There's No Right Way to Build a Career in PPC
We talk a lot about career progression in PPC: moving up through an agency, going in-house, becoming a freelancer, starting an agency or building your own business. There's often an assumption that we're all moving towards something, and that each move should be a step up from the last.
After 16 years in PPC, I'm not sure I believe that anymore.
In the first episode of the Don't Panic PPC Podcast, Veronica, Thuha and I ended up talking about our careers and how we got here. Between the three of us, we've worked agency-side, in-house, freelance and for ourselves. We've left roles, gone back to them, taken time out and changed direction because what we needed from our careers changed.
The more we talked, the more obvious it became that none of those moves were really forwards or backwards. They were just the right decision for that person at that point in their life.
Which, rather appropriately for PPC, means the answer is: it depends.
Agency, In-House and Freelance Aren't Rungs on a Ladder
I think we need to stop talking about agency, in-house and freelance as though they're stages of career progression.
Going freelance doesn't mean you've graduated from agency life. Going back in-house doesn't mean freelancing didn't work out. Staying agency-side and working your way up doesn't mean you lack the ambition to go out on your own.
They're different ways of working, and they suit different people at different times.
Veronica is probably the clearest example from our conversation. She started agency-side and moved in-house. After her second child, she went freelance because she needed more flexibility. We tend to talk up the flexibility and freedom of freelancing, and they're absolutely real, but Veronica was open about the other side: the stress of wondering whether she'd have enough work in three months' time. Eventually, the stability of an in-house role was worth more to her than the flexibility, so she went back.
I don't see that as going backwards. If anything, realising something no longer works for you and doing something about it takes far more self-awareness than sticking with it because you think that's what career progression is supposed to look like.
That doesn't make one better than the other. It just means the answer changed.
Sometimes You Don't Hate PPC. You Hate Your Job.
This was the part of our conversation that stuck with me most.
Thuha left PPC completely in 2010. She'd spent nearly five years agency-side, often in the building from 8am until 8pm, and reached the point where she thought she'd fallen out of love with PPC. She left and trained to become a maths teacher, something that had always been on her bucket list.
Teaching wasn't for her, so she went back to PPC in an in-house role. This time she loved it. The environment was different, she liked the people she worked with and how the company treated its staff, and she stayed for nearly seven years. When that role was made redundant in 2018, it pushed her into freelancing, which she's now been doing for eight years.
The PPC hadn't really changed. Her working environment had.
I've had my own version of that. I reached a point in agency life where I was stressed, anxious, getting heart palpitations and starting to think I hated PPC. Eventually, I went freelance. Changing how I worked changed how I felt about the work itself.
I think that's an important distinction, particularly when you're burnt out. When you're in the middle of it, everything gets bundled together and it's very easy to think, "I can't do this anymore."
Maybe you can't. But it's worth working out what's actually behind that feeling. Is it PPC? The company? The hours? Your manager? The clients you're working with? Agency life? Or has what you need from your career simply changed?
You might still decide to leave the industry entirely, and that's fine too. But sometimes you don't need a new career. You need a different version of the one you've already got.
What You Need From Your Career Will Change
The job I wanted in my twenties isn't necessarily the job I'd choose now, and I don't think that's unusual.
Life changes. Children come along. Financial priorities shift. You might want more flexibility, more money, less responsibility, more responsibility, a bigger challenge or simply to finish work at a reasonable time.
That doesn't fit neatly with the way we're encouraged to think about careers, where every move should come with a better title, a bigger salary or more people reporting to you.
Sometimes the better career move is the one that gives you your evenings back. Sometimes it's freelancing because you need control over your time. Sometimes it's leaving freelancing because you're sick of worrying about your pipeline. Sometimes it's a job that looks like a sideways move on LinkedIn but makes your actual life significantly better.
A successful career doesn't have to be a straight line, and I think we'd all put ourselves under a lot less pressure if we stopped expecting it to be one.
Being More Experienced Doesn't Mean Knowing Everything
There's another version of career progression I think we get wrong in PPC: the idea that the longer you've been doing this, the more you're supposed to know.
PPC has become huge. Within Google Ads alone you've got Search, Shopping, PMax, Demand Gen, feeds, tracking, scripts, automation and everything that sits around them. Then there's Microsoft, Meta, LinkedIn and the rest of paid media on top.
Nobody knows everything!
I've been doing this since 2010 and I still ask questions. On the podcast I mentioned recently asking the Don't Panic PPC Discord how the end date on a sitelink actually behaves because I couldn't remember. Veronica talked about going to Thuha for help with scripts, and asking for help when she first started working with eCommerce and Shopify.
That doesn't make any of us less experienced. If anything, experience makes you more comfortable admitting where the gaps are.
One of my favourite lines from the whole episode came out of that conversation:
"You're the expert at knowing who the other experts are."
There are people I know who are considerably better than me at certain parts of PPC, just as there are things I'd expect them to come to me for. Knowing your strengths, knowing where you need help and having a network of people whose expertise you trust is far more useful than pretending you know everything.
It's also one of the reasons community matters so much to me. Nobody should be scared to ask a question because they think it's too basic, or that someone with their job title should already know the answer. We work in an industry that changes constantly, so you're going to have questions.
Ask them.
🔹 Final Thoughts
The tagline underneath the Don't Panic PPC logo is "Because It Always Depends", because there are very few questions in PPC with one answer that's right for every account.
It turns out I think the same about careers.
There's no best place to work. There's no right moment to go freelance. There's no shame in going back in-house, changing agency, taking a break or deciding that the career you built doesn't fit your life anymore. What works for someone else might be completely wrong for you, and what works for you today might be completely wrong five years from now.
That's not failing to follow the career path. There just isn't one.
None of us had one either. In the first episode of the Don't Panic PPC Podcast, Veronica Ruiz Morcillo, Thuha Wright and I talked about our very different routes into PPC: burnout, freelancing, agency and in-house life, asking for help, and how a newspaper advert asking whether I loved the internet somehow turned into a 16-year PPC career.
We're all figuring it out as we go. Don't Panic.
4M Digital is a Google and Microsoft Ads Partner specialising in paid search and paid social, from Google and Microsoft Ads to Meta, LinkedIn, Pinterest and TikTok. Working in paid media since 2010, we help brands, retailers and agencies grow through campaign management, audits, training and white-label PPC support.
