Go Back
Agency PPC Manager - How To Hire An Agency PPC Expert
Now it's time to consider how to hire your agency PPC manager; luckily our Digital Marketing Recruitment Guide has got a great contribution from an experienced and respected digital marketer in the form of Steve Grave to guide you on how to carry out the recruitment process for an agency PPC manager.
Steve Grave is the Head of Paid Search at Mediacom, with over 6 years' experience in digital marketing and 8 in performance management. He has overseen the growth of Mediacom's Regional PPC Billings that have quadrupled over the last 18 months and in this section he discusses agency PPC Managers and how to approach hiring them.
Agency PPC Managers will manage your PPC and paid search accounts. Find out more about hiring a PPC Manager...
Our approach here at Mediacom is to ensure that we find the balance of technical ability alongside the ability to work within the team and under pressure. Working in a media agency can be both fast paced and demanding. For any prospective candidate we are looking for them to show their adaptability and their ability to work under pressure. Our approach to hiring PPC Managers needs to take this into account, and we break this down into three sections:
- Their PPC strategy ability.
- Ability to delegate, manage & ultimately achieve success through others.
- Ability to work under pressure and liaise with stakeholders.
Finally, we will always look for the candidate to demonstrate the abilities above and beyond what they can do in PPC.
When looking at their PPC experience, what we want to see from our candidates is that they can demonstrate their PPC knowledge to us while being questioned and scrutinised. We give them the opportunity to demonstrate this through Account Audit tests or demonstrated client management techniques. For any Manager level position it is important that the candidate can demonstrate their ability as an account strategist for their PPC clients too. It is important that they clearly understand the long term strategies on their clients and the work that they do here is in line with the clients long term expectations.
Outside of their own abilities in PPC, we are looking for the candidate to show that they have developed the ability to delegate and understand where their input is needed on a client's strategy and where it is appropriate to allow more junior members to have their input. Whilst we wouldn't necessarily expect our candidates to have a wealth of managerial experience, we would expect them to prove how they work alongside junior colleagues to help them learn and develop.
The key thing here is to demonstrate how to retain overall responsibility and control while delegating key tasks to the team.
Finally, the ability to work with others and manage stakeholders is a key part of any agency role. This includes clients, internal account managers, peers and other internal stakeholders. Demonstrating this ability with examples of how they approach conflict and how they go about resolving issues will show the recruiter that this candidate is capable of taking on the level of responsibility required for the role.
The Candidate… The three areas highlighted by Steve underpin how Mediacom assess any prospective candidate. They focus on a candidate's ability to relay how their experiences of working life can be judged to fit the role being recruited. Steve puts emphasis on the candidates' ability to work alongside others in a team while helping coach and develop junior members, while being able to confidently demonstrate their ability and know when to delegate tasks to the team and when the PPC Manager is needed directly.