About Kayla Johansen

Kayla Johansen is a PPC Analyst at WebFX, where she manages a multi-channel advertising portfolio for WebFX.com and Nutshell, running campaigns across paid search, video, display, social media, audio, and connected TV. She joined WebFX in 2022, and since then she’s driven millions in revenue for the business and consistently increased PPC sales year over year, all while keeping up with a PPC landscape that seems to reinvent itself every few months.

Kayla holds a B.S. in Marketing and is certified in Google Analytics, Google Ads, and OmniSEO®. That mix keeps her focused on generating qualified leads in the AI era rather than just chasing clicks, and she’s equally as interested in sharing what she learns with other B2B marketers as she is in running her own campaigns.

Kayla has become a go-to source on the numbers side of paid advertising, breaking down what PPC really costs and why. She’s laid out real average cost per click ranges (typically $0.11 to $0.50), agency fees (usually 12 to 30 percent of ad spend), and monthly budgets that can run anywhere from a few hundred dollars for a small business to tens of thousands for a mid-sized company. Her larger point is that PPC’s flexibility, the ability to raise or lower a budget in response to demand, is what makes it worth the cost for most businesses, especially when the average return sits around $8 for every $1 spent. She also breaks down the less obvious costs businesses tend to overlook, like the $15 to $800 a month that PPC management software and tools can add on top of ad spend itself.

Kayla has also made the case that SEO and PPC aren’t rivals competing for budget, but are complementary channels that work better together. She’s laid out nine concrete ways to integrate the two, from using PPC to show up for competitive keywords while organic rankings build in the background, to building PPC remarketing audiences from organic traffic, to using PPC’s faster feedback loop to test ad copy and landing pages before applying the findings to long-term SEO content.

Kayla’s expertise extends into the SEO side of strategy too, including a nuanced take on when a business should (and shouldn’t) run multiple domains. She points to real advantages, like doubling your search visibility for a valuable keyword or building a dedicated microsite for a niche audience, while also flagging the real risks: duplicate content problems, resources spread too thin across sites, and shady domain redirects that search engines can penalize as manipulative. Her advice is refreshingly practical: most businesses are better off doubling down on one strong domain than splitting focus across several mediocre ones.

Kayla’s own campaign work backs up her writing. Early in her PPC career, she was skeptical of Google’s Performance Max campaigns for lead generation, since early reports suggested the format wasn’t built for it, but a couple of years and $5 million in tracked revenue later, PMax became one of her most efficient campaigns. Likewise, she continuously weighs in on newer ad platforms and emerging PPC trends, with a goal of helping small-to-midsize B2B businesses manage their campaigns effectively and continue growing in an ever-changing paid media landscape.

Outside of work, Kayla is usually deep into a book (fantasy, sci-fi, and contemporary fiction are her favorites) or playing cozy video games (she’s recently fallen for the Zelda franchise). When she’s not in a fictional world, she’s re-watching comfort shows like Gilmore Girls, Friends, and Star Trek, or spending time with her family and her two dogs, Shep and Bear.