In Q4 2024, we launched a lighter version of our 2023 survey, with a record number of 1,151 respondents, making it the largest survey ever done amongst PPC professionals. For this edition, you won't need to download and read 60-page pdf, but we're presenting the results below and discussed them with a couple of the PPCsurvey.com partners during a webinar hosted by Swydo.
As you can see above, the top 5 countries with the most respondents were the United States (26%), the United Kingdom (15%), the Netherlands (9%), Germany (5%) and Canada (4%). Which still leaves 41% of respondents from 66 other countries. Given its population, the Netherlands could be considered an outlier here, but we can explain this result as multiple partners are Dutch companies and the Netherlands has a strong and active PPC community,
72% of our respondents manage campaigns on behalf of their clients, as 52% work at an agency and 20% is a freelancers/contractor. 24% manage campaigns in-house and just 4% of responses were from brands hiring an agency (or freelancer). This last group is always hard to reach as they're not following the PPC news and experts as closely as the other groups.
Campaign performance is the obvious and clear winner when it comes to the top priority for 2025 and we expect this to remain the number 1 priority for years to come. That's because most respondents are managing PPC campaigns day-to-day, which means they're focusing on typical campaign performance goals like ROAS, CPA, conversions, and revenue from advertising.
Business growth is the second most-often mentioned priority and this usually comes from more senior roles in the agency or brand, as they also care about growing the business as a whole, growing the team, etc.
Interestingly enough, measurement was mentioned by just 8% of respondents, while most advertisers have plenty of room for improvement when it comes to measurement and tracking. We discuss this result more in-depth in the webinar.
When segmenting the top priorities by company type as shown above, we see pretty consistent results across all segments, with a clear outlier when it comes to personal development. 19% of freelancers mentioned this as one of their top priorities, while just 5% of in-house teams and 13% of agency employees mentioned this. As freelancers sell their own expertise, it's even more critical for them to keep honing their skills.
52% of respondents thinks that managing campaigns nowadays is harder than 2 years ago, 13% thinks it's easier (exactly 4 times fewer people) and 34% thinks it's about as difficult (or easy) as 2 years ago. The charts below go into why they think it's becoming easier or harder.
When looking at the word cloud and charts above, automation is the clearly the number 1 reason why 13% of our respondents thinks managing PPC campaigns has become easier. As you'll see in the glossary below, automation are things like scripts, smart bidding, automated rules, that all reduce the time spent on tedious and repetitive tasks.
The reasons why 52% of our respondents feel it has become harder are considerably more diverse and evenly distributed. Top reasons or the loss of control (due to ad platforms allowing less control and tweaks in their campaigns), increased competition (continuously rising CPCs without a corresponding increase in conversion rates or traffic), and AI (as used by the ad platforms in a black box kind of way).
The chart above and the glossary below will reveal even more reasons why more than half of PPC professionals believe their work is getting harder. The interesting questions are: are these complaints justified and what can be done to make your life easier? We go into this during our webinar.
When comparing the results of this harder or easier question with our previous survey and segmenting the results by company type, we see pretty consistent results, although it's noteworthy that the percentage answering "much harder" instead of "somewhat harder" has increased significantly across all segments.
By far most of the answers in this section come from agencies and freelancers, as we hardly had brands hiring agencies in our survey, unfortunately. So consider this part as: what agencies find challenging in their relationship with clients. And as previous your, we see that managing and meeting expectations is the number 1 challenge. You could ask yourself if agencies aren't partly to blame in these misaligned expectations.
Clear and realistic expectations should be set at the start of the relationship and so many agencies mentioning this as their #1 challenge with clients clearly shows this isn't happening consistently. Other top challenges are about communication and performance, both closely related to the expectations theme.
In Q4 2023, it was the first time we asked about the usage and satisfaction of Generative AI for PPC, exactly 1 year after ChatGPT launched. The graph above clearly shows a significant increase in the usage of GenAI by PPC practitioners between Q4 2023 and Q4 2024. For many tasks, usage more than doubled, but even for the task with the smallest relative growth it was still 33% (writing ads increased from 42% to 56%).
We expect this usage to increase further in the coming years, especially as PPC professionals find more ways to integrate AI in their workflow.
While usage increased between 33% and 170% (depending on the task), satisfaction increased between 8% and 48%. Although less impressive, it still shows that the LLMs are continuously improving and of course, that users are getting better at using them.
In the chart above, we plotted usage and satisfaction about Generative AI for different PPC-related tasks and found two interesting outliers: for meetings (e.g. recording and summarizing meetings), satisfaction is very high while usage is relatively low. So this is an easy opportunity for PPC professionals: record all your calls and meetings (especially with clients) so that everyone gets a clear summary and next steps afterward.
On the flip side, generating insights and recommendations had a relatively high usage in our survey, but lower satisfaction. LLMs can be decent at this, but they need a lot of data and context for the insights and recommendations to be useful.
In the chart above, you can see that the trust our respondents have in Google and Meta as an ad platform has declined less than it did the year before. But it's still declining more than it's increasing. X (Twitter) had massive trust issues in our previous survey and this became even worse in our most recent survey. For all the other platforms, the results are pretty stable. LinkedIn Ads is the only platform seeing more increase in trust than decrease.
Agency pricing models for ongoing PPC management are still over the place. We're especially surprised (let's say disappointed) to see "fully custom" and "billable hours" as the top 2 pricing models.
Fully custom sounds like re-inventing the wheel for each client while your agency has probably done something very similar a 100 times before.
And "billable hours" has an inherent conflict of interest (what the agency wants more of, the client was less of) and is losing its relevancy even faster now AI can perform some tasks in seconds. AI should become the final nail in the coffin of hourly billing, let's see (and hope) this happens in the coming years.
In-house teams have become increasingly determined to retain PPC management internally in the upcoming year. In Q4 2023, just 44% of in-house teams was sure to keep PPC fully in-house, in Q4 2024 this increased to 71%.
Finally, we see in increase in the average number of Google Ads scripts used in each account, from 3.8 in 2023 to 5.2 in 2024. While that's a 37% increase, 70% of accounts still have 10 or fewer scripts running, while there are hundreds of scripts out there. Our assumption is that most PPC practitioners use scripts for a couple of critical checks/automations (like broken URLs and budget pacing) and rely on other solutions or manual work for other tasks.
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