PPCChat | The Most Misunderstood Aspects of PPC

Posted November 11th, 2026 by Amita & filed under PPCChat.

This week’s PPCChat session brought industry professionals together to examine common areas of confusion in PPC. What do industry experts find most confusing about PPC? Which aspects do PPC professionals and clients commonly misunderstood? And how do these misconceptions affect the way PPC accounts are managed and optimised?

Q1: What do you think is the most misunderstood aspect of PPC by PPC professionals?

What qualifies as “sufficient data” for decision-making @williamhboggs

I think the role of competitive positioning is a big one. You can’t make your ads in a vacuum and please don’t do it based only on brand input… I think ROAS and CPA are up there too @NeptuneMoon

1: ppc’ers overthink a LOT of things and in turn, over-act. understandable as we’re under the gun of clients or bosses, but often times the right thing to do is… nothing. 2: ppc’ers surprised when alpha’s or beta’s don’t work as expected and write off the product forever. they’re the rough drafts and often are, well, rough. temper expectations y’all! first mover advantage isn’t always an advantage 3: you can’t optimize your way out of a bad product or bad service. @Aaronlevy

IMO, the extent to which conversion rate undergirds the underlying math @leosussan

@Aaronlevy preachhhhhh Also misunderstood: I’ve inherited hundreds of accounts with misconfigured conversion tracking. Not sure whether they were set up by the clients or by another agency @williamhboggs

How about you get more of what you go after, so you data is a complete picture of what you have done, not what you might yet do… @NeptuneMoon

I think the question is the level of the PPC professional… the amount of accounts we’ve seen that have been completely mismanaged by “professionals” is scary. Lack of accurate conversion tracking/good data is usually a huge issue there. @revaminkoff

@revaminkoff if anyone calls themselves a “ppc expert” i’m…. wary. @Aaronlevy

If ChatGPT or Claude are running your paid, that’s bad. They’re not there yet. No AI is there yet. @revaminkoff

This is less of a technical thing but I often speak to fellow PPC people who think they’re the only one in the world who feels imposter syndrome / frustration that they’re doing everything right and the platform isn’t playing ball @Pete_Bowen

Q2: What do you find most confusing or vexing in PPC as a PPC professional?

The lack of control. Client and platform control so much of making a successful campaign work. @Pete_Bowen

I sometimes find it hard to decide where to spend my professional development energy. What to learn, which sources to consider, whether those skills will actually benefit me down the road. Same with networking/industry orgs @rebeccawarne

How many business owners have so little idea about what goes on in their numbers and their business operations. @williamhboggs

Conflicting information (and products) from platform partners. perfect examples are the latest “steering tools” for pmax (one adjusts budget, one adjusts conversion value) or the aug 17th debacle (conflicting advice from different reps across different platforms). I miss the “control” but imo we never REALLY had it a: and B there are so many toggles and options to control now, i don’t know that we ever could. i wish more of the mechanics were out in public or spoken about and not buried in research papers with weird mathy symbols that i have no idea what they mean. @Aaronlevy

Same on control. RIP SKAGs @rebeccawarne

@rebeccawarne same. tbh I’ve been going old school/trying to understand human behavior + finance more since technology is soooo up in the air. @Aaronlevy

One big challenge is having to move clients off of the idea that PPC is super trackable. We sold it for so many years as being incredibly accurate in tracking what ad moved what actions and it just doesn’t work like that now. (And you can argue how well it ever did, but it was universally sold and thought of as doing that thing particularly well). @NeptuneMoon

Even if you have a perfect tracking setup, a solid half of your “conversions” are made up (sorry, modeled) @Aaronlevy

Why Google pushes recommendations that will hurt your business. Why Ad Platforms don’t better understand their own product and how it’s being used by advertisers in different industries. Why Google and Meta Support suck so bad. I would love to see how much $$$ they lose each year from unresolved support cases. Why so many 3rd party tools are so poorly developed (eg: Chat widget with no conversion tracking compatibility) @williamhboggs

What the endgame is with all the AI. Google is nuking its core cash cow at the altar of AI @NeptuneMoon

I’d like to better understand what a “good” frequency is on Meta Ads @williamhboggs

Surely that cannot continue down its current path, as AI does not have a profitability path in its current state @NeptuneMoon

Somewhat related, I’m asking myself more often if I’m doing the right thing by staying in ppc and leaning into AI @rebeccawarne

Q3: What do you think is the most misunderstood aspect of PPC by clients or stakeholders?

“I GOOGLED MYSELF AND DIDNT SEE MY AD” @Aaronlevy

A classic @Aaronlevy I am still mystified when a client has a complete lack of sense of who they are competing with online. And how often this is the case (IT’S A LOT) @NeptuneMoon

@Aaronlevy said it in the other thread: You can’t optimize your way out of a bad product or bad service. @rebeccawarne

It is also wild how many brands want to use PPC as a way to reach absolutely anyone who might on a random Tuesday with the waxing moon in Sagittarius have a flicker of interest in their product. That’s not what PPC is for…@NeptuneMoon

More seriously I’ll break down to 3 (edit: it started at 3….): 1: it’s not a spigot/faucet, takes time to build up momentum, and abrupt stops cause damage (there’s a car metaphor in there somewhere). 2: ROAS is a truly terrible metric and i have no idea why execs incentivize their teams that way. 3: I don’t care how much you spend, you’re not that important to google so we can’t call to yell at them. I mean we can but it’s not productive. 4: Google ads today functions closer to early-stage DSPs (which people also did not understand) 5: everything you do outside of google as a brand affects google. stop hiding stuff from your teams (or Google) because it’s proprietary 6: they stopped calling it adwords 8 years ago. @Aaronlevy

Google best practices/recommendations are NOT necessarily best for the CLIENTS It doesn’t happen overnight. If/when the platform changes something, we have no control over that, and there’s nothing we can do about it. @revaminkoff

It’s an auction. We’re not the only ones bidding. @DanThies

Opinions are not data @rebeccawarne

7: google reps WORK FOR GOOGLE. they are incentivized to tell you things that are good for google. yes, they are motivated by retention/client growth/clients who perform better stay longer yadda yadda. but my gosh the number of execs who would trust platform reps with their lives…. @Aaronlevy

Heard this from a brand new client a couple of hours ago: “We sent 8 proposals last week but we haven’t closed any deals. Do we need to fix the ads?” I didn’t say “FFS. You’ve never done 8 proposals in a week in the last 30 years. The ads aren’t the problem.” @Pete_Bowen

Things that worked well for YEARS will just stop working. No, I didn’t “do anything” the platform did. @NeptuneMoon

@NeptuneMoon that and it’s almost like the outside world…. exists? @Aaronlevy

And god forbid you mention macro factors…@NeptuneMoon

@NeptuneMoon I had to fly across the country on 12 hours notice MULTIPLE TIMES to tell seasonal brands that it was cold out and thats why they missed spring forecasts…..@Aaronlevy

Also – it’s 70 degrees here in the Philly burbs in almost November. No one is thinking about getting their chimney cleaned Dave… @NeptuneMoon

Q4: How does misunderstanding of PPC impact your ability to effectively manage accounts?

You wind up spending a lot of time managing clients’ misconceptions and dealing with fire drills that aren’t really fire drills. @revaminkoff

With some clients I spend a lot more of my time playing defence against their bad ideas than I’d like. Basically stopping them shooting themselves in the foot. @Pete_Bowen

“Google called and said you’re doing it wrong so I told them to go ahead and fix it” @DanThies

When clients don’t understand how platforms work these days, it makes everything harder. When platforms position everything they do as good for all advertisers, it makes things harder. When clients decide to put everything into AI and take its output as correct, it makes things harder. @NeptuneMoon

All the time spent on Claudeits…@revaminkoff

Had a client in the semiconductor industry who did not understand my request for support & feedback to write new ad copy. I am not an electrical engineer, I do not know how to make LiDAR sound sexy for search ads in 90 characters or less. My area of focus is running ads @rebeccawarne

I also think the faucet idea is even worse now because of learning periods, etc. No, I cannot just triple your leads because you are now not busy. @NeptuneMoon

These emergency plumbing leads are terrible, they don’t even answer when we call them the next day @DanThies

Google building everything in their platform so it screams SCALE, SCALE, SCALE when endless scaling it not actually possible for the vast majority of advertisers! Even IF you are shown as limited by budget, you will not just get more leads or sales at the same rate or cost per by throwing more budget around! @NeptuneMoon

Q5: How do platforms contribute to PPC misunderstanding? And how could they do better?

Platforms interests are not aligned with advertisers interests. It kind of all starts there.@NeptuneMoon

Oh, definitely making recommendations based on 3 year old data is NOT helping in the least. Am I the only one with a problem with this? @ynotweb

Please please educate the agencies FIRST when it comes to the changes and what’s going on before you send the clients an email that confuses them and leads them back to us. @revaminkoff

They send sales people after advertisers. Sales people who know nothing. Sales people who say “this campaign you REMOVED last year would get more leads with AI Max!” @DanThies

I said in answer to last question too, platforms will present any new features as equally amazing for all advertisers, when it never is. I would LOVE for them to be more honest about which types of accounts will see the best performance from new campaign types, etc. I know it will never happen, but a girl can dream… @NeptuneMoon

Take your product org structure and send it to space. product designers/engineers (seem) to not talk to each other AT ALL. oh we made this new feature for sitelinks but also it conflates what’s supposed to happen with callouts and doesn’t play nice with ai and all have individual best practices. and, stop making changes under the cover of night + work on corporate comms. every shift from a platform is sent out with the same level of urgency, so a minor change causes mayhem and major changes hide. @Aaronlevy

AND STOP CALLING THINGS MAX WHAT ARE WE MAXING AND WHY ARE WE MAXXXXXING it. ai max = aaron intelligence 2 the max obviously, not “we smooshed broad and dsa together and hope you can figure it out” @Aaronlevy

Recommendations. @DanThies

Disclose who, exactly, were the advertisers who’s feedback you listened to… @NeptuneMoon

it’s Brad. @DanThies

It’s companies with 1000 times the budget and 100 times the geographic area… @ynotweb

I know Ginny does her damndest to get our feedback to the product folks, but at all the events its like – you asked and here it is! And so many of us are like, ok, but WHO asked for that???? @NeptuneMoon

@ynotweb you’re not wrong about that @Pete_Bowen

Honestly, I think it would be incredibly helpful if there was more publicly released about platform roadmaps. Where are their priorities for the coming year?

We get some insight into that at events like GML, but some type of ongoing destination that had a things talked about and a where are they in development type tracker would be amazing! I mean it can’t all be done by Barry Schwartz….And that man is a national PPC treasure. @NeptuneMoon

tbh i’ve been in a lot of those “advertiser feedback” rooms (as have many on the chat here). sometimes i get invited, sometimes don’t. sometimes the feedback is early stage, e.g. they’re just building the product, sometimes it’s “hey we’re gonna launch this next week waddayathink?” sometimes it’s “for this type of advertiser” and sometimes it’s more broad. their specifics are often obfuscated for legal or competitive reasons (they’re never going to show a full roadmap bc openai/claude/microsoft/brave/ddg/baidu will just steal it). that and making changes at the scale they operate at is….. a corporate challenge. i don’t like how platforms solicit feedback now nor do i like how they communicate, but i have NO idea how i’d do it differently @Aaronlevy

AI definitely complicates all of this. I agree on your assessment of the feedback sessions. And to be fair, I do think that the folks who are working on the various product aspects for the platforms are working hard and doing what they think is best. That misalignment is just always there with regard to interests. And teams are definitely more siloed than you would think, which platforms could certainly address if they wanted to…@NeptuneMoon

the sitelink pm doesn’t talk to the text ad pm who probably doesn’t know the callout extension pm exists (purposefully obtuse/smarmy example. @Aaronlevy

Sometimes when you talk to product folk it can feel like the “it goes to 11” scene from Spinal Tap… Like they genuinely have no idea why you would even be asking about some aspect of their piece of the product in the way that you are. And your question is pretty elemental to how a lot of advertisers think about and/or want to use that feature. It is WILD. NeptuneMoon

Make it one louder! @Aaronlevy

PPCChat Participants