Interview with Michelle Kop

Let me introduce Michelle Kop, our next amazing woman professional. Michelle is the founder of Level 28 Media. Please listen to the story of her PPC journey and successes. 🌷

 

 

Share the story of how you first got into PPC?

It isn’t much of a magical story but I was just thrown into it at my first job out of college in a small agency setting. Fun fact, I actually didn’t really enjoy PPC for a while because I didn’t know what I was doing and was forced to “figure it out” on my own. It was a big puzzle to me that was very complicated. Over time, PPC grew on me, especially when I saw the impact I was making on small organizations and seeing the needle move. It was so rewarding to get positive client feedback about performance leading to real sales opportunities and won deals. That was my motivation to continue pursuing PPC and get experience across many different industries.

What was the proudest moment of your PPC career?

I’ve had many proud moments in my PPC career from SMB client success stories to identifying a gold mine of ad savings to re-invest on a Global Fortune 500 client. The one that stands out the most is definitely winning the Drum Search Awards for Best B2B Campaign in 2020 for Sage Accounting Software. It’s an industry-leading award like the “Oscars” of paid search and I’m so proud to be a part of the winning strategy.

Do you struggle with maintaining a healthy work-life balance?

I used to struggle when I worked in fast-paced agency environments that were extremely demanding. It was really hard to shut off work at home and I had to learn how to best separate work and home in a remote environment as well. I used to be paranoid about budgets, forgetting to change a setting pacing, etc. With PPC, there are so many ways a campaign can go wrong which made me have an “on-edge” feeling whenever we were running high-profile campaigns. Now, I do tasks in bite-size chunks and have a process for QA to double-check the work to ensure quality.

Now that I own my own agency and in full control of my schedule, I’m more mindful about how I schedule time blocks and separate work from home life as much as possible. I’m not perfect by any means but doing the best I can!

Have you ever experienced any problems or challenges as a PPC because you’re a woman?

At one of the agencies I used to work for, a director gave my male counterpart more complex work on a big project that we were working on collectively. It wasn’t just me but the rest of the females in the group who were assigned parts of the project that weren’t as challenging so I knew something was wrong. My male counterpart was always asked his opinion first and given a leadership position before me and any other female on the team.

Has a client ever underestimated you because you’re a woman?

I don’t necessarily think I’ve been underestimated as a woman but definitely underestimated for being “young.” When I first started doing freelance PPC work, I had a potential client that had his guard up and gave me a hard time about my experience, not having enough testimonials, and told me I haven’t been doing this long enough to be charging my rates. That was a big red flag and I stopped the engagement before it went any further.

If you could wave a magic wand and change something in the PPC world, what would it be?

Tell Google to give us back all the data in the search query reports! I’m serious about that because it’s slowing down the discovery process when I’m launching new campaigns and wasting a lot of ad spend. I’m sure every other PPC marketer would agree with me on this one.

What about being a PPC do you enjoy the most?

Most people will say the data analysis or the creative. For me, it’s just the RESULTS! PPC is part technical and part psychological – you need to be able to understand the technical side of setting the campaigns up in the best way possible and not only that, you need to understand your target audiences inside and out to define the right strategy that will lead to results.

I pride myself in being simple and not over-complicating things. I love the fact that I get to see semi real-time data and can adjust accordingly and make updates on the fly. It’s amazing to have full control and adjust based on user behavior. Paid search is a large anonymous focus group that has data to inform a company’s long-term trajectory and for that reason, I get so excited to be able to do it every day.