What Is a Google Ads Specialist?
A Google Ads specialist is a form of digital marketer who particularly has expertise in using the Google advertising platform to promote businesses online. This is a form of digital marketing known as “paid advertising” or “pay-per-click marketing” (“PPC marketing” for short).
However, it’s often the case that Google Ads specialists are also general PPC specialists, responsible for managing ad campaigns on several advertising platforms, including Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Bing Ads, and so on.
In fact, there are many sorts of Google Ads specialist jobs out there, each one with its own set of responsibilities, expectations, conditions, etc. For example, there are key differences between working as part of a Google Ads agency that handles ad campaigns for clients, or as part of an in-house marketing team that manages advertising for a corporation’s brands.
So, make sure to properly check the provided PPC specialist job description before applying for the role. Of course, all of this doesn’t apply if you’re freelancing as a web marketing specialist or simply working a Google Ads specialist side hustle as you can set your own conditions.
What Is the Role of a Google Ads Specialist?
First things first, before we can answer the question “what does a Google Ads specialist do?”, let’s set the record straight: being a Google Ads specialist is a legit occupation.
Now that we have gotten that out of the way, let us take a look at the usual Google Ads specialist job description that you would come across in order to get a clearer idea of what exactly this role consists of:
- Managing advertising campaigns on Google Ads
- Creating and planning PPC strategies in order to boost online presence
- Examining and improving PPC campaigns to boost ROI (return on investment)
- Overseeing and improving display ads campaigns on a variety of platforms
- Launching new ad campaigns with Google Ads
- Constructing paid search landing pages
- Optimizing paid ad campaigns in order to generate more conversions
- Creating reports on ads campaigns performance
- Comparing advertising performance to competitors’ performance
Of course, this is only a sample list of the responsibilities that you could be entrusted with as a Google Ad specialist. In reality, you could have fewer or even more responsibilities than this, depending on the role you’ve accepted.
What Is the Salary of a Google Ads Specialist?
Why bother applying for a job if you don’t know what the potential pay packages are? This is especially true when it comes to a Google Ads specialist salary, as there is quite a lot of preparation, practice, and investment required in order to become a Google PPC specialist.
So, in order to answer the common question, “how much does a Google Ads specialist make?“, let us look at the average salary and the average hourly rate, which are by far the most common ways of making money as a Google Ad specialist:
- the average Google Ads specialist salary is around $60,000 per year
- the average hourly rate of a freelance specialist is in the range of $15 – $40 an hour
Of course, however, these are averages calculated from a wide spectrum of roles, each one with different competences, levels of experience, geographical locations, economic restrictions, etc. In other words, an average can only give you a vague indication of what sort of pay you can expect.
In reality, you can easily boost both your hourly and yearly income by accruing more and more experience, as well as building a portfolio of successful ad campaigns, especially when becoming a Google Ads freelancer. With enough of both, having a six-figure salary or earning hundreds an hour is not actually that far-fetched.
However, it might be difficult to gauge exactly how much your services are worth. If you want to know how much to charge for Google Ads management, we suggest reading our guide on the topic.
It’s also good to note that having an impressive portfolio is also extremely important when deciding to open your very own marketing agency. Naturally, there are more steps than that involved, so if you want to know how to start a Google Ads agency, read our dedicated guide.
How to Create the Best Resume for Digital Marketing Specialist Roles
In reality, creating an excellent digital marketing expert resume should follow the same process as creating any other resume, no matter what the job you’re applying for is. In other words, you ought to follow the same best practices that apply to the creation of all resumes.
Let’s take a look at these best practices together in order to help you create the online marketing specialist resume you can:
- Short & Sweet: one of the best tips we can give you is to always keep your resume as short as possible. This is because, on average, employers only look at resumes for 6 to 7 seconds. Aim to keep your resume to a single page, unless you have a lot of relevant experience).
- Action Verbs: you’re a marketer for crying out loud: you need to marketer yourself too! So, when describing your experience, make sure to use strong action verbs that highlight your accomplishments.
- Numbers Are Persuasive: as much as possible, try to quantify your achievements using numbers and/or percentages. This gives your prospective employer concrete examples of what you’re capable of.
- Customize Your Resume: since you have so little time to impress the interviewer, it’s well worth the effort to customize your resume to the job you’re applying for as much. Therefore, highlighting the skills and experience that are most relevant to the position is key.
- No Mistakes Allowed: before submitting your resume, make sure that there aren’t any errors in spelling or grammar. So, proofread it carefully, as otherwise you could come off as careless.
- Professional Fonts Matter: stay away from fonts that are difficult to read, such as calligraphy fonts like Scriptina or fonts that look amateurish, like Comic Sans. Use a professional font, such as Arial or Times New Roman, and make sure that it’s in a size that is easy to read!
- Breathing Room: too much clutter will hurt anyone’s eyes, other than being very distracting to anyone trying to read your resume. Try and use white space (judiciously) in order to make your resume easy to read and visually appealing.
- Feedback Helps: you’re far from being the best judge of your own work, so it’s ideal that you ask a friend, family member, or career counselor to review your resume and provide feedback.
- Only Use Professional Templates: you could definitely take the time to create your own resume… or else you could use one of the many professional resume templates available online. This not only saves you time, but will make sure that your resume looks professional.
- Stay Up-to-Date: can you imagine the interviewer’s reaction when they receive a resume and the last relevant experience was from 4 years ago? Yeah, instant rejection. In other words, make sure to update your resume regularly with your latest relevant experience and skills.
However, other than the best practices we listed above there are a few things that are specific to creating a Google Ads specialist resume, which we will look at in the upcoming sections.
Google Ads Specialist Resume Skills to Include
Arguably, one of the most important aspects of creating a resume that will blow any employer’s socks off is the list of skills that you have. Of course, while listing your experience is imperative, as that will prove that you’ve been through it all, having a list of your skills is also important as it will “quantify” what you know and you can do to your potential employer.
PPC specialist resume skills can be split into 2 categories: hard skills & soft skills. You don’t have to categorize them like that on your resume, but understanding the 2 categories can help you understand the quality of the skills you need and what you can do to achieve them.
After all, you cannot learn something like communication skills the same way you would learn Google Ads. These skills are more developed as part of your own experiences rather than through a course or anything like that.
But enough chit-chat, you’ve come here for concrete advice. And in this section we’re going to give you some of the digital marketing resume skills that employers find the most important, categorized as hard and soft skills:
| Hard Skills | Soft Skills |
|---|---|
| Google Ads | Critical Thinking |
| Google Analytics | Communication Skills |
| WordPress | Leadership Skills |
| Bing Ads | Project Management |
| Copywriting | Creativity |
| Search Engine Optimization (SEO) | Problem Solving |
| Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) | Determination |
| HTML | Ability to Work in Teams |
| Performance Tracking | Time Management |
It’s a bit impossible to list all of the skills of a digital marketing specialist that are considered important to have. However, we hope that our sample of skills will help you with your resume!
How Do I List Google Ads on My Resume?
Naturally, one of the most important paid marketing resume skills that you ought to put down is the ability to use Google Ads. There’s no point in apply for a Google Ads specialist role if you have no idea how to use the platform.
Including your ability to use Google Ads in your resume is actually very easy: all you have to do is include it in the skills section of your resume, choose the appropriate proficiency level, and that’s it! Of course, this step will depend on the platform that you’re using in order to create your Google Ads resume.
Naturally, you could stop there—or else, you could also include any Google Ads certifications that you might have picked up. Google Ads certifications could lend more credibility to your resume, which makes getting a Google Ads certification worth it at the end of the day.
After all, even if the employer pays no attention to it, it’s still completely free!
For a complete guide on how to get Google Ads certified, we highly recommend reading our blog post about the process.
Digital Marketing Specialist Resume Summary
A digital marketing resume summary is a series of short sentences that basically introduces you as a candidate, and includes brief explanations on your experience, any relevant skills, and any achievements that you have managed to accomplish along the way.
It’s imperative that the resume summary is brief but punchy in order to immediately hook whoever is looking at your resume. If your resume is excessively long or is written like a washing-machine instruction manual, then the potential employer will immediately lose interest and won’t bother with reading the rest.
Therefore, your resume summaries have to be short and sweet as they need to capture attentions almost immediately. We suggest a length of between 30-40 words and under 200 characters long. Moreover, summarize your years of experience and present it in the first sentence. Finally, try to mention any significant achievements.
To illustrate what we mean, we’re going to go ahead and provide your with our own example:
“[name] is a passionate marketer that has been helping businesses achieve their PPC goals for 6+ years. Thanks to [name]’s work, [he/she] has helped businesses save an average of [$$$] in ad budget.”
Of course, you won’t have to follow our digital marketing summary example to a T. It’s merely there to guide you about how you should do your own.
Google Ads Specialist Resume Objective
If you wish, you could also include a PPC specialist resume objective. This is basically a short statement, or a handful of statements, that express your wishes and aims with regard to the kind of career you would like, the industry you would want to work in, and the kind of skills you want to learn.
As such, your resume objective should follow the same rules as the summary. An example of a Google Ads specialist resume objective is the following:
“[name] is looking to expand [his/her] skills in PPC marketing. Having completed a course in paid advertising, [name] would like to put [his/her] skills to the test by becoming a Google Ads specialist.”
Naturally, this isn’t always necessary as it becomes quite obvious what your career goals are when you apply for a certain role. A digital marketing specialist resume objective becomes essential, however, if you post your resume online.
So, in case potential employers come across your resume, they would be able to know if their job offer aligns with your personal goals.
Digital Marketing Resume Keywords
One other important aspect of your resume is making sure to insert keywords—yes, exactly like SEO content writing. But instead of inserting keywords because they’ll be picked up by a search engine, these keywords will be picked up by the interviewer and/or your potential employer.
Think of it like this: how does a professional come off as a professional? The answer is quite simple: jargon. When you hear a doctor speak and they use, for example, “scapula” instead of “shoulder blade”, or using “hematoma” to describe a particularly bad bruise, then you know that they know what they’re talking about.
The same line of reasoning applies when adding keywords to your resume: in order to show that you know your stuff, you need to insert these little bits of marketing jargon that will catch the eyes of the person reviewing your resume.
It’s an easy way of showing off your expertise as well as giving the interviewer what they’re looking for. So, to give you a hand, here are some important marketing keywords for your resume:
- Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing
- Google Ads
- Google Analytics
- WordPress
- Conversion rate optimization (CRO)
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Digital marketing
- Copywriting
- Content writing
- Ad budget
- Performance tracking
- Data analysis
- Email marketing
- Social media marketing
That’s a sample of what keywords you can insert in your resume. If you’re wondering why many of the keywords are the same as some of the skills we mentioned above, it’s because the keywords serve as ways to grab an interviewer’s attention. Mentioning relevant skills is definitely a fantastic way of grabbing attention!
Digital Marketing Resume Template
You can’t write an excellent resume if you don’t follow a tried and tested digital marketing resume format which makes sure that the most important parts of your resume are your most prominent.
Of course, resume templates can be found by the dozen, each one a little different depending on the opinion of whoever came up. Thankfully, however, there are some features that remain constant throughout all the templates that you might find. For example, you’ll always find the resume summary first.
Here we will give you what we believe is the ideal resume template:
[Full name]
[Role applied for] | [Email address] | [Address] | [Mobile number]
[Resume summary]
[Brief and powerful summary of your relevant experience, skills, and achievements]
[Work experience]
[Job title] + [Employer] + [Start date – end date]
- [Action verb] + [job duty]
- [Action verb] + [job duty]
- [Action verb] + [job duty]
- [Action verb] + [job duty]
[Links]
[Links to professional website/portfolio/LinkedIn]
[Skills]
[Skill] | [Skill]
[Skill] | [Skill]
[Skill] | [Skill]
[Skill] | [Skill]
[Education]
[Name of degree] + [institution name] + [start date – end date]
- [Topic learnt]
- [Topic learnt]
- [Topic learnt]
- [Topic learnt]
[Courses]
[Course title] + [institution name]
[Languages]
[Language name] + [proficiency]
[Hobbies]
[Hobby 1] | [Hobby 2] | [Hobby 3]
Digital Marketing Specialist Resume Example
The best way to close off this blog post is obviously to provide you with our own PPC specialist sample resume so that you can have a more concrete idea of what an ideal resume should look like. At the same time, you would be able to use our digital marketing resume example to compare it to your own.
It goes without saying that you shouldn’t copy the PPC resume example that we’re providing as that would entirely defeat the purpose.
You can find our example here:
FAQs
Is becoming a Google Ads Specialist worth it?
Becoming a Google Ads specialist is worth it only if you’re passionate about paid advertising and you can endure the stresses that come with the job. If both of those apply to you, then becoming a Google Ads specialist might be worth your while, especially when considering that being a paid advertising specialist can come with a hefty salary, many job opportunities and ways of how to get Google Ads clients, and the chance to work remotely.
What does a PPC specialist do?
There are many roles that can be assigned to a PPC specialist, naturally all of them revolving around the use of paid advertising in order to boost online presence, generate more leads and conversions, and overall, increase a company’s total revenue.
What are PPC skills?
There are quite a few things that can be considered as PPC skills. These would include proficiency in popular PPC platforms, like Google Ads, Bing Ads, etc.; familiarity with tools that are relevant to your work, like Google Analytics, Semrush, etc.; the ability to create and optimize landing pages; knowledge in general marketing, and so on.
What are the key skills for a marketing specialist resume?
There are a number of digital marketing specialist skills that are important to include in a resume. Other than hard skills like knowing how to use paid ad platforms such as Google Ads, and knowing how to use relevant tools, there are soft skills that are also important to include. Examples of important soft skills include communication skills, organization, project management, leadership skills, ability to work in teams, etc.
How do I write a digital marketing resume?
In order to write a digital marketing resume, we would highly suggest following a resume template that highlights the most important aspects first. Therefore, first begin by introducing yourself. This is done through adding your personal details to your resume and following up with a summary. Then make sure to mention your relevant job experience, your skills, your education and any relevant courses you have done. Finally, you can finish off with what languages you know and any hobbies you enjoy doing!
