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Disappearing industry?
Hi all,
Hi everyone, I work at an agency and have noticed a significant shift in PPC roles being outsourced to countries like India. This has made me concerned about job security, so I’ve started a job search. What I’m seeing is that many agencies are now posting most PPC jobs in India, Bangladesh, the Philippines, etc. The positions available to Canadians often don’t pay a living wage (around $60-80k for senior roles in a high-cost-of-living area). My friend commented that I "work in newspaper" and that PPC is a dying industry for us and suggested that it might be time for a career change. I’m curious about your thoughts and experiences. Has anyone changed industries or considered it? What do you think the future holds for PPC careers in the next three years for those of us in the U.S. and Canada?
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1 Reply
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I really wouldnt worry too much, a few months of dealing with ppc staff in India they will come crawling back
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PPC is most certainly not dead. You are seeing jobs being outsourced because agencies are in a really bad place because so many of their clients have slashed their marketing budgets or stopped digital all together. Agencies are choosing to outsource rather than hire domestically for the sake of the bottom line. Once the economy comes back around, agencies will start hiring more again.
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I have a close friend who launched an India-based PPC agency. The customer facing folks are all US based. All their PPC folks came from big US agency holding companies with India-based ops. It’s a good model.
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IMO you have it backwards. The move is: find a monetizable model and YOU do YOUR OWN PPC work for free.
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Offshore PPC is all technical, no local knowledge or ad copy skills that resonate with locals. Also they’re clockwatchers doing the bare minimum. Just look at Google Ads support (Hyderabad team hacking handling Australian clients are borderline braindead.)
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Some people in India will level up but just like people in Europe and North America… many will just be average or awful at the job. Our industry is not going anywhere and there will always be a need for people in North America because local talent will have local context to running ads.
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In this day and age, I’d focus on becoming a full stack marketer, as opposed to just a PPC manager. Learn it all. Tracking, running ads, funnels, audiences, messaging etc.
The days where you could do a Google Ads course (or Facebook ads course), and call yourself a marketer are long gone.
And the chances of a business hiring a high-level marketer (manager, director, CMO) abroad are extremely slim.
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My agency is the opposite, they’re culling freelancer use. Depends on the stability of your agency
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I worked with a a UK guy’s agency, name starts with Linked and he had really good pitch, but in reality I was outsourced to the guys who barely spoke English and were absolutely clueless and gave zero fucks.
It was omega frustrating, especially with the hefty fees they charged. The owner was eloquent, but in his case outsourcing will kill his business imo.
Basically he just travels the world now, and has core operations outsourced, it will backfire sooner or later -
Different clients want different things. Where the ppc manager sits on the planet doesn’t determine how well they can manage your campaign.
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If you’re good at what you do, I wouldn’t be worried about it. Outsourcing is nothing new in the world, it’s always existed and it’ll always exist. There’s a reason why it’s cheap, not because they’re in a different location, but because quality is overall lower.
I moved to Japan and I still charge EU rate. I’m not putting a knife under my clients’ throats. My clients know they can hire Indian/Bangladeshi/Pakistani/Filipinos/etc. providers. They choose not to.
It’s ultimately not about location. It really is about quality. The really good Indian/Bangladeshi/etc. specialists ask for top money too. Yeah, they can afford to be slightly cheaper, but really, they’re not _cheap_, they know their value very well.
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From my experience the quality always dips when outsourcing, so my short answer is no, I don’t think it is a dying industry for North America.
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The problem with agencies is that they are sensitive to economic changes and are very quick to hit the layoff button.
That said, digital advertising is a fast-growing industry with META alone ready to overtake [in ad spend] linear tv in the coming months.
So no I wouldn’t worry about it.
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Not disappearing at all. PPC is evolving and nowadays a good PPC manager has broader general marketing knowledge rather than just what’s inside an ad platform.
Businesses will also always need someone to do this job because: 1. They don’t know how to do it themselves or 2. They don’t have time to do it themselves.
The outsourcing is also an interesting aspect.
The bottom line is that there are people in developing countries that are fluent in English and can do an equal or better job than North Americans or Europeans for a third of the salary.
Sure there are shitty PPC managers as well…but that’s on the agency to filter them out, just as they should with anyone anywhere. If they don’t, then that means it’s probably a meat grinder agency and you wouldn’t want to work there anyways.The mindset of “eventually they’ll realize that outsourcing to developing countries will get low quality work” Is lazy and erroneously generalizing.
When looking for jobs you are essentially a product and trying to sell yourself in Interviews. If competition is tough you’ll need to either level up your game and bring more value to yourself, or move to India or Argentina.
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Data. Data. Data.
Clients do not care about how many impressions or clicks you got. Or how high was your CTR or how low the CPC
The only thing they care about is cost per conversion.
So many agencies skip this step. They know sales are coming in but can’t quantify it to clients. So the clients outsource to lower their costs.
If you can show them you’re running a campaign profitably they are way less likely to jump ship.
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