After a month of voting, rigorous research and data analysis, it is time to announce the wildly anticipated list of the Top 25 Most Influential PPC Experts for 2015. We release our newest edition of the Top 25 every summer—it’s a nice way to honor some of the hardest workers in our tight-knit community.
This year, we took it a step farther and also recognized International PPC experts, as well as some of the Top Rising Stars in PPC! We asked our readers to submit the names of PPCers just starting to burst onto the scene and destined to become an influencer. These “Rising Stars” just might be on the Top 25 list next year!
Of course, voting is only one part of the complex, mostly boring (but fun for us!) formula that goes into calculating what makes someone truly influential in our industry. We’ll go into more detail describing how we arrived at the rankings, but the quick and dirty version is: We measured Vote Totals, Social Impact, and Traditional Influence for each person that received a vote. The Impact scores took into account only what someone has done within the last year to truly stay up-to-date as an influential expert.
You’ll notice that while there are still some movers and shakers from past years, there are quite a few new experts on the list! We’ll explain more below the graphic, but we saw lots of shuffling among the entire 25. The competition for being one of the most influential experts in the PPC industry is fierce!
So are you ready? Let’s get to it!
The Official Top 25 Most Influential PPC Experts:
Please note: As always, employees of Hanapin Marketing, the creators, owners, and writers of PPC Hero, are not eligible for this list.
The Results
We took a different approach with the voting this year than in years’ past. Instead of giving readers a comprehensive list of experts they had to choose from, we gave them complete freedom to write in who they thought were influential experts (and rising stars!). And wow, did it open our eyes! We were introduced to people we didn’t know were making such an impact in PPC (mostly in other countries) and were happy to see those that having been speaking and writing quite a bit in the last year get several votes.
This also meant that if an expert didn’t get voted in, they weren’t included in the process for rankings (so, every vote counts!). Like last year, we were also mindful in limiting the list to purely PPC experts. While you might notice certain highly influential individuals are not included, we assure you it’s because we’re keeping it 100% PPC geeks only.
Moving on. We stayed pretty close to the overall methodology used in past years, however, along with the voting, we did tweak a couple of things.
To learn more, read about our methodology below.
The Methodology
All metrics are normalized into a standard scale so that they can be compared and tallied using the same rubric. Some of the measurements we list below sound a little like apples and oranges, but we used a weighting and normalization scheme specifically to ensure that no single thing created a bias for any particular PPC experts.
The metrics we measured can be roughly defined as belonging to three categories:
Traditional Influence
Speaking engagements, books, blog posts (both frequency and variety of sites/conferences), etc.
Social Impact
Influence measurement using tools like Moz’s awesome Social Authority metric.
Vote Totals
The votes, nominations and enthusiasm of you, the PPC community!
All metrics were based on what the individual has done within the past year (June 2014 – June 2015). If they wrote a book in September 2014, they got extra points for that, but if the last time they wrote a book was in February 2013, no extra points were added. The same went for speaking engagements and blog posts. We felt this truly measured the impact of an influencer, by making sure all efforts were up-to-date and we weren’t accounting for activities that had taken place more than two years ago.
There is plenty of room for debate (we have certainly learned that much), but we always do our very best to ensure that the scores are objective and that they rely on actual data, not opinion. The list is crafted from a 1:1 comparison of the numbers in our formula, and nothing more.
The Reaction
We want to hear from you! Love the list? Tell your friends! Hate the list? Tell your friends! But most importantly: Tell us.
Leave a comment below with any questions, kudos, congratulations, complaints or commentary.
Tweet @PPCHero with your thoughts, feelings and emotions. We want to hear it all!
Past Top 25 Lists:
The Top 25 PPC Experts of 2014
The Top 25 CRO Experts of 2014
The Top 25 PPC Experts of 2013
The Top 25 PPC Experts of 2012
Do PPC Experts Even Exist?
Should Every PPC Expert Know CRO?
Follow List
In the past, readers have asked for some kind of list that will allow them to easily and quickly follow these experts. We listened! Below, enter your email address for a free, downloadable list of these influential PPC experts.
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