Does anyone else feel like PPC is a miserable job?

[Luc_ElectroRaven]

Can’t prove you wrong – you are seeing it exactly right. I see the same thing and have been doing the same thing with adding more skills.

[priortouniverse]

Why don’t you just switch back to manual cpc? you still can

[Bo_Babelitz]

Higman, that you?

[ppcbetter_says]

Kinda. The conversion tracking is getting more complex, so setting up and maintaining offline conversion tracking keeps me a little bit busy.

There’s also the creative director role. With AI a search ppc guy can easily make creative briefs and sometimes even full video ads. Good creative will driver performance forever.

[Gabriela_Growth]

id agree, A lot of the craft that made PPC feel alive has been automated away, and what is left can feel oddly empty. The thrill of constant testing and hands on control has been replaced with guardrails, signals, and waiting. For many of us, it now feels less like steering and more like supervising a very capable machine.

But the value never disappeared, it just moved. The real work lives outside the dashboard now in the thinking, the structure, the clarity of the offer, the quality of tracking, and how everything connects. PPC on its own is quieter, but performance as a whole still needs human judgment. the role is not dying perhaps i could say it is evolving,,..

[rattlesnaek]

Sure, the technical stuff got easier, but in my experience it’s the strategy or overall business knowledge that many “specialists” don’t get right.

You actually need solid business & marketing knowledge to be able to comprehend your client’s business, industry, offer, target audience, etc. and how to approach all that to structure a campaign around it.

Hell, even choosing the right digital channels for your company/niche requires that. PPC doesn’t even work sometimes and companies want to push it because they believe everyone needs to.

Most PPC specialists or agencies (at least where I’m from) miserably fail at this general business knowledge. They’re literally just like “yeah bro let’s run a PMAX” without putting any thought in understanding, for instance, consumer psychology for that specific niche.

For us who actually know marketing as a whole and not just PPC, we have a considerable advantage in my opinion.

[local-bee1608]

>You were constantly testing, tweaking, and coming up with new ideas. Writing new ad copy, using long tail keywords.

>But now… all of that is handled by AI and bidding strategies. What even is there to do anymore?

I agree with this sentiment, but I see this much more positively. The machine is going to do a better job for most things overall (e.g. bidding) than you ever could do manually. This shift allows us to focus more on aspects around PPC that are just as meaningful as having “good” campaigns. For example, tracking and conversion-rate optimization are going to become even more important the less levers you can pull in Google Ads itself.

All that said, even if you don’t have to spend hours searching for individual keywords, a good campaign setup is still super important and a lot of people make egregious mistakes. Basically every account I audit in my agency is set up in horribly wrong ways. So I think expertise and good campaign management are still extremely vital, it may just feel a little bit different than before.

[DonDoesDallas]

The way PPC is seen within the business is the larger problem. You are bidding on a complex marketplace, where outcomes aren’t guaranteed. At least, we should expect clear goals & objectives.

[aamirkhanppc]

PPC is not miserable .. You need to focus on growth so in AI Era you need to further think outside the box .. just not rely on old strategies.. Create Advance AI tailored strategies and you will defiantly create more value.. also as you said up-skill will give you edge

[ppcwithyrv]

Its competitive and always evolving- technically changing. Meaning the rules change every year.

What worked in 2015, 2020 or even 2023…..will not work in 2026 or 2027.

[Pr0f-x]

I find paid to be unusually complex with so many moving parts, many of which need critical analysis, reasoning and some lateral thinking. Results are also directly proportional to an offer, usability and pipeline efficiency. In other words you could spend all day being phenomenal at analysing data, being creative, doing everything right technically, all for it to be completely unravelled by things technically out of your control.

I find it to be one of those jobs to be totally under appreciated considering its relative complexity. It is nothing like dialing a number on a CRM and having a conversation. Or sending out a weekly newsletter.

So I don’t worry so much about ai and automation. I focus on the ancillary stuff that makes or breaks my results.

[Goldenface007]

Of course flipping burgers is a miserable job. At some point you’re supposed to get promoted and move up to bigger things.

[QuantumWolf99]

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.

[NoEnd373]

PPC is the part of my job I hate the most. I don’t feel confident in my ability to generate results but my agency keeps bringing on more clients looking specifically for paid ads

[kreativo03]

Calculations..how high can your CPA, cpc, etc. be compared to business expenses so you’re still profitable. Also building presentations for stakeholders and explain stuff. Like I just did to justify why our brand campaign collapsed, what the reasons are and what should be done.