5 undervalued skills to complement PPC management

I always ask the same hypothetical question to friends and coworkers:

If you were 20 years younger with the hindsight you have, what career path would you take differently?

It’s fairly easy to look back. But what’s (much) harder is to look forward in time and identify areas that will increase in value in the next few years.

Here are five marketing skills I believe will only increase in value in the next few years to expand your expertise and your career path options.

1. Creative generation

Everybody seems to think creativity is dying, especially since the rise of AI over the past two years.

However, AI is the exact reason why I think the skill of creating smart, engaging, edgy, unique, and thought-provoking creative will be worth its weight in gold.

Creative is advertising’s founding father. It will never not be at the core of your advertising strategy.

In a sea of average content, which ChatGPT often provides across multiple channels, the ability to stand out from mediocrity will be crucial – particularly for brand building and new businesses in a crowded marketplace.

ChatGPT and Gemini can be the answer when companies want quantity over quality.

Advancements in technology and lower entry points will also allow more people to create high-quality ads, which will no doubt make people raise their game to stand out.

Even for brands where user-generated content is more of the image they want to portray, I believe this will continue to thrive in a world where the stock of authentic content is only going up.

2. Conversion rate optimization

In PPC, we focus so much on investing in what happens before the click that what happens after is neglected and taken for granted.

Out of all the digital marketing skills I’ve seen over the past 10 years, there is not another that is more underestimated relative to its importance than conversion rate optimization (CRO).

I’ve been involved in meetings where the primary discussion amongst six or seven business stakeholders is pausing or adding a handful of long tail keywords. Or whether changing a few titles and descriptions in a search ad is going to make a significant difference.

We are guilty of delving into topics of little significance and ignoring areas of core value to a business’s digital success, such as CRO.

I believe part of this is because it’s often delegated to the developers to fix. Most agencies only care what happens before a user visits the website, while the clients only want to focus on things where they can have an element of control.

CRO is so valuable at the moment because so few agencies offer this outside of small-scale consultancy. There is usually a gap on the client side where they have their marketing team and developers, but no one in between linking ecommerce or lead gen expertise, strategy, and the ability to action any changes.

Those jack-of-all-trades within businesses are normally spread thin because of their versatility. So having someone at the agency side to lead CRO with in-depth user and competitor analysis to back up any hypothesis and recommendations is vital.

You can break it down by numbers to get a better sense of its importance:

• If a website is working at a 5% conversion rate at a £100 AOV with 100,000 unique sessions per month, that’s £500,000 in revenue per month.

Through a CRO service, they identify a number of barriers to conversion for a large % of users, such as:

• Inefficient checkout process.
• Lack of USPs.
• Inefficient use of reviews.
• Bloating product page.
• Lack of payment providers.
• Lack of up-selling strategies.
• Slow response time.
• Generic USPS. 

Once the dev and marketing team had reviewed, approved and actioned these changes, conversion rate increased to 6% and AOV £125.

With the same level of advertising dollars spent and the same monthly sessions, that revenue is now £750,000.

A £250k improvement, which over the whole year is £3 million and a 50% uplift in the company’s annual revenue!

And that’s just from a one-off service! That value won’t be underestimated forever.

3. Omnichannel

There has always been a healthy form of competition between channel experts for years now.

So often siloed and reported individually with channel-specific creative, an omnichannel approach is rare, whether on the client or agency side. The obsession with attribution has always fueled this separation.

With the growth in marketing mix models (hello, Meridian), I believe this is a strong sign that we are shifting toward a more omnichannel approach.

The impacts of this may be that we start seeing more channel consultants, client directors or omnichannel specialists.

This will lead to a greater alignment of strategies and consistent messaging across the channels.

We may even see a surge in old-fashioned storytelling, but with modern twists to enhance the customer experience across the different touch points.

When reliant on channel-specific metrics, the individual parts are often greater than the whole. By stepping back and placing a greater strategic emphasis on omnichannel, greater channel collaboration can lead to the whole being greater.

4. Profit optimization and business economics

This is something that has grown in importance over the past two years, but not as quickly as I would have thought.

For a number of years in Google Ads for retail accounts, ROAS is the source of truth. In some cases, clients haven’t changed their ROAS for a number of years, despite increases in manufacturing costs, delivery, competition, etc.

This makes your Target ROAS more difficult to achieve without lower revenue generation. In some cases, because of those increased expenses, the original target ROAS isn’t even profitable, regardless of revenue generation.

ROAS is mostly an arbitrary metric that gives an account manager a goal to optimize toward. Nothing else. It does not reflect most businesses key objectives and it caps the growth potential of any ad account.

ROAS is only effective if stakeholders have their finger on the pulse of their business economics (e.g., average cost of goods sold, shipping, packaging and handling, discounts). And, spoiler alert, most don’t!

That’s where you come in.

If you have an understanding of general ecommerce business economics, and combine that with executing a profit-first approach with a helping hand from tools such as ProfitMetrics, then you will go beyond just the PPC account management sending monthly reports on clicks and CTR.

Suddenly, you will become a business consultant with the ability to structure a PPC account in line with a business’s key objectives.

With ecommerce markets still struggling, campaign growth becoming more complex with rising costs, increasing competition, and more profitability levers to pull (Google even now has its own tool to focus on more profitable products) the value of integrating account management with profitable tracking and business unit reporting is only going up.

5. Ecommerce consultancy 

I’m cheating a little bit here as this skill covers all services, but the value of being able to expand beyond just a PPC specialist and become an all-rounder has never been higher.

AI has levelled the playing field, no more so than for PPC specialists.

For the past few years, PPC management has slowly migrated away from spending the majority of your time in Google Ads focusing on tactical decisions and optimization and toward spending more time on higher-level strategic work. This is largely because of automated features and tools that do most of the heavy lifting (PMax, RSAs, AARs, Smart bidding, etc.).

PPC specialists who want to stay relevant and future-proof themselves may want to become a T-Shaped specialist. Essentially, you want to become someone who leans on core expertise and has a deep understanding of that service (e.g., a PPC specialist) but also has a broad knowledge of other business services on top of that.

This will enable you to become less reliant on just one area and enhance your value across all other business and marketing areas, such as SEO, analytics, measurement, or the other areas I’ve already discussed in this article.

You don’t need to be an expert in these areas, just enough knowledge to provide value to your client and integrate it into your core expertise.

If managing PPC ads is your core expertise, but you also are comfortable with CRO and analytics, when troubleshooting poor PPC performance for a month, you have the ability to look beyond CTR and impression share.

You might see that the ads are underperforming because the cart abandonment rate increased after installing a new checkout widget a few weeks prior, or removing a payment provider because their fees were too high, compromising the checkout stage and reducing website purchase efficiency.

A PPC specialist may not have looked beyond the Google or Bings interface to spot the issue, which could have lasted months before being resolved.

Grow your value

Whether it’s becoming a T-shaped specialist or deep diving into another undervalued business service (would this be an H-shaped specialist?), the value of bulking up your expertise outside of your core area will really set you apart.

You will bring added value to your own company and to your clients. And the appetite and demand for this type of person is only growing in an AI world!