For companies running PPC (pay per click, as in Google Ads or Bing Ads) at scale (over ~$15,000 per month), a full time PPC manager can pay for themselves quickly. Many PPC managers also work with a PPC agency as their spend continues to scale and the PPC Manager is working on strategy, but having a PPC Manager at the company leading PPC strategy can be useful.

So how do you hire a PPC manager if you have decided that is the right way forward?

For starters, you need an awesome PPC Manager job description to attract the right candidates.

Just below here is the PPC Manager job description you can copy and use for your recruiting, but don’t miss the commentary below as well because it helps to understand the why behind the what of the description.

PPC Manager job description

COMPANY is looking for a new full-time PPC Manager to manage our paid ad spend across multiple platforms to drive business results.

We are a leader in the BUSINESS VERTICAL space and looking to grow our mindshare and wallet share with potential customers searching for what we offer online. We are well loved by our customers and ready to get more onboard to make a bigger impact.

About you:

You are a PPC veteran with deep experience across various platforms such as Google Ads and Bing Ads. Others in the PPC industry consider you an expert and you have the results to go along with it.

You are a strategic marketer, not just a tactician, who understands how PPC drives the business forward and constantly pushes to understand more about the customer and the results the business is getting from your PPC campaigns and initiatives. At the same time you are driven by the data you see and make decisions based off that.

You are constantly holding yourself to a high standard and keeping up with the pace of change within PPC.

The ideal candidate for this role has 3-5 years of PPC experience managing spend for a brand like ours. You also work well with others, were voted “most likely to succeed” by your peers in high school, and believe in constantly learning more and getting better results.

How to know if you need a full time PPC manager

A statement we hear fairly often at Credo is “We’re not sure whether or not we should hire a PPC Manager in-house or hire an agency to run our PPC campaigns for us.”

Like many things in this world and digital marketing, it depends on your business and what stage you are in.

You should hire a PPC firm if any of the following are true:

  • You need to get started with PPC and are willing to commit budget (at least $2,000 per month) to ads as well as paying the firm to set up and manage the campaigns;
  • You are already advertising and want someone to come in to audit your campaigns and then grow them as they are profitable and it makes sense;
  • Your spend is below ~$15,000 per month and you don’t see it growing substantially;
  • You don’t have the headcount to hire a new full time person, but do have the budget available to spend on advertising and a PPC firm;
  • Your PPC spend is currently being managed by a more general digital marketing manager (a great role to have at a company) who has a lot of responsibilities and not enough time to manage the PPC side.

As to hiring a PPC manager full time, take the inverse of the above and ask yourself if having a full time person to whom you are also responsible for their equipment, PTO, HR management, benefits, and more is worth it.

Often, a great PPC firm can be managed very well by a digital marketing manager or an existing PPC manager who is more focused on strategy and buy-in across the company (and maybe even project managing landing pages and developers and designers as part of their job) who just needs some boots on the ground.

What to look for

A PPC manager can drive incredible results for your company, or they can waste a lot of your money. Of course, you want to do the first and not the second.

So what do we recommend you look for in a PPC manager?

First, proven results. This should be a no-brainer but they should be able to give you multiple examples of results they drove, what they did to get those results, and what they’d do differently next time around. This shows both self-reflection as well as how they think through problems.

Second, a public body of work. While this is not required, it goes a long way to showing how they think and that they are both able to explain things and that they are learning new things and on top of changes.

Third, you should look for someone who has experience running PPC for the type of company you are. This might seem like a no-brainer, but it is unfortunately common for companies to hire PPC managers for, for example, a B2B lead generation company when the PPC professional has mostly worked in ecommerce. We’re not saying that this person can’t be successful, but it’s a very different type of company from what they are used to and there will be a learning curve.

Common mistakes companies make when hiring a PPC manager

There are quite a few mistakes that companies make when hiring a PPC manager that you can avoid.

First, too many companies are not sure of the level of person to hire. A PPC manager, aka someone who manages PPC spend, usually has 3-5 years of experience. More than that and they need a more senior role usually, less than that your results will be lackluster.

Second, too many companies require a marketing degree or similar. Requiring this will severely hurt your chances of recruiting someone good to the role. Most marketing degrees at good universities are still teaching from textbooks written in the early 2000s when PPC was a nascent channel. It’s much better to look at their work experience and case studies and public body of work to understand what they really know.

Third, too many companies dramatically underpay for the skill set. PPC is able to drive incredible results for your company, and the switching cost of hiring someone and paying them too little so they leave for another opportunity is high. Unless your company is very good at recruiting and getting new employees up to speed, you should pay fair market rate and expect to give them raises as they make your company more money.