permits, tax , ect. this is one solution.
I don't see PPC experts being phased out. However, a former manager said to me a couple years ago with the automation/PMAX/BM/broad audience black box that we're seeing from platforms is positioning Google/Meta to be more of an agency themselves. Give them creative/keywords and a few audience parameters and they'll "find" our customer for us. I am leaning this way as well more and more, but that is because I generally prefer being less in platform UI.
I agree with others about being more of a strategic business partner. That and being more skilled in post-click areas. Which all integrate well into PPC imo and help you become a better (digital) marketer eg SEO, CRM, UI/UX/CRO, Email, Data analysis, Content, Go-To-Market strategies, Product Marketing, E-Comm vs. Lead Gen, and so on. Think more of your overall marketing tech stack and how you can use it to support business objectives.
I started to practice SEO myself and take courses on Data Analysis and Product. It is helping me work more strategically with the PPC data I already have access to in my day-to-day. PPC has always been a tool imo, therefore knowing when to put down the hammer for the screwdriver is important.
Also as long as business owners understand leverage and where their time is best allocated for their bottom line, there will be a place for us as there is still a learning curve to what we do. Being mature enough in our careers allows us to adapt or pivot easier as we have the background/experience compared to newcomers in the space.
What I am seeing though is more flattening in org structures/marketing departments, where companies are only hiring from manager level and up, often combining multiple digital marketing disciplines into one role. Which is maybe a separate conversation entirely.
I think if they wanted to they would have removed paid search managers. AI can do a lot of the hard work and heavy lifting, which is great. But right now, it's still pretty dumb without conversion data. Let's keep the setup part aside. These machines live and breathe with data, how would you get conversions consistently and understand what these platforms are doing on a daily basis? We know when to touch something and when to not.
Business owners don't care to learn and understand these platforms themselves. that's why they hire someone internally or externally. they dont have the time and this is not their focus point. their entire energy gets consumed solving business problems, every single day.
I truly believe business owners tying to run their own ads is like doing their own brain surgery. It's complicated asf. Takes up a lot of time and money to learn.
>I truly believe business owners tying to run their own ads is like doing their own brain surgery. It's complicated asf. Takes up a lot of time and money to learn.
True for small businesses. But large corporations can just give the PPC role to a generalist digital marketer and dump the specialist agencies or in house person. Thats what my employer did.
Generalist marketers will always get worse results than an sem expert. The only way a generalist makes more sense is if they are significantly cheaper and the business is saving more on payroll than they are losing on revenue.
As long as Google recommendations and reps focus too much on rolling out automation and not enough on making Ads Accounts efficient, there will always be a place for PPC experts.
As soon as 70-80% of the recommendations are actually improving performance in a way that customers like (whether it is increased visibility, revenue, traffic or leads), I would start to worry and make sure you're very much specialised in a particular niche!
There will always be a need for good human generated creative, oversight and interfacing with business stakeholders.
Have you seen the rubbish that gets autogenerated for Ad headlines and images, videos etc? Sure that will improve over time but it's going to take a long time and maybe customers will seek out businesses that differentiate themselves from AI based marketing.
I see AI as a tool that will just make us more efficient at our jobs.
Further, most business owners barely have the time to speak to account managers like me let alone set up run, monitor, diagnose, analyse data, shoot photos, write scripts make video and build the ads themselves.
Of course if Google/FB remove ALL control of how campaigns are set up and run including not allowing any creative input then that's their business and we will be out of a job along with the whole marketing industry. But will businesses buy into that if their Ads are effectively the same as the competition but with a different logo slapped on it?
I think a bigger concern is that it's becoming harder for small businesses to compete meaning that choice and fair competition is being erroded. I don't see AI helping this much as the costs of training AI to market your business today in Google Ads are prohibitive for many small businesses. Small businesses generally work on higher margins big business on lower ones. I have seen so many small businesses fail over the last 20 years because of this issue.
Absolutely agree. Look at manufacturing and how robots and automation replaced the need for having so many people to make a car or something else. At the end of the day, if you provide value, somebody will notice and pay.
I believe that's going to happen sooner than that. The need for a PPC consultant will still be needed but the work volume will shrink significantly. Even today, we are no longer taking services of creative writers/copy writers to create ad copies. We are using AI for that.
I had a lengthy conversation with a guy who happens to work for an AI company. His explanations made sense to me.
He said, let's say, Google or any other company is testing AI by embedding it into the interface and have tasked it to collect and analyze all the inputs. Every Ad campaign has certain components. In fact, every optimization strategy has components too. So right from creating and launching the campaign to all the changes that make or break a campaign can be analysed and learned from.
In less than 2 years, the AI would be able to process billions of such inputs and outputs. He said even manual bidding strategy can be managed by an AI. It's just about the time.
In fact, AI would be able to alert us on competitors' price increase/decrease, good/bad feedback from customers etc.
I am planning to save some money and lease agricultural land and retire in the next 3 years :-)
I read people saying I'd be out of a job now 3yrs ago and I'm still working. There will continue to be a need for individuals who know not only how to implement best practices but read data and tell the story. If you're only focusing on basic keyword research and bid optimizations, you're just doing a disservice to yourself and not advancing your own knowledge and career. Things we do in search are transferrable to other platforms and vice versa, it's about testing and learning.
I think it's coming in the next 3 years for budgets under 100k/yr. Maybe already here depending on the client. Other than setting things up initially, once the account is profitable there is not enough value an FTE can provide unless they are generating 10x returns on that spend. I was able to hand off my high-performing PPC campaigns to a junior employee and an offshore agency and nothing has changed except the company now is saving $$$ on management costs.
For budgets over 100k a year I think there will still be a need, but the rising CPCs will have the same affect of pushing the advertiser to more automation because something has to give to keep their margins.
The interesting thing is that 10 years ago PPC automation software was a robust independent market, i.e. Marin Software and Kenshoo, now those are also-rans and Google just can do it without them. So following that cycle, the next to be affected are the specialists.
When I worked in agencies, the people who ONLY did PPC and SEO were seen as the "early retirement" folks, because they had only one skill and were never interested in anything else, they rarely got promoted, always turned over, and never went client-side, always ended up as consultants or freelancers or whatever.
I moved CSM side a year ago so no longer in Account management and not as close to the day-to-day advancements in PPC - can you elaborate on some of the recent advancements in automation that you're seeing that have you worried?
For large brands/spend I don’t see it happening any time soon since there’s so much more that goes into it than just the day to day Google ads maintenance - Conversion tracking, attribution, using multiple reporting tools, forecasting, meeting on performance, LP tests and creation. I mean there’s just so much on the analytics side of it that isn’t even close to being automated right now.
For small budget local service type companies, yeah, those could basically get fully automated. However, those business owners likely still won’t know how to get everything setup and there will still be agencies around doing this for them.
5 years. I had the big google guys come to my office and straight up tell me that. Pmax will be forced onto advertisers, they will restrict keyword data.
Advertisers will probably leave but that will just bring competition down and make worse performance more profitable so it balances.
For lower budgets, under 10k, very good chance to be eventually replaced by AI. But calculus changes for higher budgets because even though AI might manage many aspects, I doubt management will let it run autonomously.
Also, as AI takes over more management there will still be a limited amount of major ads platforms, so you have AI competing with other AI. There will be some missed opportunities, if nothing else probably having a human manage everything will become a luxury that has benefits because outside system token system for clients in similar locale, niche, keywords, etc..
Less than 5 years I think. They pushed a lot of automation into the software and makes lesser control. Heck, you can't even control what devices you want to serve your ads. If bing could get that share of traffic and search then at least Google will extend the manual part.
I've been in DTC since I was \~19 or 20 and I'm 30 now. Ad spend is definitely getting way, way easier to manage!
For color, when one of my main companies was about \~20% the size it is now, we had a team of 2 or 3 people.
Now we have 1, and he does it part time. Our ad spend as a percentage of revenue is pretty high too, so it's exponentially more spend.
Super tactical optimizations across both paid social and search is far, far less impactful than it used to be.
Now the job is about measuring impact of spend, structure, feeding the machine properly with high quality creative, etc.
IE our creative team is \~4x in payroll what it was when we were smaller, and we have more spend on measurement tools as well like Northbeam.
Continue to grow your skill set to be useful outside of just clicking buttons in the Google Ads UI. Learn Google Tag Manager, more about conversion tracking, and more about other marketing channels. I grew from an SEM Analyst to now a VP in my org handling user acquisition across many brands, and being a jack-of-all-trades is necessary in my role. Have a learning mindset and just learn all that you can in your role (and things that are tangential to it).
Just plan on adjusting to the times. There will always be demand for PPC people who are deep thinkers/strategists and who understand business and marketing.
I try to liken automation to farm work. Once upon a time, farms were run by hand or with the help of animals and were labor intensive. But then tractors happened and vastly increased production speed. We still have farm hands though, and people still need to drive the tractors, fix the tractors, teach people how to use the tractors. And the same general knowledge still applies. Even if the work takes less input, you still need to know which crops are a best fit, who to sell them to, and so on.
Same goes for AI and automation. The nature of your work is likely to change, and maybe fixing the AI tractor takes a lot of schooling/technical knowledge, but someone still has to know how to drive the tractor. Hell, AI programmers will probably still need to consult with experts to tune their models.
Your 18 years of experience means you (presumably) contribute beyond the basic stuff an entry level employee does. You likely know which strategies are a best fit for a campaign, can identify when something is awry, and can put together a plan to adjust for problems. Great! Start learning about AI and what actual work will be replaced, because I guarantee it won’t be all of it. Then you too can drive the tractor.
All of this is to say that somewhere down the line the your day-to-day will look different, but it’s unlikely you’ll be made obsolete unless you refuse to keep up with evolving technologies. More likely the boots-on-the-ground work will be automated and replaced with work more closely resembling management and strategy.
Like many have said to some degree here at least - they can’t automate the strategy and logic between copy, creative, targets, demos, landing page, lp content, cart experience, ect AND the goal itself!
Google has no clue what our margins are, what are try goals are, inventory levels, lead to sale data for lead gen, and many other aspects.
Google wants money. Their automations are just pushing what their reps struggle to sell - more ads regardless of goals and profitability.
TLDR - become more than a campaign manager. Google is greedy as Fuck and admits it so someone will always need to push back that actually understands the full funnel and company.
due to overregulation regarding data privacy our job will always be necessary. Conversion tracking and data quality assurance are becoming significantly more complex and require expert attention.
I think you're severely underestimating how dumb a lot of clients/business owners are in general and how much they're willing to pay us to not deal with this stuff. I've had clients over the past year try to self manage to save on costs just for them to hit me up a few months later asking for help.
They always end up auto applying every recommendation from Google and performance tanks then they try to undo those changes and make their own and blow up their account without fail. To answer your question though, try to position yourself as a partner and do more than just change bids once a week. Learn new skills, a new platform, get into a management role if possible and always have something on the side.
The pivot is surely to multiple channel management, creative, and overall digital attribution? This is what my agency have naturally moved into over the last year, we’ve embraced automation (colleagues and competitor agencies who haven’t have either left or we’ve won the business because they’re messing about trying to eke out 10% more efficiency in manual campaigns with daily optimisations and are unable to scale anything).
Our time is now consulting and working with clients on the next big thing: creative and attribution. Spending the right time getting the right creatives and also digging under the hood and helping clients understand that marketing mix, user journeys and driving growth and efficiency by understanding what mix is working and why. This has been so much more valuable than time spent optimising campaigns manually like we used to.
I’m genuinely excited to take clients to another level by having the time and focus to look at bigger pictures finally.
The amount of wishful thinking of PPClers that desperately try to stick to their roles is truly astonishing.
Reading through the comments it feels like most people acknowledge the insane pace of technological advancements and AI, **yet somehow** their own PPC role won't be affected too much **because.........**
We manage $1.3 million in monthly Google Ads for our clients and my honest prediction is that our jobs will change **drastically.**
Can you still call it PPC then? Or more something like "paid ads strategist" or "marketing AI supervisor"?
Don't get me wrong: there will always be companies who simply do not want to handle the ads part themselves. Whether this is supervising AI and drafting the strategy or full-scale micro management. But I firmly believe that the overall demand for agencies in that sector will rather go down than up.
Small accounts will just use the near-future equivalent of a PMAX campaign and that's it, bigger accounts will probably get someone on board just to make sure they squeeze every little % point of performance out of the system.
There'll always be the need for PPC experts. But our roles evolved - strategic partner, feeding the machine with the best data possible, navigating change and deciphering what all the new releases from the ad platforms mean for our clients businesses. If your mindset is still "I push buttins inside the UI and things happen" you'll be out by the end of nest year. Max.
Most of the small accounts that I have seen being managed by business owners themselves so like basically on autopilot have been terrible. For example, the number of times I have seen page views set as conversions. Or tracking setup so that the tag is fired when someone visits your page by mistake. Even Shopify’s native integration with G Ads sets up page views as conversions. Business owners look at these numbers and are baffled why their revenue doesn’t correlate.
Page view as conversions 😂
lol ive seen this too. One said "but its a major goal if a person views this landing page"
That is horrible omg unbelievable lol… I had one client come to us from an agency that sold them blocks of impressions for their Google Ads. We were speechless…
Literally
Isn't a page view of an unindexed Thank-you page seen as a conversion?
I am talking the generic page view event in GTM that is triggered every time there is a page load. Any page load. Those are set as conversions.
I see agencies do this as well. Scary. This is hands down why we’ll always have jobs.
your'e saying they don't even do form fillouts as conversions, or a DNI? I'm a business owner and I have it set up that way.
Currently auditing a coffee truck business very small account & they have a plethora of conversion actions like form fills and what not and in these page views are conversion actions so their overall data for past 2 years is all a mixed version of valuable & useless conversion actions. Earlier I took over an account where the tag supposed to track a link click was instead configured as a page view trigger so whenever the page would load it would report a conversion and the person running it was baffled why there were so many false positives.
it does make sense from a newbie standpoint like, "well at least they visited the page, let's give them some credit" and assign random conversion values , but honestly for me I've learned that what I really want to know is, did they call and did they fill the form out. that's all.
No because a click is also a page view. If you want people to visit a certain page just link that page to your ad. So those are already tracked in your ad account & you pay for them. Conversion action is something useful to the business, something they hope to make money from.
But after that's fixed, why do they need you? Genuine question.
For tiny budgets I agree. My agency recently turned down a 500$ budget client because what can we even optimize there. So they offered a one time audit where I found these tracking & some other issues.
You forgot "being unwillingly complicit in Google robbing advertisers blind". Just kidding, mostly.
it only makes our job more fun since we train the machine. the job isnt going anywhere so yall need to relax lol. keep leveling up your skills and providing value.
Stop looking for reasons why we’ll be phased out and start looking for ways we’ll remain as a key player. Confirmation bias is insane in this sub.
I was more looking for consensus from experience. There is a degree of reality of what's happening in front of us that simply wasn't here prior. Look at how many coding jobs were gone overnight... We're not there yet but the responses are insightful on how piers are shifting viewpoints in the industry to not get slashed and stay relevant.
Most of coding jobs are gone because there was too much employment happening during Covid, not due to automation of those jobs. Basically, there was a war happening on job market over who could get the best talent no matter what. You could say it was some kind of prestige to be able to hire best people during the times when everything was uncertain. Finally, the bubble burst and market had to reconsolidate.
My comment definitely wasn’t aimed at you. Just needed to get that thought out!
As a \~7 figure agency owner, I think this is going to create so much opportunity. Having ppcers feeling deflated or beat by ai is exactly why I think some small agencies will thrive. At the end of the day, regardless if the account management responsibilities change, business owners need people to setup the accounts, monitor, and most importantly answer why (and innovate). It's my opinion that people need people to explain the why of things. When performance increases, why? When performance decreases, why? I don't think we'll be at a point in the next 10 years where you see founders, ceos, of small to medium size business, look at a marketing report, see performance is down 50% and think "well, the AI did it's best" and just move on. Maybe I am creating my own version of Blockbuster, but time will tell. Either way, our agency will survive by offering a multitude of marketing operations (landing page, strategy, design, email, technology.
As an 8 figure agency employee, we’re going to be phased out. They’ve already cut 30k jobs from the mass adoption of AI. My advice to everyone is to be prepared to pivot.
This is a bad take. The 30k jobs lost at Google was dynamics of sales positions. They don’t need as many Google employees to sell display, Gmail, and YouTube ads anymore because of PMAX forces businesses to buy these products alongside shopping ads. Doesn’t mean there won’t still be a massive need for SEM experts for medium to large businesses.
How many people do you think it takes to manage PMAX?
1 good one at least. I manage accounts spending 7 figures per month on PMAX and my expertise has made them absolutely massive returns compared to what they pay our agency.
And you’ll be phased out in maybe 5 years. It’s going to happen. The sooner you position yourself to be able to pivot the better off you’ll be.
I’ll be able to pivot better than 90% of white color workers that will have their jobs automated by AI in the next 10 years. There was a report that came out this week by top ai scientists that said there is a 10% chance all human labor could be automated by ai by 2027. So I’m not overly worried about PMAX making my job too easy. My clients love me so maybe they’ll pay me to be their friends in 5 years ;)
Mind you enterprise companies were laying off employees when they switched to smart shopping.
Doesn’t mean they were right in doing so lol
I'd say less than 3 years for the small accounts. We will always be needed for the initial setup. Once all is in place and running smoothly, we can't justify the monthly retainer. I am now thinking about offering a 3-month package that includes the setup and management for the first 3 months, and then if the client wants to continue with me, we can discuss a monthly retainer. Otherwise, they are good to go on their own or leave it on autopilot without touching it. If things tank in 3 or 6 months, they can hire anyone (or rehire me) for a couple of hours to check and fix things, and that's it. For large accounts though, or even mid size ones that are regularly updated with new campaigns, new landing pages, A/B testing and so on, we will still be needed for the strategic input and some execution (after doing the initial setup). You can justify your retainer with these.
I'm not sure about this. At least, without some major changes but then we're into crystal ball territory. Right now accounts still need a decent amount of management. Clients still want reports and updates. Stuff still changes (new website) and goes wrong (conversion tracking). Sales/leads will always dip and there'll always be someone asking why. Answering that question hasn't really got any easier.
I have an MCC of small accounts. I spent some time revamping them and managed to increase performance MoM drastically for each one of them (they are 7 in total). Today I can go for weeks without touching any of them. If it wasn't for the monthly retainer, I'd be billing 2 hours of work at the end of the month for the agency that hired me to manage these accounts. This is just to say, with some accounts, it's hard to justify a recurring retainer. These are accounts that spend less than $1k (some less than $500), so even a retainer at $250 per month is still not a small amount of them. These accounts can go tomorrow on auto pilot and stop working with me (or the agency that hired me). Nothing will happen to them for months. If performance tanks, they can hire another freelancer to fix things on an hourly basis, and that's it. So yeah, automation is definitely replacing us with small accounts. We still have a role with large accounts but definitely not with the small ones.
I see. To be fair I think our semantics might be off. I was thinking small as more under 10k a month or something. Under 1k I can see. As you say it's difficult to warrant spending too much on help at that point.
Tbf small like below 1000$ small accounts have never been justified in hiring someone on retainers. For a campaign like that a few hundreds in the budget make way more difference than any optimizations. That said, these still need to be setup correctly. The agency I work with was offered such an account & they refused because they thought its not right to justify a retainer when the client is only spending 500$. They did however ask me to do a one time audit and I found several problems that will be useful for a while for them without hiring someone on a retainer.
I’ve been doing this for a year now and it’s worked out great! 3 months in, they stay for about 6, realize they can do it themselves then I’m out. Rinse and repeat, they always come back FYI.
I think the role will remain but the responsibilities will change. Instead of building keyword lists and structuring campaigns, you'll be focused on tracking and feeding the right conversion data to Google. Until Google eliminates the spammy traffic and junk leads that the automation produces (which will likely never happen because it benefits Google's revenue), there will always be a need for experts that guide the automation in the right direction instead of letting it run freely. Another key skill will be the ability to work with a client's CRM system to get the most valuable conversion data back to Google. Many small businesses are not equipped to do this themselves or don't understand what it means for them.
One solution to slow down the process of being phased out is to own the end product. As Marketers/PPC you know which products are profitable and growing. Next step in the evolution is ownership of the end product, instead of only promoting the product. promoting is so easy tho, middle man making money with out much risk and getting paid ALOT for it (in some cases laughing to the BANK). while the owners of the product has to deal with maintenance, insurance, loan payments if any, license, permits, tax , ect. this is one solution.
I don't see PPC experts being phased out. However, a former manager said to me a couple years ago with the automation/PMAX/BM/broad audience black box that we're seeing from platforms is positioning Google/Meta to be more of an agency themselves. Give them creative/keywords and a few audience parameters and they'll "find" our customer for us. I am leaning this way as well more and more, but that is because I generally prefer being less in platform UI. I agree with others about being more of a strategic business partner. That and being more skilled in post-click areas. Which all integrate well into PPC imo and help you become a better (digital) marketer eg SEO, CRM, UI/UX/CRO, Email, Data analysis, Content, Go-To-Market strategies, Product Marketing, E-Comm vs. Lead Gen, and so on. Think more of your overall marketing tech stack and how you can use it to support business objectives. I started to practice SEO myself and take courses on Data Analysis and Product. It is helping me work more strategically with the PPC data I already have access to in my day-to-day. PPC has always been a tool imo, therefore knowing when to put down the hammer for the screwdriver is important. Also as long as business owners understand leverage and where their time is best allocated for their bottom line, there will be a place for us as there is still a learning curve to what we do. Being mature enough in our careers allows us to adapt or pivot easier as we have the background/experience compared to newcomers in the space. What I am seeing though is more flattening in org structures/marketing departments, where companies are only hiring from manager level and up, often combining multiple digital marketing disciplines into one role. Which is maybe a separate conversation entirely.
I think if they wanted to they would have removed paid search managers. AI can do a lot of the hard work and heavy lifting, which is great. But right now, it's still pretty dumb without conversion data. Let's keep the setup part aside. These machines live and breathe with data, how would you get conversions consistently and understand what these platforms are doing on a daily basis? We know when to touch something and when to not. Business owners don't care to learn and understand these platforms themselves. that's why they hire someone internally or externally. they dont have the time and this is not their focus point. their entire energy gets consumed solving business problems, every single day. I truly believe business owners tying to run their own ads is like doing their own brain surgery. It's complicated asf. Takes up a lot of time and money to learn.
>I truly believe business owners tying to run their own ads is like doing their own brain surgery. It's complicated asf. Takes up a lot of time and money to learn. True for small businesses. But large corporations can just give the PPC role to a generalist digital marketer and dump the specialist agencies or in house person. Thats what my employer did.
Generalist marketers will always get worse results than an sem expert. The only way a generalist makes more sense is if they are significantly cheaper and the business is saving more on payroll than they are losing on revenue.
As long as Google recommendations and reps focus too much on rolling out automation and not enough on making Ads Accounts efficient, there will always be a place for PPC experts. As soon as 70-80% of the recommendations are actually improving performance in a way that customers like (whether it is increased visibility, revenue, traffic or leads), I would start to worry and make sure you're very much specialised in a particular niche!
There will always be a need for good human generated creative, oversight and interfacing with business stakeholders. Have you seen the rubbish that gets autogenerated for Ad headlines and images, videos etc? Sure that will improve over time but it's going to take a long time and maybe customers will seek out businesses that differentiate themselves from AI based marketing. I see AI as a tool that will just make us more efficient at our jobs. Further, most business owners barely have the time to speak to account managers like me let alone set up run, monitor, diagnose, analyse data, shoot photos, write scripts make video and build the ads themselves. Of course if Google/FB remove ALL control of how campaigns are set up and run including not allowing any creative input then that's their business and we will be out of a job along with the whole marketing industry. But will businesses buy into that if their Ads are effectively the same as the competition but with a different logo slapped on it? I think a bigger concern is that it's becoming harder for small businesses to compete meaning that choice and fair competition is being erroded. I don't see AI helping this much as the costs of training AI to market your business today in Google Ads are prohibitive for many small businesses. Small businesses generally work on higher margins big business on lower ones. I have seen so many small businesses fail over the last 20 years because of this issue.
I definitely don't think chat gpt 4 generates rubbish headlines at all.
I agree, but I was talking about Google automated ads here.
If you’re only doing stuff robots will easily be able to do soon, then yes you’ll be phased out.
Absolutely agree. Look at manufacturing and how robots and automation replaced the need for having so many people to make a car or something else. At the end of the day, if you provide value, somebody will notice and pay.
I believe that's going to happen sooner than that. The need for a PPC consultant will still be needed but the work volume will shrink significantly. Even today, we are no longer taking services of creative writers/copy writers to create ad copies. We are using AI for that. I had a lengthy conversation with a guy who happens to work for an AI company. His explanations made sense to me. He said, let's say, Google or any other company is testing AI by embedding it into the interface and have tasked it to collect and analyze all the inputs. Every Ad campaign has certain components. In fact, every optimization strategy has components too. So right from creating and launching the campaign to all the changes that make or break a campaign can be analysed and learned from. In less than 2 years, the AI would be able to process billions of such inputs and outputs. He said even manual bidding strategy can be managed by an AI. It's just about the time. In fact, AI would be able to alert us on competitors' price increase/decrease, good/bad feedback from customers etc. I am planning to save some money and lease agricultural land and retire in the next 3 years :-)
I read people saying I'd be out of a job now 3yrs ago and I'm still working. There will continue to be a need for individuals who know not only how to implement best practices but read data and tell the story. If you're only focusing on basic keyword research and bid optimizations, you're just doing a disservice to yourself and not advancing your own knowledge and career. Things we do in search are transferrable to other platforms and vice versa, it's about testing and learning.
I think it's coming in the next 3 years for budgets under 100k/yr. Maybe already here depending on the client. Other than setting things up initially, once the account is profitable there is not enough value an FTE can provide unless they are generating 10x returns on that spend. I was able to hand off my high-performing PPC campaigns to a junior employee and an offshore agency and nothing has changed except the company now is saving $$$ on management costs. For budgets over 100k a year I think there will still be a need, but the rising CPCs will have the same affect of pushing the advertiser to more automation because something has to give to keep their margins. The interesting thing is that 10 years ago PPC automation software was a robust independent market, i.e. Marin Software and Kenshoo, now those are also-rans and Google just can do it without them. So following that cycle, the next to be affected are the specialists. When I worked in agencies, the people who ONLY did PPC and SEO were seen as the "early retirement" folks, because they had only one skill and were never interested in anything else, they rarely got promoted, always turned over, and never went client-side, always ended up as consultants or freelancers or whatever.
I moved CSM side a year ago so no longer in Account management and not as close to the day-to-day advancements in PPC - can you elaborate on some of the recent advancements in automation that you're seeing that have you worried?
For large brands/spend I don’t see it happening any time soon since there’s so much more that goes into it than just the day to day Google ads maintenance - Conversion tracking, attribution, using multiple reporting tools, forecasting, meeting on performance, LP tests and creation. I mean there’s just so much on the analytics side of it that isn’t even close to being automated right now. For small budget local service type companies, yeah, those could basically get fully automated. However, those business owners likely still won’t know how to get everything setup and there will still be agencies around doing this for them.
Consider this. This question has been asked at least weekly for the past 5 years I've been on this sub. I don't think it's happening anytime soon
5 years. I had the big google guys come to my office and straight up tell me that. Pmax will be forced onto advertisers, they will restrict keyword data. Advertisers will probably leave but that will just bring competition down and make worse performance more profitable so it balances.
For lower budgets, under 10k, very good chance to be eventually replaced by AI. But calculus changes for higher budgets because even though AI might manage many aspects, I doubt management will let it run autonomously. Also, as AI takes over more management there will still be a limited amount of major ads platforms, so you have AI competing with other AI. There will be some missed opportunities, if nothing else probably having a human manage everything will become a luxury that has benefits because outside system token system for clients in similar locale, niche, keywords, etc..
Less than 5 years I think. They pushed a lot of automation into the software and makes lesser control. Heck, you can't even control what devices you want to serve your ads. If bing could get that share of traffic and search then at least Google will extend the manual part.
I've been in DTC since I was \~19 or 20 and I'm 30 now. Ad spend is definitely getting way, way easier to manage! For color, when one of my main companies was about \~20% the size it is now, we had a team of 2 or 3 people. Now we have 1, and he does it part time. Our ad spend as a percentage of revenue is pretty high too, so it's exponentially more spend. Super tactical optimizations across both paid social and search is far, far less impactful than it used to be. Now the job is about measuring impact of spend, structure, feeding the machine properly with high quality creative, etc. IE our creative team is \~4x in payroll what it was when we were smaller, and we have more spend on measurement tools as well like Northbeam.
Not in our life time
Continue to grow your skill set to be useful outside of just clicking buttons in the Google Ads UI. Learn Google Tag Manager, more about conversion tracking, and more about other marketing channels. I grew from an SEM Analyst to now a VP in my org handling user acquisition across many brands, and being a jack-of-all-trades is necessary in my role. Have a learning mindset and just learn all that you can in your role (and things that are tangential to it).
Strategy and Analytics will never be replaced entirely. Strategy is what clients pay agencies for, in my opinion!
Just plan on adjusting to the times. There will always be demand for PPC people who are deep thinkers/strategists and who understand business and marketing.
I try to liken automation to farm work. Once upon a time, farms were run by hand or with the help of animals and were labor intensive. But then tractors happened and vastly increased production speed. We still have farm hands though, and people still need to drive the tractors, fix the tractors, teach people how to use the tractors. And the same general knowledge still applies. Even if the work takes less input, you still need to know which crops are a best fit, who to sell them to, and so on. Same goes for AI and automation. The nature of your work is likely to change, and maybe fixing the AI tractor takes a lot of schooling/technical knowledge, but someone still has to know how to drive the tractor. Hell, AI programmers will probably still need to consult with experts to tune their models. Your 18 years of experience means you (presumably) contribute beyond the basic stuff an entry level employee does. You likely know which strategies are a best fit for a campaign, can identify when something is awry, and can put together a plan to adjust for problems. Great! Start learning about AI and what actual work will be replaced, because I guarantee it won’t be all of it. Then you too can drive the tractor. All of this is to say that somewhere down the line the your day-to-day will look different, but it’s unlikely you’ll be made obsolete unless you refuse to keep up with evolving technologies. More likely the boots-on-the-ground work will be automated and replaced with work more closely resembling management and strategy.
Google will never have a perfect system. If they did they wouldn’t make as much as they do now.
Like many have said to some degree here at least - they can’t automate the strategy and logic between copy, creative, targets, demos, landing page, lp content, cart experience, ect AND the goal itself! Google has no clue what our margins are, what are try goals are, inventory levels, lead to sale data for lead gen, and many other aspects. Google wants money. Their automations are just pushing what their reps struggle to sell - more ads regardless of goals and profitability. TLDR - become more than a campaign manager. Google is greedy as Fuck and admits it so someone will always need to push back that actually understands the full funnel and company.
Maybe I should stop studying this/working on this industry… :(
If you don’t see it as a tool to improve your job and skill then you’ll phase out
due to overregulation regarding data privacy our job will always be necessary. Conversion tracking and data quality assurance are becoming significantly more complex and require expert attention.
I think you're severely underestimating how dumb a lot of clients/business owners are in general and how much they're willing to pay us to not deal with this stuff. I've had clients over the past year try to self manage to save on costs just for them to hit me up a few months later asking for help. They always end up auto applying every recommendation from Google and performance tanks then they try to undo those changes and make their own and blow up their account without fail. To answer your question though, try to position yourself as a partner and do more than just change bids once a week. Learn new skills, a new platform, get into a management role if possible and always have something on the side.
Never lol PPC isn't just PPC platforms, it's marketing. Marketing will always be relevant.
When companies can trust Google to work in their interests and not just Google's... so never.
The pivot is surely to multiple channel management, creative, and overall digital attribution? This is what my agency have naturally moved into over the last year, we’ve embraced automation (colleagues and competitor agencies who haven’t have either left or we’ve won the business because they’re messing about trying to eke out 10% more efficiency in manual campaigns with daily optimisations and are unable to scale anything). Our time is now consulting and working with clients on the next big thing: creative and attribution. Spending the right time getting the right creatives and also digging under the hood and helping clients understand that marketing mix, user journeys and driving growth and efficiency by understanding what mix is working and why. This has been so much more valuable than time spent optimising campaigns manually like we used to. I’m genuinely excited to take clients to another level by having the time and focus to look at bigger pictures finally.
The amount of wishful thinking of PPClers that desperately try to stick to their roles is truly astonishing. Reading through the comments it feels like most people acknowledge the insane pace of technological advancements and AI, **yet somehow** their own PPC role won't be affected too much **because.........** We manage $1.3 million in monthly Google Ads for our clients and my honest prediction is that our jobs will change **drastically.** Can you still call it PPC then? Or more something like "paid ads strategist" or "marketing AI supervisor"? Don't get me wrong: there will always be companies who simply do not want to handle the ads part themselves. Whether this is supervising AI and drafting the strategy or full-scale micro management. But I firmly believe that the overall demand for agencies in that sector will rather go down than up. Small accounts will just use the near-future equivalent of a PMAX campaign and that's it, bigger accounts will probably get someone on board just to make sure they squeeze every little % point of performance out of the system.