Question
I’ve been in the game coming up on three years now, two and a half years agency and recently switched in-house. The agency I worked at everything was segmented, so separate teams for Strategy, Conversion Tracking, CRO, Copy, Creative, with me in Paid/Performance. My new gig is a one man army, which I’m quite enjoying sinking my teeth into the other aspects of PPC I wasn’t involved with before, and finding the Conversion and CRO parts quite interesting.
Everyone keeps saying to master PPC you need to get REALLY good at X or Y or Z, but where do you actually learn?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m on the PPC, AdWords, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Google Tag Manager etc. subreddits daily, and equally follow experts in the field on LinkedIn, but there just doesn’t seem to be a solid free resource for the advanced things set in a structured way.
It’s either top level basic stuff from places like Udemy or Skillshare, or the paid stuff from places like AnalyticsMania or CXL, which people are recommending, but it’s difficult dropping a few hundred or even couple thousands dollars.
So where/how did you master your skillset? Do I have to open up my wallet if I really want to continue learning, or are there some good free resources out there?
Answer
You don’t “master” PPC.
You learn a lot of things and it becomes a big chunk of knowledge you need to make sense out of in order to do your job.
To learn more, if you’re done learning where you are, you move onto other jobs, different positions and find new mentors.
Once you reach a certain level of experience, you’ll know more of what you don’t know, but you’ll know enough to know you don’t need to know everything.
Hm, maybe we’re getting a bit too philosophical. OP followed up with the following:
Admittedly, “master”ing PPC was a bit of a clickbait title 😉
I definitely agree on your point around knowing what you don’t know with experience. The more you’re exposed to certain elements of the job, you realize how vast the topic is, the niches within the field, and the tools out there that exist to help us.
I guess my question was more around looking for more sources of learning, as anything I’ve found so far is either top level or paid.
That’s because good knowledge is worth good money 🙂 although there are also some bad stuff on sale.
As I said, there’s not much better than learning with someone better than you – that involves working with better people, directly or indirectly.
Chat with peers. Bring value to the table. Get corrected. It’s a long way to go, but it’ll eventually get there.
With 3 years of experience, I don’t think you have to worry that much about it.
I’d argue 3 years is when you start thinking of specialising into something.
Thinking about it, it’s been over 10 years since I started working and I realise there are still a lot of things I don’t know of, or never got the chance to play with.
Digital marketing is too complex to know everything in-depth — but choosing a speciality shouldn’t stop you from learning something else: we highly value “T-shaped” individuals in our industry, in other words, people who are experts in a few things (in my case: search & content marketing) but are also savvy or more in other related fields (in my case, most things digital marketing: social, UX, email, etc.).