Interview with Brent Gaynor
This is part of a study that aims to create a practical guide for PPC educators and learners as well as an academic article based on inputs of PPC professionals all over the world. Caveat: these notes are based on my understanding of our conversation. All mistakes are mine. — Kahlil Corazo
Professional Background
Brent Gaynor’s first entry into PPC was through his software business 7 years ago. It was a PDF creator when this function was not yet integrated in word processors. He has managed about 20 accounts, the biggest of which had an ad spend of $150k/month. He has not trained anyone in PPC but wrote a book on PPC (yet to be published).
Brent is now the CMO of Colligent, another software company which provides guidance in targeting your audiences not through the usual keywords or demographics that directly describe your target market, but through keywords and demographics not necessarily related to your product or service but that apply to the same target market. For instance, a potential buyer of a luxury vehicle may be targeted through apparently unrelated interests and demographic filters in Facebook. He says that it is so effective that a client of theirs was contacted by Facebook because of their incredibly high CTR of 7% (if you have ever advertised in Facebook you know this is an amazing number).
Core skills needed by PPC Professionals
Brent considers the following to be the core skills needed by a PPC professional:
- Understanding consumer behavior
- Data analysis and interpretation, handling large amounts of data
- Managing consumer perception (both in the ads and in the landing pages)
- Account organization
Non-core skills
- Creativity (eg, coming up with new keywords, taking advantage of “loopholes” in AdWords policy — for instance, at one point you were not allowed to use superlatives like “best” but you could quote a magazine which claims you are the best.
- Having an open mind and learning from trial and error
Learning PPC
Brent considers practice to be the most important source of learning in PPC. He says that you should start out with an understanding of strategy, which is learned largely through mentoring. You should also keep an open mind of one’s own behavior — constantly ask yourself: “what ads catches your attention and makes you click?” Brent warns that PPC resources contain conflicting information.
Other important things
When I asked my favorite question, “what should I have asked you?” Brent mentioned the following:
- How analytics plays a role with AdWords
- PPC in YouTube and other media
- Using PPC differently in different areas in the marketing/sales funnel (eg, using PPC for awareness in the appropriate part of the funnel)
Originally published at www.corazo.org.
