This is part six of a series of posts on Search Engine Marketing for marketers. This part discusses in-house PPC (or SEM for most Asian marketers) management.
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
Should You Hire A PPC Staff?
The first question you probably want to ask before you hire anyone, “is it worth it?”, or “should I…” Ask yourself the following questions instead:
- How much have you been constantly spending on paid search campaigns every month? More importantly, how much extra do you have to pay if you outsource to an agency or third party to do it?
- How many markets do you target?
- How many search engines do you use?
If you are rewarding an agency enough to hire an in-house, why don’t you? The dedicated PPC team can just focus on your business goal instead of several ones. Besides, you won’t hesitate when you want to share some insights about your business and marketing plans.
Who Are PPC Qualified?
The chances are, you don’t have someone to identify a qualified PPC person for you. These are the qualifications you should be looking for:
- Web Analytics. Be familiar with the basics of web analytics; not necessarily the exact web analytics suite your company uses. If your company uses Google Analytics , sponsor him/her to take the IQ test.
- Search Engines. Depending on your target markets, it’s important the search marketer has got experience in top search engines of each market. However, if a person is very familiar with one search engine (especially Google), it won’t be a problem to get used to the others.
- Language Abilities. This is a must. The person you are to hire must be capable of reading and writing in all local languages in your MAIN markets.
- Years of Experience. People get easily impressed by big names and years of experience. It’s not true that the longer one works, the better he or she becomes. It’s just that he or she has more chances in longer period of time to become better. Focus on the following experiences instead:
- Related industry experience
- Optimization. What have been done to optimize the campaign?
- Past campaign objectives and outcome. Is it just driving traffic or ROI driven campaigns?
- Monthly budget one has handled independently (and, you may want to ask how your candidate did budgeting).
- Business Acumen. SEM is not technical work; someone without business acumen can hardly work out a proper SEM strategy.
Managing PPC Staff
There are two things people want more than sex and money… recognition and praise.
Mary Kay Ash quotes (American businesswoman, She founded Mary Kay Cosmetics (1963). b.1915)
Recognizing and rewarding your PPC staff from campaign performance are important to keep him or her motivated to constantly look for ways to improve your business. These are some KPIs you can consider for your PPC team:
- Total Sales via PPC
- PPC ROAS
- PPC Cost Per Conversions (conversions could be better designed as: leads, downloads, sales, clicks, etc.)
- Conversion Rate
It’s harder to hire an in-house PPC than one for an agency; look into one’s potentials to constantly improve your SEM performance. And, someone with a passion in digital marketing is always a valuable asset. The next part discusses PPC outsourcing.
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