A Day in the Life of a Paid Search Specialist

Every Day Starts With Emails

You’ll probably start your day with emails. Any job in marketing tends to involve a lot of communication back and forth with coworkers and/or clients. In our always-on work culture, emails land in your inbox at every hour of the day and night. So your first order of business each morning will probably be tackling that inbox to answer questions and put out fires. 

After that, your typical tasks will depend on the priorities for that day, but each day will probably include a mix of research, analysis, and coordinating with others. 

Keywords Are Key to a Paid Search Specialist’s Day

Your goal as a PPC specialist is to create compelling, targeted campaigns that drive traffic to your company’s or your client’s websites. For a paid search specialist, most of the daily tasks revolve around online advertising via PPC campaigns as a result. That means a large part of each day will involve setting up and managing those campaigns by researching keywords and groups, analyzing traffic and trends, monitoring results, and optimizing ads based on those results. 

Depending on the size of the organization you work for, you might also manage other tasks related to online advertising, including writing ad copies, developing display ads, and building or optimizing landing pages for those ads.  

Monitoring, Analyzing and Reporting

As with any kind of advertising, PPC campaigns must be monitored. Money is being spent, and the paid search specialist must make sure that money is delivering a return on investment (ROI). To do so, part of your typical day will be spent analyzing ongoing campaigns to look for any changes in activity and to make sure the ads are meeting the goals set for them. 

In addition, you’ll consider ways to improve those ads to generate even better results, as well as create reports to demonstrate the effectiveness of each campaign to the management or your clientele. 

Working With Others

Marketers rarely work in a vacuum, and paid search is no exception. Whether you’re working on PPC in-house or at an agency doing paid search for clients, you will be part of a team and working closely with others. Those coworkers or teams might include: 

• The SEO specialist who will benefit from your keyword research plus offer you insights from the organic search side
• The content marketing specialist who will want your help in driving traffic to content they’ve created
• The social media marketing specialist who will work closely with you to place ads in social networks or to get your help to drive traffic to social campaigns 
• The designer or web development specialist who will build landing pages and display ads for your paid search campaigns 

In addition to those coworkers, you might be working with clients if you’re employed by an agency, and you’ll definitely be working with a manager who is overseeing the budgetary side of the marketing efforts, to ensure money is spent judiciously and the ROI meets expectations. 

Staying Current With Industry Changes

Anything related to Google is subject to change, and that includes PPC advertising. Staying current with those changes is part of your daily job as a paid search specialist. Although you’ll have more time some days than others for reading blogs and articles like those of PPC expert Brad Geddes, doing so will be one of your tasks. If you fail to carve out time to keep up, you’ll miss out on critical information. For example, if you don’t know how the functionality of Exact Match changed, you won’t adjust your keyword research accordingly, and your ads will suffer as a result.

Getting Started As a Paid Search Specialist

The job of a paid search specialist is unique to the digital marketing world. Does this unique combination of analytics and marketing appeal to you? Then get trained to be a sought-after PPC specialist. Simplilearn offers a PPC Specialist Master’s program that can get you industry-ready and fast-track your career with a clear, structured learning path recommended by industry experts. As part of your training, you’ll learn to master the nuances of pay-per-click, display advertising, conversion optimization, and web analytics. You’ll also get extensive project experience to prepare you for managing paid marketing initiatives. You will complete your training ready to create compelling, targeted campaigns and drive increased traffic to websites.

And when searchers go looking for answers online, you can help to make sure they find the websites that matter to you and your employer or client.