Google Ads after automation
Be straight about what automation has done to this work. Smart Bidding, responsive search ads and Performance Max have taken over the parts that used to fill a PPC executive's day — manual bid changes, ad rotation, hourly adjustments. Anyone still selling a course built around setting bids by hand is teaching 2016. What automation has not taken over is everything that decides whether the machine is aimed correctly: which conversion you tell it to optimise for, whether that conversion is actually a sale or just a form fill, what a lead is worth to the business, which searches you refuse to pay for, and whether the landing page can carry the click you bought. Feed Performance Max a bad conversion signal and it will find you the cheapest worthless clicks on the internet, very efficiently. That is the honest shape of the job now: less clicking, more judgement, and far more attention to the money. It is also why the modules on conversion tracking, budget strategy and reporting sit at the centre of this syllabus instead of at the end.