Ideal PPC Team Hierarchy: Senior Strategist & Junior Specialist
Are you wondering if you have the most efficient PPC team setup? I've been on a few, and I want to tell you what I've seen work the best. Stick around and I'll also tell you some horror stories that may serve as a cautionary tale.
My favorite structure is pairing a senior level PPC Strategist with one or many junior level Specialists. The idea here is that you can increase the impact of one talented person by alleviating them of tedious tasks. The pay gap can be quite significant, saving you money, and providing your team with career advancement opportunity. I'll explain who these people are and how I recommend breaking out the responsibilities.
The Senior PPC Strategist
The Profile
This person has more than 5 years of PPC experience. They've worked with several different types of clients including the industries that your clients are in. They can clearly and simply explain the strengths and weaknesses of PPC as a marketing tool and can make educated predictions about the future of Paid Media. They love analyzing data and coming up with actionable conclusions. They know what a pivot table is and how to use it.This person also understands the relationship of PPC to SEO, social media, content marketing, and can offer specific recommendations for on-site conversion rate optimization.
Their Tasks
Most of their time will be spent segmenting numbers and talking to clients or account managers. This person will be able to document and communicate compelling talking points about the success of the campaigns and the strategies in place to improve performance.They should propose and plan high-impact initiatives including:
- Initial campaign creation
- Targeting improvements
- keyword expansion
- geographic targeting
- audience list usage
- Ad copy messaging
- On-site conversion rate optimization
- Conversion tracking & integration
- Propose supplemental campaign efforts including native and retargeting
- Setting goals and identify what is and isn't achieving them
This person should be great at strategy and communication. They should also be an excel and Analytics wiz.
The Junior PPC Specialists
Who To Hire
This could be a great role for an intern, recent college graduate, or just about anyone who can prove that they're detail oriented. They should be able to follow instructions and have excellent computer skills and an understanding of the consumer experience.How To Manage Them
Documentation is key. These employees might not stay at your company long and if they do, they might want to move up to that Senior Strategist role. Either way, expect turnover and create detailed documentation on how each task should be fulfilled. Don't expect people to know how to do things after being shown once or twice. Creating an internal certification process is a great idea if you have the resources.Here are some tasks you can give Junior PPC Specialists:
- Spot check budget and spend accuracy
- Check ads for misspellings
- Propose ad variations
- Confirm geographical targeting
- Identify negative keyword opportunities
- Run ad preview & diagnostics to identify issues with ad delivery
- Update ads with current promotional offers
- Opening new accounts when needed
Reporting Resources Make Or Break A Talented Employee
It's important for your teams to have access to all the data. PPC people regularly make assumptions about opportunities to improve campaigns and they rely on access to raw data in order to prove or disprove their hypothesis. Your PPC team should be able to export data for custom date ranges, with segmentation available for visibility into performance by:
- campaign
- keyword
- device
- placement
- ad type
- etc.
Make sure that your tools and automation aren't preventing your teams from getting the real time data they need.
Stuff That Didn't Work
- A team full of mid level specialists
- Promoting your best talent to manager
- Require non-senior people to speak to clients
- Building your own automation tool
- Overlapping responsibilities
I Can Help Your Organization
If you want someone to come into your organization and provide you a comprehensive report on opportunities for improvement in your structure or implementation process for Paid Media, please reach out to me below ↓
Email Me
hello@davidjohnwyatt.com
