What Does a Google Ads Specialist Do?
Naturally, you cannot apply for any Google Ads jobs if 1) you have no idea how to use Google Ads, and 2) you don’t even know what a Google advertising specialist does.
There are various responsibilities that can be entrusted to a Google Ads expert, the majority of which have to do with managing ads campaigns for either a third-party client or for any of the brands owned by their employer. This depends on whether they form part of an in-house marketing team or provide services to clients.
No matter who they provide their services to, the role of a Google Ads specialist remains largely the same. So, an ads specialist is expected to manage paid advertising campaigns; optimize them in order to boost conversions as much as possible; potentially launch new ad campaigns; report on campaign performance, and so on.
There are other tasks that can be expected of you, including offering marketing suggestions, helping with creating new strategies, etc.
Is Google Ad Specialist Legit as a Job?
If you’ve never heard of someone whose full-time job is being a paid advertising marketer, it’s easy to question the existence of the role. In fact, it’s not the first time that we’ve seen people ask if being a Google Ads specialist is legit. Take it from us as PPC marketers ourselves: being a Google Ads specialist is an actual job.
And applying to become a Google PPC specialist actually follows the same process as applying for any other job. This involves preparing an excellent Google Ads specialist resume, going to an interview, completing pre-employment assessments, and so on.
You don’t even need to take it from us: there are many other marketers who have made paid advertising their career.
How Does a Google Ads Specialist Make Money?
There is more than one way that a Google AdWords specialist can make money, and this is because this kind of job comes in a variety of forms.
In other words, you can either make money from a Google Ads job salary, much like any other employed person, or else you can make money by charging clients a rate. This is usually in the form of an hourly rate—but there are other ways of how to charge clients for Google Ads, which you would do well to know about.
Oftentimes, your Google Ads specialist hourly pay is determined by you, but it can also be the case that the rate is determined by what your client can afford or what they can accept as an hourly pay.
However, depending on the gig you pick up, you can find some clients offering a fixed-price payment package. In other words, once you’ve accepted the job, you’ll get a fixed Google Ad specialist pay for completing the job, no matter how many hours it took you to finish it.
Because of this, it’s extremely important to familiarize yourself with all the different ways of how to get clients for your Google Ads services. Having to continuously accept a fixed pay might not always be ideal, which is why you should be able to find clients in as many ways as possible.
When it comes to a Google Ads expert salary offered by a company, this is subject to the same conditions as any other salary for any other job. In other words, you can either get a raise and see your pay package rise, or else you can have bonuses and other incentives depending on performance, etc.
How Much Can You Make as a Google Ads Specialist?
Now let’s get down to answering the real question of this blog post: how much do Google Ads specialists make?
Naturally, the answers to this question will vary depending on whether we’re talking about a Google Ad specialist job salary (in other words, earning money like any other employee), or else through other means if you happen to work as a freelancer or working with Google Ads as a side hustle.
Moreover, there is also a difference between earning a Google Ad expert salary by working for a Google Ads agency that manages campaigns for external clients, or else by being an in-house marketer and managing campaigns for a corporation’s portfolio of brands.
This is because it’s usually smaller companies that choose to outsource their marketing as it would make more financial sense for them. On the other hand, a big corporation that owns multiple brands is more likely to have its own marketing team for various reasons. In short: the bigger the company, the more you can earn.
There are more factors involved in calculating your Google AdWords specialist salary, as we’ll see in the next section.
But just as a side note before we close off this section: there is plenty of money to be made from Google Ads. In fact, according to Statista, Google’s advertising revenue has been continuously increasing since 2001, a year after Google AdWords was launched in 2000. So much so that in 2022, Google accumulated $224.47 billion in revenue from ads.
That’s around $18.7 billion per month in revenue. In other words, people are spending that amount of money more of less every month on Google Ads, and you can definitely take a slice of that pie if you can manage to help anyone increase their ROI (return on investment) through the Google paid advertising platform.
What Is the Average Salary of Google Ads Specialist Jobs?
No matter if you’re reading this article to discover how much you can earn, or if you’re trying to gauge how much you need to pay your employees if you’re looking to start your own Google Ads agency, to truly answer the question of “how much do Google Ad specialists make?” it’s barely enough to simply give you an average that can easily be discovered through a Google search.
As we have already said, the salary that you can expect to earn changes depending on many factors, such as whether you work as a freelancer, as a full-time marketer, or even if you work as a Google Ad specialist part time! And we’ve already seen that the company that employs you is also a factor.
But what is definitely the biggest factor out of all of them is how much experience you have with paid advertising. This has the biggest impact on how much you can expect to earn as the more experience you accrue over your career, the more you can expect to earn. Which is why we’re going to look into this factor in more detail further below.
This also applies if you’re the founder of a PPC firm: the more experience your employees have, the more you ought to pay them in order to make sure you retain them and not lose them to a competitor. Employee retention actually saves you time, money, and headaches in the long run!
For the purposes of our blog post, however, we are going to look at the Google Ads specialist salary in US rather than in any other country. Please take into consideration that your geographical location is also a factor that has an effect on the kind of paid ads specialist salary you can expect to get.
Entry Level Google Ads Specialist Salary
To kick this off, let’s start with the lower end of the scale and that’s with a junior specialist position. In other words, you either have no experience or very limited experience. For this kind of work, you actually can look forward to a really decent payment package. In fact, most estimates place the range of available salaries at $30,000 – $40,000 per year.
Mid Level Google Ads Specialist Salary
If you have been working in the business for a while, say between 2 and 5 years, you can now consider yourself as fairly experienced, and you can expect a certified Google Ads specialist salary of somewhere between $45,000 – $60,000 a year. There are even some who consider the upper limit of the salary range to be around $80,000 a year.
Senior Google Ads Specialist Salary
If your skills in Google Ads have become the stuff of legends and you’ve been flexing your muscles in the industry for around a decade or so, you can easily rake in anywhere between $70,000 – $100,000+ per year, depending on your niche and the company you work for.
However, this is a conservative estimate, and there are some who even say that marketers with a ton of experience can earn anywhere from $120,000 – $150,000 a year. These would usually be managers or supervisors that oversee an entire team and probably manage campaigns over multiple platforms and brands.
How Much Does a Google Ads Specialist Make an Hour?
If you prefer to know what the Google Ads specialist salary per hour is, as maybe that’s a figure that you can understand more easily, then let’s provide you with a few figures:
- Entry Level: if you’re just starting out as an ads specialist, you can expect to earn somewhere around the $18 – $25 per hour range, depending on the company that employs you.
- Mid Level: if you already have some experience under your belt and you have been successfully managing campaigns for a while now, then a Google AdWords specialist hourly pay of $40 – $50 is not unheard of.
- Senior Level: if you know Google Ads like the back of your hand, and you’re a marketing force to be reckoned with, you can easily earn $80+ an hour.
If you’re a freelance Google Ads specialist, on the other hand, you won’t be getting a Google AdWords expert salary for the simple reason that, well, you’re essentially self-employed and you won’t receive a salary in the conventional sense. Therefore, there are different considerations to make.
As a freelancer, you can either set your own Google Ad specialist hourly pay, or else you can accept whatever rate the client “imposes” on you. So, take into consideration what your level of experience is, and gauge how much you ought to earn per hour accordingly.
According to Upwork, the average hourly rate for a Google Ads expert is $15 – $40 per hour. However, with more experience, you can easily ask for much more. In fact, with a few years of experience under your belt, you can reasonably ask for $80 an hour, or even more, with the best marketers charging hundreds an hour.
FAQs
Still have some questions that need answering? Maybe we can answer them here.
How to become a Google Ads specialist and get paid?
So, we’ve piqued your interest, huh? It’s always good to get new people involved in pay-per-click marketing. However, we can only give you a summary here. If you want to know the full answer on how to become a Google Ads specialist, we highly recommend reading our detailed guide on the subject.
The first and most important step is learning how to even use the tool. There are many ways you can do this, but the easiest and probably best way is to sign up for a Google Ads course. If you wish to know what the best Google Ads courses are, we have a blog post that can help you out with that.
You can also consider picking up a Google Ads specialist certification from Google themselves. This is a completely free accreditation that can not only teach you how to use the platform, but it can help in landing you a new job. If you want to know how to get Google Ads certified, we have a separate blog post for that.
Bear in mind that there are 10 certifications available, so if you want to know which Google Ads certification is best for your goals and aspirations, read our article on the matter. Also, if you’re not quite sure if the Google Ads certification is worth it or not, as maybe you’ve seen people online say that it’s essentially worthless, check out our post that goes into the pros and cons of the certificate.
Finally, you are going to need experience. Lots of it. Naturally, this is tough to come by but there are ways you can do it. You can either create your own websites and do your own campaigns; offer to do the work for free for voluntary organizations; or else offer your services for a very cheap rate until you can reasonably ask for a higher rate.
Working for free or at a cheap rate sucks, but think of it like Google Ad specialist training. Eventually, you’ll manage to reap the fruits of your hard work and forget all about it!
Is being a Google Ads Specialist worth it?
Well, if we haven’t managed to convince you through the financial benefits that come with the job (as we said, if you manage to stick around long enough for the job, you can earn a six-figure Google Ads specialist salary per month… that’s a pretty big benefit if you ask us!), then there are other benefits to the occupation.
If you want to know the full answer to “is becoming a Google Ads Specialist worth it?“, we suggest checking our blog post that’s dedicated to this topic. However, in a nutshell, the benefits include being able to work remotely; always being able to find a job, thanks to the high demand; and so on.
Can you make money being a Google Ads specialist?
Absolutely. Being a Google Ads specialist is a genuine form of occupation, and you can make money either through getting a salary as an employee, or else by becoming a Google Ads freelancer and offering your services to clients.
How much do Google Ad search specialists make?
Simply because you’re specializing in one channel of Google Ads over the others (in this case, search ads over the other forms of paid ads, like video ads, display ads, etc.), doesn’t mean that you’ll earn any less than a more general advertising specialist. You can still expect to be paid the same rates and salaries.
