What Does Automation Mean For PPC Careers
PPC marketers and those looking to explore the PPC career path have come face to face with the question “will automation be the end of the PPC industry?”
With the increased use of smart campaigns and automated strategies, it’s safe to say that machine learning is getting better at, well… learning. You see instances of campaign types that were previously unreliable become more profitable over time.
This improvement amongst these low maintenance campaign types trigger advertisers and business owners alike to opt towards the use of them over your standard campaign that requires a lot more upfront work and long term maintenance. Not only saving them money from having to outsource the work but also valuable time that could be spent elsewhere.
What does this mean to those who have built a career on providing marketing services specialising in the PPC side?
It certainly means that there is the potential for demand to change, especially amongst industries that take a preference in the use of a single smart campaign. Or small ecommerce brands that only have the budget capabilities for a single campaign, so opt towards smart shopping for a hands-off advertising approach.
Why would this happen you ask?
- As mentioned above, smart campaigns require little to no management; this saves businesses money from having to hire a service or alternatively saves time from having to manually build a campaign themselves.
- The likes of Google and Facebook heavily promote these campaign types, inexperienced users of the platform are more likely to gravitate towards what is recommended due to limited knowledge on the platforms.
However… I will hold off the fear mongering for the moment, although automation is improving at a fast rate, it’s not going to be impacting anyone’s careers any time soon but specialists in this field do need to start preparing. Before we cover what you can do to prepare, let’s talk about why you shouldn’t panic.
Yes, smart campaigns and automated bidding have come a long way, but they still have a long way to go.
Let’s talk about smart campaigns first, the likes of Smart Shopping within Google have become relatively reliable, often delivering a decent ROI in comparison to their manual shopping counterparts. However, there are plenty other campaign types that are still not great. Amongst the PPC community, fully automated campaigns often have a reputation of spending more than they can return, indicating the current need for a professional setup and ongoing management/optimisation.
The majority of PPC platforms often provide it’s users with recommendations to “improve” campaign performance. Whilst in some instances, these can be helpful, providing you with insight on what can really take your campaigns “to the next level” (sarcasm intended). Most PPC specialists will know that the vast majority of the time, these recommendations are relatively useless and ultimately serve as a hindrance to account managers.
This is simply because these platforms have a surface level understanding of what the advertiser is trying to achieve. Leaving them to make recommendations that are far from beneficial, causing potential catastrophic campaign changes.
The likes of Google, Facebook and Microsoft have proven to release cost effective bidding strategies that are more ROAS and CPA focused. However you can have the best bidding strategy in the world but it will be very limited from a performance perspective when paired with subpar or targeting.
This same principle applies when building a house, this house could be decorated to the nines, but without proper foundations, your decor is somewhat irrelevant. Targeting is essentially the foundations of a campaign, not having an expert build this is like asking your next door neighbor build the walls of your home over a professional bricklayer.
Privacy laws are getting strict and ultimately impact what the platforms can and can’t learn about the everyday user. This means that automation and machine learning has taken two steps back as it can’t track to the extent it once was able to, not only stunting the current capabilities of machine learning but slowing the potential of improvement.
What Can You Do
The digital marketing industry shouldn’t just rest on these negatives about automation/machine learning and if PPC is your specialist area, you should always have a back up plan for when automation takes over.
First of all, make sure you are learning new skills in other areas where you can offer potential services. This can range from content creation, to web development, to user experience. This will not only be beneficial in the short term as you are able to offer more value within your current services, it also means you have a backup service you can provide in the instance automation takes over.
Whether you service clients or work inhouse for a company, ensure you are educating them on the importance of your role and why they can’t simply set up a basic, run of the mill campaign.
There is no doubt that machine learning will eventually take over, so stay up-to date with the changes in the machine learning world. This way you are always one step ahead of the game and prepared for what it has in store.
