Organising a Paid Search Marketing Team

Posted on February 16, 2008
Filed Under sem agencies |

Yesterday I noticed this question on LinkedIn:

What is the best structure for a Paid Search Marketing team?

How have you defined the roles within your teams?

Have you split your team into specialists or generalists?

Are you outsourcing some of your responsibilities?

I am particularly interested in what your experiences are in structuring a large Paid Search Marketing team within an agency. This could be either a specialist SEM or full service media agency. Rian Carstens, Head of Search EMEA, MediaEdge:CIA

As Efficient Frontier in the UK has grown 3 times in size over the last 18 months, this is a question I've been asking my self repeatedly. Here's the answer I gave:

There's no right answer to this, but here are three things which I think are important:

The structure is not as important as the kind of people in it. Too many agencies still staff up with soft-skilled marketing-type people. I have nothing against those type of people, but paid search is all about maths and analysis. When I'm hiring, I always look for maths skills, not marketing ones.

I don't think paid search is complex enough to carve up all the different roles (keyword gen, bid mgmt, copy writing etc) to different people. If you've hired smart people, they will become all round experts in no time at all. If you try to de-skill the process by compartmentalising it, then the final output will be poor.

Don't let people do what a computer does better. Too many agencies hire bright graduates and then grind them into a pulp by using them as Excel monkeys. If you don't make a significant and continual investment in technology (and I don't just mean bid management!) then you won't be able to cope.

What answer would you give?