A stat did the rounds this week: 53% of advertisers think Google Ads is harder to manage now than it was two years ago (research credit to ALM Corp).
My first reaction was to disagree with the premise. I don't think the platform itself has got harder. If anything, PMax is in a better spot than it was two years ago, with more transparency and more control than people give it credit for.
But the stat isn't wrong. Something has got harder. It's just not inside the platform.
The difficulty moved
Two years ago, being a good PPC manager mostly meant knowing how to run campaigns and use the automation well. Structure, match types, bid strategies. The job lived inside Google Ads.
That's not where the job lives anymore. The accounts I see performing well right now aren't winning on clever campaign structures. They're winning because of what's feeding into the campaigns:
- The shopping feed quality
- The landing page experience
- Whether margin or customer value data is actually going into the algorithm, instead of letting it guess
- CRM audiences built off real data, not platform defaults
None of that is a Google Ads skill. It's feed management, it's briefing a landing page properly, it's sitting with merchandising and marketing teams instead of staying in your own lane.
So when 53% of advertisers say management got harder, I think what they're actually describing is this: the parts of the job that used to be optional are now the parts that decide whether an account performs. That's a harder job, even if the platform is easier to use.
Why this isn't the whole story
It's worth being honest about the other side of that stat too. Some of the reported difficulty is probably just rising competition and CPCs. More advertisers bidding on the same auctions, tighter margins to defend. That's not a "PPC managers need new skills" problem, it's a market problem, and no amount of feed optimisation fixes it on its own.
But it doesn't cancel out the first point. It sits alongside it. Even in a more competitive, more expensive auction, the accounts with clean feeds, fast landing pages, and real signal data are the ones with room to compete. The ones without that foundation feel the CPC pressure hardest, because they've got nothing else to lean on.
What this means for the job
If the campaign layer is increasingly automated and the differentiation has moved upstream, the job description has to move with it. Good PPC management now looks less like "manage the account" and more like:
- Working with a feed, not just importing it
- Briefing a landing page instead of accepting whatever the client's dev team ships
- Sitting in merchandising and marketing conversations, not just PPC ones
- Pushing for margin and LTV data to actually reach the algorithm
None of this is a knock on the platform. Google Ads didn't get harder. The job got bigger.
If any of this sounds familiar (where you're spending more time in feeds and briefs than in the Google Ads UI), that's probably a sign you're already doing it right.