Yes, PPC Is Still Used — and Still Heavily Funded

The short answer: PPC isn't just still used — it's one of the most heavily funded channels in all of marketing. If anything, the question has shifted from "is PPC alive?" to "why does it feel harder to make it profitable?"

Start with the money. US paid search spending was projected at $124.59 billion in 2024, up 11.1% year-over-year, according to Salesforce's marketing statistics. Companies aren't quietly abandoning paid search — they're pouring more into it every year. Paid search also holds 39.5% of all digital ad spend, more than any other ad format, per IAB data. That's not the profile of a dying channel.

The effectiveness ratings back this up. Survey data shows 93% of marketers rate PPC as effective or highly effective — the second most effective channel measured. And when it comes to where that spend actually goes, Statista research finds 98% of PPC marketers still use Google, even as budgets gradually spread to Bing, Amazon, LinkedIn, and TikTok.

So the numbers tell a clear story:

• $124.59B in US paid search spend in 2024, growing 11.1% year-over-year
• 93% of marketers rate PPC effective — second only to one other channel
• Paid search holds 39.5% of all digital ad spend, the largest share of any format
• 98% of PPC marketers still run campaigns on Google

Here's the tension, though: the same research shows why it feels different on the ground. Nearly half of marketing specialists — 49% — say PPC is harder to manage than it was two years ago. CPCs have grown 13% year-over-year, meaning the "set and forget" approach is no longer viable. The channel still works; it just demands more from the people running it.

That's why, when we evaluate demand channels at Worqd, PPC isn't judged on whether it works — the data settles that. The real evaluation is whether a business has the follow-up speed, creative testing, and unified data to make rising click costs pay off. The accounts winning today pair paid search with fast lead handling and modern creative, rather than treating the ad click as the finish line.

So the honest framing isn't "is PPC still used?" It clearly is, at massive scale. The question worth answering is why profitable PPC feels harder than it used to — and what the businesses still scaling on it are doing differently.

Why PPC Feels Harder Than It Did Two Years Ago

If you're running the same PPC playbook you built in 2023, you're probably paying more for worse results — and the data explains exactly why. PPC hasn't stopped working; it's stopped working passively.

Nearly half of marketers feel it. Salesforce's marketing statistics show that 49% of marketing specialists find PPC harder to manage today than they did two years ago. That's not a perception problem — it's a structural shift in how auctions, search results, and buyer behavior actually work.

The first pressure point is cost. According to PPC optimization research, CPCs rose 13% year-over-year, and Shopify's PPC benchmarks found costs climbed in 87% of industries in 2025 — beauty and personal care jumped 40%. The same budget now buys fewer clicks, which means the "set and forget" era of PPC is officially over.

The second pressure point is AI in search results. Practitioner analysis from scandiweb found that paid CTR on queries triggering AI Overviews collapsed from 19.70% to 6.34% between June 2024 and September 2025. When Google answers the question directly, fewer people click anything — paid or organic.

The third pressure point is privacy. Third-party cookies no longer feed the bidding algorithms that decide who wins the auction. First-party data — your CRM contacts, your conversion history, your enhanced conversion signals — now determines whether your bids compete at all. Accounts without that data connected are, as the scandiweb analysis bluntly puts it, systematically outbid.

Here's what that adds up to in practice:

• Every click costs more, so wasted clicks hurt more than they used to.
• Fewer clicks arrive on AI Overview queries, so post-click conversion matters more.
• Bidding now rewards connected first-party data, not clever manual bid adjustments.
• Creative quality drives roughly 70% of social performance variance, so ad fatigue drains budgets faster.

The uncomfortable conclusion: the 2023 playbook loses money on the same budget. As one practitioner quoted in the scandiweb analysis put it, accounts running 2023 strategies are losing money while accounts running current strategies scale on half the budget.

This is why the question isn't whether to keep spending on PPC — it's whether your follow-up, your data connections, and your creative testing can keep pace with what the auction now demands. That's the same lens we use at Worqd when evaluating whether a client's paid spend is actually producing booked calls, or just impressions.

How PPC Stacks Up Against SEO, Social, and AI Search

If you're weighing PPC against other lead generation options, the honest answer is that the data doesn't crown a single winner — it rewards the best integration. Each channel brings a different strength, and the smartest budgets treat them as one system rather than competing line items.

On raw ROI, organic channels often edge out paid. According to HubSpot's marketing statistics, website, blog, and SEO rank as the #1 ROI-generating channel for B2B, with paid social close behind. For B2C, email marketing takes the top spot, followed by paid social and content marketing. Paid channels are rated highly effective — just rarely #1 on ROI.

Where PPC wins decisively is speed. SEO takes 3 to 12 months to scale, while paid campaigns deliver immediate visibility and measurable results. That timing gap matters when you need pipeline this quarter, not next year.

Here's what the comparison looks like in practice:

• SEO and content — highest long-term ROI, but slow to compound and vulnerable as AI tools absorb search traffic
• Paid search and social — immediate, measurable demand, with 93% of marketers rating PPC effective, per Salesforce's marketing data
• Email and reactivation — top B2C ROI and the cheapest demand you already own in your CRM
• AI search visibility — the emerging multiplier that lifts performance across every other channel

That last point reframes the entire debate. Brands cited in AI Overviews earn 91% higher paid CTR than brands that aren't cited. Meanwhile, paid CTR on AI Overview-triggering queries dropped from 19.70% to 6.34% between June 2024 and September 2025. Paid and organic are no longer separate disciplines — your organic authority now directly determines how hard your ad dollars work.

Social discovery is shifting the landscape too. Product discovery on social platforms rose from 46% in 2023 to 53% in 2024, according to Salesforce's research, and 76% of Gen Z now discover products through social. Buyers meet your brand across channels before they ever click an ad.

The real question isn't PPC vs. alternatives — it's whether your channels work together. A click from Google Ads converts better when the searcher already saw your brand cited in an AI answer, watched your video ad on Meta, and received a follow-up within seconds of inquiring. Fragmented vendors for ads, creative, SEO, and follow-up break that chain at every handoff.

This is exactly why Worqd runs the whole path from first click to booked call — paid ads, SEO and answer-engine optimization, creative testing, and instant lead response under one plan and one report. When one partner owns the full journey, the channels stop competing and start compounding.

The takeaway: keep PPC in the mix for its speed and measurability, pair it with SEO and AI search visibility for compounding returns, and make sure fast follow-up closes what the click starts. The brands winning in 2026 aren't choosing channels — they're connecting them.

The Four Levers That Keep PPC Profitable in 2025

The accounts still running the 2023 playbook are losing money on the same budgets, while the ones that adapted are scaling on half of it. That's the gap one practitioner analysis puts bluntly: most PPC advice today assumes an outdated playbook still works — and it doesn't. Here's what does.

Lever 1: Diversify beyond Google. For the first time in over 20 years, Google dropped below half of US search ad spend, holding 48.5% in 2026, and budgets are shifting toward Bing, Amazon, LinkedIn, and TikTok. Microsoft Advertising in particular offers lower customer acquisition costs for B2B and high-income demographics. Putting every dollar into one auction means paying whatever that auction charges.

Lever 2: Invest in AI search visibility. This one surprises people. Paid click-through rates on queries that trigger AI Overviews collapsed from 19.70% to 6.34% in just over a year — but brands cited inside those AI answers earn 91% higher paid CTR than brands that aren't. Answer-engine optimization is no longer a separate discipline; it's a direct multiplier on what you're already spending.

Lever 3: Test creative relentlessly, especially video. Creative iteration drives roughly 70% of performance variance on social platforms, and personalized video ads convert 3.5x better than generic ones. With CPCs up 13% year over year, better creative is the clearest way to stop inflation from eating your returns. This is where high-volume testing — scripts, hooks, variations — beats polishing one "perfect" ad.

Lever 4: Fix what happens after the click. As Search Engine Journal puts it, keywords and ads get users to your site, but landing pages close the deal. Fragmented data across spend, CRM, and landing pages turns optimization into guesswork, and accounts without CRM-linked first-party data are systematically outbid. The click is only half the job.

A few practical checks:

• Is more than 80% of your paid budget sitting in one platform?
• Do you know whether AI answers are citing your brand — or your competitors?
• How many ad variations did you test last month? One or two isn't testing.
• When a lead arrives at 7pm on a Friday, who responds — and how fast?

None of these levers works in isolation, which is why we built Worqd's growth model around one integrated path — from first click to booked call — instead of separate vendors for ads, creative, and follow-up. PPC still works in 2025. It just refuses to work passively.

If you want to know which of the four levers is holding your pipeline back, that's exactly what we dig into on a growth call: book a growth call and we'll find the bottleneck before touching anything.

Where the Click Stops Mattering: Follow-Up Decides ROI

You can buy the click. You cannot buy what happens after it. With average Google Ads CPCs at $5.26 and cost-per-lead around $70, every inquiry that slips through the cracks is money already spent, according to Shopify's PPC benchmarks.

Search Engine Journal puts it plainly: keywords and ads get users to your website, but landing pages close the deal. The same logic extends past the landing page. If a lead fills out a form at 7pm Friday and hears back Monday, the click was wasted — no matter how well the campaign was targeted.

Speed-to-lead, qualification, and booked calls are where PPC spend either pays back or quietly leaks away. And the pressure is rising: CPCs grew 13% year-over-year, which means every follow-up gap costs more than it did last year. Fragmented data across spend, CRM, and landing pages only makes it worse — Improvado notes that fragmented data turns optimization into guesswork.

This is why the practical answer to rising CPCs is an integrated one, not a bigger budget. One partner running the whole path from first click to booked call, instead of separate vendors for ads, creative, and follow-up. The pieces that matter:

• Ads and creative testing together, so winning angles reach buyers faster — creative drives roughly 70% of social performance variance
• AI SDR follow-up that qualifies every inquiry in under 60 seconds, 24/7, so after-hours clicks still become booked calls
• Pipeline recovery that reactivates the cold leads already sitting in your CRM — demand you already paid for

The click was never the finish line — it was the starting gun. Worqd's growth engine is built on exactly this: one plan, one report, no vanity metrics, covering ads, creative testing, instant AI follow-up, and recovery of leads that went cold. The accounts running 2026 strategies are scaling on half the budget, as scandiweb's head of paid media observes — the ones still running the 2023 playbook are losing money on the same spend.

If your PPC clicks aren't turning into booked calls at the rate they should, the bottleneck is probably after the click, not before it. Book a growth call and Worqd will help you find where leads are stalling — and fix the path from first click to booked call.