My first post-college job was actually at Enterprise Rent-a-Car. I took an internship with the company mostly because it was paid and offered great sales experience, and from there I was hired on full-time after college. I quickly realized that although it taught me so much and gave me thick skin, rental cars weren’t exactly my calling. From there, I took my first online marketing job at a company called Pepperjam, Inc. in Wilkes-Barre, PA, which is now owned by GSI Commerce in Philadelphia. This was my first job in PPC or Paid Search marketing, and I was instantly hooked.

After working at Pepperjam for a while, I realized I wanted a change and to live in a bigger city. I moved to Boston after getting a job at a company called Mindfire Interactive, which was quickly acquired by Connelly Partners and that’s how I became a part of the Connelly Partners interactive team.

I enjoy the environment and culture at CP. It’s a very “work hard, play hard” type of culture. There’s a bar in the middle of the office, for starters. I also have the opportunity to grow and shape the PPC side of the business here. Plus, I never thought I’d make so many friends in a work environment before coming to CP.

The simplest way to think of this is if you’re looking to receive more information, book a vacation, buy something online, research a product—what do you do? You go to a search engine, of course. PPC is just as it sounds: Pay per click. Impressions on a search engine are free, but you only pay for the valued click—if someone chooses to click on your ad and visit your website. Unlike SEO, PPC requires a media budget as you pay for clicks, but it is a very cost-effective means to get a business’s website noticed by their target audience.

A good way to think of PPC is like a silent auction. As a Senior PPC Manager, I place bids on keywords or phrases that are relevant to my clients’ target audience. There’s keyword research and a bit of psychology to it: “what would a person type in a search field when they are looking for specific goods or services?” Organic search is obviously a great way to generate free traffic to your website, but often requires tweaks or updates to a website and a significant amount of time to see results.

There are so many benefits to utilizing PPC, including but not limited to: Instant flow of traffic, landing page control (you choose which pages of your site a user sees), precise tracking and adjustment (ability to choose which keywords you bid on and real-time campaign adjustments—tracking revenue, ROI, leads, sign-ups, etc.—at the keyword level to increase profitability), buy position on the search engine results page (if you want to rank #1 for a certain keyword or words, there is a way to do so with the right strategy).

Strategies for remaining calm at work are the same as strategies for dealing with any difficult situation in life. I usually go with the motto “I’ll figure it out” or “I’m not saving lives.” It’s true, and I always do. There are certainly some unpredictable things that can happen within a PPC campaign. The #1 thing that has worked well for me is being proactive, being fully transparent with my clients and giving them full explanations of what’s going on in their account. If you’re doing all you can and you test something and it just happens to not work out, well then you know that it doesn’t work, and that’s actually a really positive takeaway for the PPC account. A positive attitude and staying relaxed during an intense situation can go a long way. 

I utilize blogs by Google and industry leaders to stay up to date with search marketing trends. Some of my favorites include the Google Adwords blog, PPC Hero, Search Engine Land and Search Engine Watch. There are also so many free webinars that are available online, so it’s really important for me to take time out and attend those when I can.

Paid search marketing is a job that never ends. It’s ongoing and has the potential to be a 24-hours-a-day job. It’s my role as a professional to figure out ways to not make it a 24-hours-a-day job, and to set a client up for success even during non-traditional work hours.

The most challenging part of my job is relaying information in a way that demonstrates the true value of PPC for my clients. Unless you’re a super data geek like me, reviewing metrics of clicks, click-through-rates, cost-per-clicks and impression shares gets old pretty quick, so I have to relay information that is high-level and shows the true value for the business. 

Organization, proactivity and patience. Keeping accounts organized is the #1, most important part of a PPC campaign, otherwise it’s very difficult to keep track of what keywords, ads and landing pages are working the best for you. If you have a PPC account with over 50,000 keywords, you can’t group them into one campaign with the same ad for each keyword—it wouldn’t be targeted and would be impossible to manage performance. In an ideal world, every 1-5 keywords would have their own group, their own targeted piece of ad copy and a very relevant landing page. This ensures you’re giving the user the best experience and helping them find exactly what they’re looking for.

Proactivity also is something that has really benefited me with managing campaigns. I always feel it’s important to keep track of trends and think of possible solutions down the road (whether it’s an update to a landing page or requesting an increase in budget due to competition).

Patience is another area of PPC that is often overlooked. To truly measure performance, you can’t make drastic changes to an account every single day. It’s important to keep up to date with management and tracking performance/budgets, but making too many changes at once doesn’t allow for any one change to have a chance to work or accrue data for accurate results.

My schedule is never the same. I can predict how busy my schedule will be in different weeks of the month, but a lot of the time it’s unpredictable. The beginning of the month is always busy because it’s the time where we crank out monthly reports and have monthly in-depth meetings with each of our clients. There are always new businesses on the horizon, though, and that’s something I have to prepare for to fit into my schedule.

I would say the top three skills that are essential to succeeding in PPC are: never being satisfied, proficiency with Microsoft Excel and curiosity. It’s easy to sit back and relax once things in your PPC account are going well, but it’s important to remember that the algorithm will always change, new competitors will always roll in and there’s always something you can test or try to improve performance even further. This goes hand in hand with curiosity and wanting the best for your clients. 

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my PPC career, it’s that after a period of time PPC becomes much easier to understand and speak about with clients. Speaking about PPC and actually implementing it on the backend are two completely different things though, and if you don’t have a strong knowledge of Microsoft Excel and want a career in PPC, I strongly suggest taking a class. There are tons of online courses and classes often offered at colleges or universities. If the concatenate formula, pivot tables and via lookup sound like a foreign language to you, time to get some excel practice in.

I think the most exciting part about being in this industry and my career is waking up to see what is coming next. Google recently started testing images on the search results page with big brands (JetBlue, for example) when, years ago, they said they’d never do that. It’s great to be in an ever-changing industry and wondering where that will take me. I think next steps for me would include becoming part of a panel at a local search conference.