Today, every smart business recognizes the benefits that come with outsourcing. Along with saving costs associated with having an in-house team, outsourcing allows business owners to focus on their core competencies while professional experts take care of the non-core functions such as IT, finance, and marketing. And talking about marketing, it is one of the key business functions that have reaped huge benefits from outsourcing. Companies, small or big, can access the best global expertise, best practices, and access the latest marketing tools and technologies to reach, acquire, and retain customers. True to this, a recent survey conducted by Clutch shows that 34% of small businesses currently outsource digital marketing, with 52% planning to follow suit in the future. If your company is looking to hire a PPC/sem analyst, there are two broad hiring models that you can take advantage of; hiring an in-house PPC team or offshore PPC management.
In this article, we are going to look at what PPC is, the role of a PPC team, and how to build a PPC team. While at it, we are also going to pit DIY PPC against a dedicated PPC services provider to see which one suits you best.
What Is PPC?
Also known as pay-per-click, PPC is a form of internet advertising that involves paying a fee every time a person clicks on your online ad/s. Simply put, you get to pay for advertising only if someone clicks on your ad. PPC advertising cuts across different platforms and internet content, and it comes in the form of bidding on search terms in search engines and ads appearing in affiliate websites, videos, web pages, or social media feeds.
Before you can hire PPC expert/s, it is important to know the different forms of PPC advertising, which can be profiled into several primary categories including:
- Search engine advertising. Here, the pay-per-click ads pop on the search results pages.
- Display advertising. Pay-per-click ads pop as banners on the web pages.
- Social media advertising. Pay-per-click ads appear in user feeds.
- Product/shopping advertising. Here, the pay-per-click ads appear in online marketplaces or search engines.
Roles and Functions of a Pay Per Click Advertising Specialist
One of the biggest challenges faced by hiring managers looking to hire within the digital marketing realm is the fact that most positions aren’t as “standard” as other professions. Still, most digital marketing positions require an unusual mix of skills ranging from highly analytical and extremely creative, which makes it challenging to hire dedicated PPC experts.
Here are some of the roles and responsibilities of a PPC team:
- A dedicated PPC account manager/ team is tasked with planning and managing account management responsibilities associated with search platforms, Google Ads, and Bing.
- A PPC team also assists in reviewing competition advertising strategies, strengths, weaknesses, and suggesting the best solutions to counter them.
- Suggest keyword lists depending on the business goals and the target audience
- Monitoring and reviewing keyword bidding, clicks, quality score, daily and monthly budgeting, and any other critical campaign metrics.
- Working together with the copywriting team, they also help plan and craft catchy graphical and creative ad designs to capture the customer’s attention.
- Implementing best digital marketing strategies and offering suggestions for campaign structuring, targeting, relevant keywords, and display network.
- Generating, analyzing, and making weekly and monthly reports to identify the improvement areas.
- Keep tabs on the latest search engine industry developments and trends.
In-house PPC Professional vs an Offshore PPC Expert: What Works Best?
Depending on your marketing needs, you can choose to stick it out yourself and handle your PPC campaign personally or outsource PPC team, both of which have pros and cons. Let’s briefly look at the merits and demerits of each.
DIY PPC
At the very basic level, DIY PPC entails handling your pay-per-click marketing campaign by yourself or using an in-house team.
| Pros | Cons |
| Greater control over your marketing campaign. | You may not have the necessary PPC skills or tools in-house. |
| Relatively cheaper in the short term compared to hiring a fully-constituted off-shore team. | No economies of scale. |
| Reduced risk of intellectual property theft. | Inhouse teams typically work in-silo on your marketing campaigns, which can result in tunnel vision. |
| In-house teams have the business values and culture embedded in them. | Lack of industry awareness. |
Dedicated Pay Per Click Advertising Services
A remote PPC team, on the other hand, does not operate within the company’s premises although they collaborate with the in-house teams to achieve a common goal. Below are the pros and cons of PPC outsourcing services.
| Pros | Cons |
| The huge expertise of outsourced agencies allows you to drill down deep into the core of PPC and peel down the intricate layers to find the right solution for your needs. | Some agencies fake skills and experiences. |
| By looking for PPC specialist in an outsourcing agency, your in-house team gets to acquire new skills and keep tabs on industry trends, all thanks to the shared learning environment. | Outsourced PPC advertising services could lead to intellectual property theft, especially if you didn’t sign an NDA. |
| Outsourced PPC campaign management services let your company access global digital marketing talent. | |
| Saves costs associated with running and maintaining a full-time digital marketing team. | |
| With outsourcing, you can hire PPC manager on a need basis, allowing you to only pay for services rendered. |
From the above two tables, it’s clear to see why many companies opt to outsource PPC management rather than go with the DIY PPC option. Having a team of a dedicated team of PPC experts for your business lets you enjoy access to global talent, better tools, and technologies, and augmented operation to keep up with your overall digital marketing needs.
Questions to Ask Before Hiring a PPC Manager
When looking to find a PPC agency or dedicated experts, you’ll want to start by asking the right questions. Essentially, you should be thinking about the marketing issues you are facing and how you want them resolved.
Below, we have compiled a list of the questions to ask the experts you are considering hiring:
- Are you willing to share reviews and case studies from your other clients? More specifically, can you give a detailed account of the previous successful campaigns?
- What guarantees do you offer in terms of timelines, return on investment, and adherence to marketing budgets?
- Are you a Google/Microsoft ads partner? What other ad platforms are you certified with?
- Can you point to previous clients that you have worked with on similar projects?
- How much of our data will you have access to?
- Can you create custom reports for your key performance indicators (KPIs)?
- How often will you be communicating and through what communication platform?
- How do you plan on billing or invoicing the project?
- Can you conduct multichannel marketing across multiple ad networks?
- Can you incorporate a search PPC strategy with an SEO strategy?
- What backup plan do you have if the PPC campaign doesn’t perform well?
If you are looking to hire PPC consultant/s with an agency, the above starter questions will help you separate the real experts from over-confident PPC amateurs.
How Our Company May Assist You in Setting up a Remote PPC Team
If you are reading this article, chances are you searched for the phrases ‘Where can I find a PPC analyst’ or ‘how to find PPC advertisers’. And you are not alone. Today, many companies around the world are head over heels trying to source the best digital marketing talents. And that’s where we come in.
We are a PPC talent sourcing and recruiting agency based in Ukraine, and we have been helping companies bridge the digital marketing skills shortage within their ranks. Our PPC experts are driven by the client’s success and are constantly striving to crush our customers’ competition with the latest tools and technologies. We live, breathe and sleep PPC, and we are never satisfied no matter how well your campaigns are doing but constantly looking for new ways to give you an upper hand in the ever-evolving digital world. Whether big or small, we treat all our customers equally, and it’s our number one goal to always ensure that your brand is seen and heard.
Some of the services that our PPC manager remote workers can help with include:
- Keyword research & analysis
- Landing page conversion optimization
- PPC management
- Paid search advertising
- Ads A/B split testing
- Conversion rate optimization (CRO)
- Google & Bing ads management
- Social media advertising
- Nextdoor advertising
- Remarketing campaigns
- Amazon PPC
- YouTube ads
How We Hire PPC Managers
We pride ourselves in having a streamlined hiring process, which helps our clients avert the grueling, tiresome, and costly hiring process. By now, you are probably wondering; how much does it cost to hire a PPC manager? The good news is that our services are flexible and you can hire our experts on a need basis.
Here’s how our recruitment process plays out.
- Understanding your requirements. Right off the bat, we will arrange for a virtual or physical meeting to understand your business needs, hiring needs, culture, and business values.
- Matchmaking the right talent. Next, our recruiters will invest time into matchmaking your hiring needs with our large pool of PPC marketers to ensure that the talent we deploy meets your exact requirements. If need be we will also activate our robust referral-based system to expand our search for the right talent. Once done, we will send you resumes of the chosen candidates for your consideration.
- Interviewing. Next, we will arrange for you to virtually interview the candidates. We can also conduct background checks, referee confirmation, and salary matching upon request.
- Contract signing. By now, the hiring process has been completed. The newly-hired PPC manager or team will be required to sign a comprehensive contract outlining the job requirements, starting date, and salary.
- Induction. The newly hire PPC expert will be introduced to the rest of the team and hit the ground running.
The newly-hired dedicated PPC manager or team will be introduced to the rest of the team and deployed within a matter of days. For communication purposes, your Account Managers will only be a virtual call or email away.