As a Google Ads specialist, sometimes called a pay-per-click specialist, you may think that you have all the technical skills you need to deliver high-quality, high-performing advertisements.

However, both technical and soft skills are vital to your job performance. Your skills can always be honed to provide better customer service and improve job satisfaction.

While a fast turnaround can be good, attention to detail is a valuable soft skill to any Google Ads specialist. When choosing a budget or keywords, it's important to pay attention to exactly what you're doing. You don't want to accidentally spend more than a client is willing to on an ad, nor do you want to target the wrong audience upon delivery.

Creativity Meets Technical

Creating a beautiful, effective landing page is a technical skill that shouldn't be overlooked. When potential customers click on your ad, they need to be enticed to convert on the landing page. The landing page should match your ad as far as content is concerned. Ads that don't extend well to the landing page may not be shown to Google users as often. Your creative thinking skills come into play here, and you will need the ability to come up with new ideas and concepts if an ad isn't working. Having original ideas can literally set you apart from the competition.

Be Open to Suggestions

While you don't need to have an e-commerce background to be a successful Google ads editor, it is important to understand online retail in some capacity. Online retail has different challenges to brick and mortar stores, but also has room for lots of creativity! Don't be afraid to ask your customers questions about their business to get a better idea of what their struggles might be. Empathy is an important trait to hone here as well. Understanding the problems that your client may have had in the past is important in the ad development process.

Empathize with Customers and Buyers

Empathizing with your buyer can also be helpful as well. Knowing the buyer's journey is both a technical and soft skill, and one that pays off in the long run. Understanding the issues a customer may have prior to purchasing your client's product or service can help improve your Google ads, as well as the products themselves. For example, certain companies may only want to build awareness of their brand, especially if they're starting out. However, other companies may tailor their products or services to specific issues that a customer is having, so lead generation should be how the Google ad is structured.

Copywriting

You don't need to be a world-renowned writer, but having some practice copywriting can improve your calls to action and general Google ad content. Ads with verbiage that seems clunky or confusing may lead to fewer clicks. This includes ads that may be too wordy or have too much industry-specific lingo. For example, if you're creating Google ads for a law firm, it may be best to avoid legal jargon when crafting the ad. This all ties in with being a good communicator to your audience. When you are clear and concise with messaging, your audience sees and respects that, and is more likely to engage with your content.

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Embracing Analytics

Statistics is sometimes the most daunting aspect of being a pay-per-click specialist. A Google Ads expert needs to be able to differentiate between an ad's clicks and click-through rate (sometimes called CTR), as well as factoring in the overall number of impressions that an ad gets. For example, if an ad is viewed many times with little action on the part of the Google user, you may need to change the ad content to be more enticing. However, if a consumer clicks on the ad but doesn't stay long on the site, or convert as you would like, the landing page may need a tune-up. If you are working for a client, statistics will need to be presented in a way that is understandable. Instead of throwing numbers at clients and letting them figure it out from there, create visuals to allow them to view the stats in a digestible format.

Using Google Adwords

This next technical skill may seem obvious, but knowing how to use Google Adwords is important to ensure that the ads you create are shown to the largest, most accurate audience they can. Excelling in Adwords means understanding how keywords work, in addition to analyzing what time of day and what day of the week your ad performs best in. Adwords also allows ad creators to bid on ad placements, meaning that you must learn how to properly compete with those vying for the top spot.

Attention to Detail

For a Google Adwords specialist, attention to detail will be the most essential skill you will need to brush up on. Work will require managing and structuring around details on geolocation, bidding selection, keywords, and targeting options. Daily tasks and workload will revolve around numbers, words, and statistics that require focus to fully decipher the best marketing approach and cost associated with each campaign. Remember that the little details really do count.

Embrace Excel

Your work will always require working on spreadsheets every day as keeping track of data will be instrumental to the success of your future campaigns. Excel is the go-to tool of paid marketers for quickly looking at performance data so that they can quickly slice, dice, and analyse data results.

At a minimum, you must familiarise yourself with:

• Basic math codes: Sum, Averages, etc.
• IF code statements
• VLOOKUP
• Trim & Clean

Ability to Take Risks

Apart from your technical skills, Google Adwords specialists must be brave. Failure is part of the learning process, but you can lessen the risk. You must take a leap of faith when managing campaigns based on your best analysis of the trends and data at hand. This is an important skill for digital marketers as most of what you do will require experimenting and testing new strategies and ideas.

With all of these soft and technical skills, confidence is key. You must believe that you have the ability to learn and adapt to the ever-changing Google platform and its algorithms. Trying new strategies and ways to communicate is vital to remaining successful as a Google Ads specialist.

If this all sounds a little overwhelming and you would rather just have a professional do it for you then check out AdsByJustin.com. Justin has been a Google Ads expert for 15 years and he helps small and medium businesses with their ads.

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