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Does anyone feel like working in PPC is just a constant state of impending doom?
To me, I feel like I can’t reap any joy or reward from PPC when I know that all it will take is some seasonality, stock issues or the algorithm throwing a tizzy to cause issues with account performance. I used to work in sales and it was much more rewarding and far less anxiety inducing. Once a sale was made, you reaped the reward and moved onto the next one. In PPC you can improve an account for months and months, setting a new ‘baseline’ performance for the client as every day passes. When it does inevitably dip, it feels like all the hard work was for nothing and oftentimes it’s completely unclear as to why. I can’t help but feel like every time something improves, it’ll just feel worse when it faulters. There seems to be absolutely no end-goal in PPC. Not from a career perspective, but in the job itself. You chip and chip away, with no gratification at all. It feels like I’m just holding back flames that will break through at a moments notice. Nothing is ever finished and nothing is ever ‘complete’.
To be honest, the only feeling of calm and closure I’ve had is when clients have left, or when I’ve left an agency. Whether an account performed well or not, knowing it has come to an end is so satisfying. But the run up to it coming to an end, which is 100% probable (unless a client spends their whole life with one agency), feels like a constant impending doom.
Does anyone else feel this way?
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1 Reply
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I think as you build your intuition about PPC mechanics and match them back to business/economic scenarios you’ll see it as a challenge you can meet with the right plan.
What I suspect is that you’re working with customers that don’t have the right expectations in mind or know-how on how to react when things shift. They likely pass the burden and stress onto you and fixing it isn’t met with thanks – “good back to the way it SHOULD be”.
The problem here is that we all operate on a moving train – it’s just having confidence and setting the right expectations on what to do when things do ebb and flow.
Is that what you’re experiencing?
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No.
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It sounds like you’re getting lost in the current trends of your accounts.
You can’t have an account for a significant period of time and ignore market trends and fluctuations. Seasonality, YoY growth or shrinkage, and quarterly trends are all important. If you’re not looking at where the market is going and only focusing on “we got more than last time” you’re going to get yourself in trouble, because you’re setting the expectation of infinite growth for your client.
If you live by “we grew again” then you’ll die by it when it eventually (and predictably) doesn’t happen.
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I somewhat feel you. I run a 2-people Google Ads agency (my brother and myself) and we manage $600,000 in monthly ad spend for eCommerce brands.
I like my work and to me it’s super satisfying to see a new strategy unfold and scale an account by 50% in a month. Or to see amazing ROAS numbers at the end of a month and receive really grateful client messages.
However, I totally agree with your point of essentially fighting a constant upwards battle. You can do well for 6 months and if month 7 performs really poorly, a client may be super upset (of course there are also great and terrible clients) but oftentimes it can’t really be **explained.**
Even if you are an amazing PPC marketer – you are still at the mercy of Google or whichever platform you work with. Those systems are way too complex to be understood 100% and there are infinite variables at play. Sure, after 7 years of doing this and having spent $25 million or so I have a pretty good grasp of what works and what doesn’t, but if a campaign that worked great for 2 months suddenly tanks without a change in search term quality, seasonality, competition and others it can be extremely frustrating.
All in all I still like PPC a lot – especially when working in a team and when you stay up to date and have the (client) budgets to build great campaigns. But there are downsides to it for sure.
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It is indeed a losing game where the house continues to win. I’ve done it for ten years and it’s a scam.
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I run a PPC agency and struggle with this. Sometimes a campaign tanks out of nowhere, and it’s got me thinking about offering other services as well to help offset the volatility of PPC. I still love the feeling of cracking a campaign and getting leads and making money for clients, but it comes with the downside of random volatility for sure. Not sure you can escape that…just have to offset with a quick pivot, offering another service or making sure you have great client relationships so they don’t panic.
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Yeah, especially when clients don’t understand that not every fucking thing is “super urgent”. Cunts.
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I 100% feel you OP. It does seem to be a constant battle and there’s no end game other than clients eventually leaving. Like you said, no matter what you do, how many years you build an account, eventually, one day, it’s going to stop working. And now you’re basically on a race to beat the ticking timebomb (client) to try and get things “fixed” even though nothing’s broken, before the client eventually fires you.
Or for lead gen clients, everything looks good on your end, but you later find out the client hasn’t been calling any of the leads. So they fire you.
In PPC it really seems to be one damn thing after another, it’s super hard to remain optimistic.
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Imagine working in oil & gas…
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Not really. Just set client expectations properly. If I’ve never told them that their performance will be better MoM or YoY then I don’t need to worry about telling them their CPC has doubled.
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I do feel like that sometimes, but not always. It is often a thankless task though. It’s especially hard right now as people have so much less buying power, and yet agency customers seem to think that we are able to somehow change this fact. You can advertise castles to poor people all you want, doesn’t mean they’re going to be able to build one.
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IMO you can’t let it faze you. Don’t worry too much about the performance. Focus on the process and do good work. Performance is the by-product.
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I view a career in 100% PPC as risky. You are hitching your wagon to a large corporation that can just decide to change their product and cut you out. Reminds me of the 90’s when people made products that depended on MSFT Office Suite. Then MSFT would introduce a feature that made that product useless.
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Nope. The vast majority of my clients are winning and paying more fees quarter over quarter.
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Nothing here in untrue- only distinctions worth making are (1) most jobs have at least a little impending doom, in part because that comes from you (or, in my case, from me) and (2) something I didn’t realize until i accidentally landed at an agency that isn’t toxic- the environment matters a LOT. Having AMs & VPs that will defer to you & support you when things go wrong makes the whole thing so much easier to stomach.
None of this is actually important. Literally none of it matters. Idk if you get right with real-world applications of existentialism, but they tend bring me tremendous comfort: even at its absolute worst, it can only really matter so much.
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