Advertising and Paid Media jobs and careers

If you’re a strategic thinker that loves helping businesses grow and forming technical campaigns (from writing enticing copy for adverts to pushing the campaign live and monitoring the success), a career in paid media / paid search is creative, analytical and systematic. There are a range of paths you can go down, including agency where you could be managing various campaigns for different clients, or you could be based in-house with one focus – growing the business of one brand through effective online paid strategies.

This career path can take you down a variety of different routes. Your role may blend more with digital marketing or you could specialise in PPC alone.

As a PPC Executive or Paid Search Executive, you’ll manage paid search campaigns on channels such as Google and Bing and social media. Part of your role is to create, optimise, report and to delve into the data and related analytics, to discover what is driving performance.  You could as work as a PPC Executive as part of an agency team, and this is sometimes called a PPC Account Executive.  This role would involve managing various accounts for a wide range of clients. You’ll specialise in paid search, biddable media, programmatic and display. You’ll be instrumental in supporting the success of client accounts, ensuring successful digital marketing strategies for your clients. You’ll be comfortable working across commercial, analytical, communication and hands-on PPC based tasks.

As a PPC Specialist, you’ll provide day-to-day management and optimisation of paid search campaigns – to enhance performance in line with ROI targets. Daily PPC optimisations will include, query reports, budget/bid management, ad copy changes and keyword expansions. Competitor research will be key in staying several steps ahead of the competition. You’ll play part in the wider marketing team, ensuring a unified message is portrayed.

As a Paid Social Specialist, you’ll manage campaigns on platforms such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. The principles are similar to PPC, in you will create, manage and optimise campaigns but these will be focussed only on social media channels. Analysis of analytical data will give you insight into customer behaviour and allow you to edit your overarching strategy.

As a Programmatic Account Manager, you’ll oversee the automated process of buying and selling ad inventory. This occurs in real-time and allows you to bid across mobile, display, video and social channels. The process makes use of artificial intelligence technologies and demand site platforms to facilitate the process.

• PPC Specialist
• PPC Executive
• PPC Assistant
• Paid Search Manager
• PPC Account Executive
• Head of PPC
• Head of Paid Search
• Paid Social Executive
• Paid Social Manager
• Programmatic Account Manager

• PPC Assistant
• PPC Executive
• PPC Manager
• Head of Paid Search

We’ve outlined the latest salary benchmarks for Paid Media roles in the guides below:

Digital Marketing Salary guide – South West

Digital Marketing Salary guide – London & South East

Agency Salary Guide – South West

You should be naturally analytical with great organisational skills, along with the ability to communicate your ideas well and explain them technically.

You may hold a degree or diploma within a relevant subject such as IT, marketing or mathematics. There are other options to get your foot in the door, such as apprenticeships, online courses and on-the-job training.