A PPC specialist plans, runs, and improves paid advertising on platforms like Google Ads, Meta, Microsoft Ads, and LinkedIn. The job is to take an advertising budget and turn it into profitable revenue, leads, or app installs. PPC stands for "pay per click", but in practice the role covers any paid digital placement, including channels that don't strictly charge per click.
What I actually spend my time on
Most of the work isn't glamorous. I'm in search query reports, trimming negative keyword lists, watching budget pacing before it costs real money, building shopping feeds, writing ad copy, fixing conversion tracking, and reading attribution data with a healthy dose of suspicion.
The end goal never changes. More profit from the same budget, or the same profit from less. Every other job on the list serves that.
A big chunk of my time also goes to things that aren't strictly "in the ads platform". Landing pages. Product feed quality. Conversion tracking accuracy. Margin data. The biggest wins in a paid account almost always sit outside the bidding screen, and most of the people calling themselves PPC specialists never look there.
Where PPC specialists work
Three main camps:
In-house at brands or retailers. One specialist usually runs one or two accounts deeply, working closely with creative, dev, and merchandising teams.
At agencies. Each person juggles 5 to 15 clients, splitting time between hands-on work and reporting decks.
Freelance, which is where I sit. Usually senior, usually focused on a niche. For me, that's eCommerce.
Each setup attracts a different kind of person. Agency work suits people who like variety and pace. In-house suits people who want to go deep on one brand. Freelance suits people who've done both and want to choose their own clients.
True best practice vs Google's "best practice"
Here's the bit nobody seems to want to say out loud. There's a difference between actual best practice in PPC and the version Google calls best practice.
Google's "best practice" is the set of recommendations the platform pushes through your account. Switch everything to broad match. Add Performance Max with no exclusions. Hand bidding control to the algorithm. Increase budgets to capture missed demand. Each of those is excellent for Google's auction revenue. Whether they're excellent for your business is a completely separate question, and the answer is regularly no.
True best practice is what survives testing in your specific account. Tight keyword targeting where the numbers prove it works. Controlled automation, with the controls actually steering the algorithm at your goal rather than Google's. Conversion tracking that fires on real revenue rather than every form fill. None of that is exciting. It's just the unglamorous work that delivers profit consistently.
The PPC specialists I respect treat Google's recommendations as input, not gospel. They test what's claimed, ignore what doesn't hold up, and back every change with measurement. That mindset is the difference between an account at £40k a year that wastes 25% of its budget and one at £55k that delivers more profit on the same spend.
What separates a good one from the rest
A weak PPC specialist clicks whatever the recommendations tab suggests and calls it "best practice". A good one knows when to ignore the tab entirely.
Most of the accounts I audit are losing money on jobs the platforms talked them into. The work to fix them isn't complicated. It's slow, it's evidence-led, and it requires somebody who's prepared to spend a few weeks doing the unglamorous testing the platforms would rather you didn't bother with.
A specialist worth their fee questions every recommendation that touches your money. They ask why before doing anything. They know your margins before they touch a bid strategy. They check that your conversion tracking actually fires properly, instead of trusting whatever Google Tag Manager spat out the first time someone set it up.
That mindset is the difference between someone who genuinely moves your numbers and someone who just keeps the campaigns running.
Hiring one
If you're thinking about hiring a PPC specialist, ask them what they'd do in your account in week one. The answer tells you whether they're a strategist or a button-presser.
If you'd like a second pair of eyes on your paid accounts, message me. I'll pull a quick audit and give you an honest take on whether you need a specialist, a different specialist, or just a few small fixes to what's already running.