The Info-Product Philosophy in PPC: Why Agencies Sell Google Ads Courses

There’s a question I’m genuinely curious about. Why would an agency or a freelancer sell a course that trains their future competitors? Or maybe the goal is different: teach people the wrong way so as not to breed competition, and fleece the gullible a little along the way?

Contents

1. A market flooded with “three-day solutions”
2. Reason 1. Money, and it all comes down to margin
3. Reason 2. A cheap talent pool
4. The story of $2000 and a magic pill
5. What to do if you really do need to learn
6. Agencies aren’t growing competitors, they’re collecting cheap labor
7. FAQ

Let me clarify right away. I don’t run Google Ads courses and I don’t plan to. I don’t consult on “how to find clients as a freelancer,” “how to connect a CRM” or “how to set up product ratings on Prom” (Prom.ua, a Ukrainian marketplace platform). Anything to do with training as such is outside my services. A Google Ads consultation is a different matter. It’s only possible when there’s a clear request: the client comes with a specific question, we work through it together, and they get an answer.

But “how do I learn Google Ads” or “how do I make my ads more effective” are fundamental questions. They don’t fit into one sentence, and even an hour-long consultation can’t answer them properly.

A market flooded with “three-day solutions”

Now look at what the market offers: courses, intensives, webinars, 50-point checklists on “how to double your conversion rate,” “effective Google Ads setup in 3 days.” All of it generic, with no specifics, aimed at the “average patient in the hospital.”

If you fall for this kind of marketing junk, I have a question for you: are you sure you belong in marketing?

Now for the reasons agencies and freelancers release courses in the first place.

Reason 1. Money, and it all comes down to margin

Key point: the only people who make money on courses are the people selling them.

Why does an agency go into info products? Because the margin on its core service has a ceiling.

Take a PPC management service at, say, $1000. Out of that money you have to pay for:

• the performance specialist running the project;
• the team lead;
• head of PPC;
• the CEO, the accountant, the COO and the CFO;
• operating expenses.

And somewhere at the end, keep something for yourself as profit. The margin on a classic agency service rarely exceeds 20%, 30% at best. To double in size, an agency has to double its headcount, and with it overhead, management and risk. More on what goes into the price in the article how much a Google Ads specialist costs.

A course has a completely different margin: 60–80%. The material is recorded once and then sold to crowds of people who dream of working from a beach somewhere in Sicily.

Look at how these courses position themselves: “in a month we’ll turn you into a PPC specialist and you’ll earn $1000+.” Meanwhile the same agencies hire trainees or juniors at, if you’re lucky, $600–700. That’s a contradiction right there, and it should make anyone who plans to make a living in Google Ads stop and think. This job needs critical thinking and the ability to work with numbers. If the numbers don’t add up in the course’s own pitch, what comes next?

If I ever released a course, it would be to make money, not out of an altruistic wish to help someone or improve the market. And I’d honestly admit it.

Key point: I’m not saying all courses are bad. Some paid courses are genuinely worth it. But there are also free ones that give you roughly the same thing without spending a dime.

Reason 2. A cheap talent pool

There’s a less obvious bonus besides money. Agencies constantly need “fresh blood,” meaning new hires. Getting a senior to work by your playbook is hard. Retraining a mid-level specialist is harder too. But someone who starts from zero gets your playbook and your methodology during the course itself. They fit into the system with practically no resistance.

Add access to a contact base and homework checked by a mentor (sometimes it’s just a mid-level specialist). Say a hundred beginners sign up, and three of them clearly get it. They can easily be converted into your own employees. If the best students are also offered a job, you get the perfect combo:

• The financial gap is closed: the course paid for itself and turned a profit.
• The staffing gap is closed: you have ready-made employees trained on your templates.

Not very obvious, but it works very well. I wrote about how working with an agency differs from working with an individual specialist in my comparison agency or freelancer.

The story of $2000 and a magic pill

Last year a man came to me with $2000. He said: “Teach me. I want to be like you.” Of course I turned him down. Not because I don’t like money; I like money just fine.

The thing is, a person who comes with a “teach me” request is rarely looking for a system. They want to shift responsibility onto someone else: I paid, so I’ll somehow magically be turned into a highly paid professional. And they only see the tip of the iceberg and want to be “like him.” But it’s more complicated than that.

Even if I handed over my methodology one to one, I couldn’t hand over my thinking and analytical skills, and without them the methodology makes no sense at all.

What to do if you really do need to learn

I don’t have a course, so there won’t be a “buy now” pitch here. Here’s an honest list of what’s actually useful:

• Google Skillshop. All courses are free, and each one comes with a certificate. When you apply for an agency job, that certificate carries more weight than the “diploma” from any commercial course, even a very expensive one.
• Google Ads Help Center. There’s simply no better primary source on their tools.
• Accelerate with Google. It’s not a course but a video series released periodically about Google’s new products and features.
• My YouTube channel. A warning up front: it’s not training material. My audience isn’t people just starting out as Google Ads specialists, and specialists in general aren’t my audience. Agencies sometimes book consultations with me, but that’s a small share. The channel is built for something else. But if you watch carefully and read between the lines, there’s more value there than in most paid courses.

Agencies aren’t growing competitors, they’re collecting cheap labor

To sum up. Agencies sell courses neither to grow competitors nor to deliberately deceive anyone. It’s simply a high-margin info-product model. And also a tool for collecting cheap labor trained on their own templates.

Recently I was offered a partnership. They asked: “Do you do audits?” I said I do. “Because we use them to bring in clients.” Sure, I said. I sent a few examples of my real independent Google Ads audits, which stick to the substance instead of waxing poetic. In response they sent me their audits, dozens of pages filled with so much filler no bucket could hold it. Thirty pages about:

• 5 Performance Max impressions on a kids’ cartoon YouTube channel;
• a low optimization score in the ad account (I wrote about that metric separately, by the way);
• an “ugly” ad account ID.

I told them I wouldn’t work by their playbook because it’s complete junk, and I’m a Google Ads expert who doesn’t do that kind of thing. A junior at a marketing agency will, of course. Nothing needs explaining to him: here’s a checklist, off you go.

And that, really, is the end product of this assembly line. You can pass on the tool in a few weeks or months, it doesn’t matter. But engineering thinking, an analytical approach and understanding a business as a structure can’t be passed on by a course or a 30-page checklist. That’s why the market will keep being flooded with “specialists” fresh out of webinars and intensives.

Conclusion: truly deep work with advertising remains a handcrafted product. It’s done not through mass lectures but through targeted analysis of specific numbers.