Stay sharp and relevant with ongoing PPC training

Contributor Jeff Baum recommends ongoing technical and soft skills training for your PPC team.

The paid search world continues to grow and evolve at an extraordinary rate. Machine learning and automation are changing how the paid search professional operates. Account managers must be more customer service- and business-oriented than ever before.

Being strategically proficient is no longer a luxury — it’s a requirement.

The challenge pay-per-click (PPC) professionals and their managers face today is identifying the core skills needed to successfully manage paid search in an ever-more-complex business environment and ensuring that a strong training plan is in place that enables the PPC professional to meet those challenges.

Skill requirements

Today’s PPC professional needs to be very adept at proactively finding solutions to complex problems.

I’ve seen a distinct shift in client expectations.  Five years ago, clients used to be impressed by our account manager’s ability to “pull the levers” within an account; the bar for success was tactical proficiency. Clients now expect the PPC professionals they engage with to be tactical whizzes, which means just being tactically proficient is no longer enough.

The new client expectation is that their account manager is someone who understands the big picture, the big business problem that needs to be solved, and knows how to use the right set of PPC tactics, tools and machine learning in a strategic way. That talent needs to lead to meeting performance goals and quickly identifying and seizing upon new growth opportunities.

In addition to possessing superior technical skills, the PPC professional must also possess finely tuned soft skills needed to communicate how they fit into the organization’s big picture, the impact of their work and how their use of PPC is solving the big business problem at hand.

In the ever-growing fight to justify PPC spend and obtain more budget, the PPC professional must communicate on a simple level to clients and stakeholders what PPC is and how it’s making a material impact on their business.

[Read the full article on Search Engine Land.]

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