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IMHO PPC isn’t dead it just evolved past what most people think the job actually is… you’re mourning bid adjustments and device modifiers but those were busywork disguised as strategy.
Real PPC in 2026 is conversion architecture, attribution modeling, and teaching algorithms what success looks like through proper data infrastructure.
The agencies getting phased out are the ones still thinking their value is campaign babysitting and quarterly ad copy refreshes… meanwhile businesses spending serious money need people who understand how to structure accounts so Smart Bidding doesn’t optimize itself into a corner… worked with luxury furniture firm where the previous team was manually tweaking bids daily like it was 2015… we switched to automated bidding with proper conversion tracking and ROAS jumped from 1.9x to 3.2x in 110 days because the algo finally had complete signal instead of guessing.
For my clients with $100k-$300k+ monthly spend the work isn’t easier it’s just different… instead of adjusting bids we’re solving attribution gaps where customers research on mobile but buy on desktop 3 weeks later.
Building conversion tracking that captures phone calls AND form fills AND chat conversations so the algo has complete data… structuring campaigns so each one has enough conversion volume for Smart Bidding to actually learn instead of fragmenting budget across 12 campaigns with single digit conversions.
If your job feels like monitoring dashboards and adding negative keywords then yeah you’re probably getting automated away… but if you can architect data pipelines that turn messy customer journeys into clean conversion signals the work has never been more valuable.
