Global PPC Team Structure

Global companies with multiple markets across the world can be spending enormous marketing budgets on Google Adwords. However, only by setting up the optimal structure for the inhouse PPC teams, it will allow the search marketing specialists’ expertise to be fully applied. We are to examine the pros and cons of the 3 PPC team structures for managing Adwords accounts.

  • Centralized Structure
  • Decentralized Structure
  • Hybrid Structure (the Hub Model)

Centralized PPC Team Structure

  • Overall PPC strategies are planned from the central
  • All PPC operations are executed by the central team
  • Marketing budgets are centrally decided and managed

Pros of Centralized Structure:

  • All the best resources stay at one spot – All or most of the roles of an inhouse PPC team including Strategist, campaign specialist, data analyst, keyword specialist, copy writer, and web developer
  • No overhead to manage regional teams and agencies
  • Easy to manage marketing budgets and maximize ROI – Know exactly by spending in which regions Google Adwords will return the best results

Cons of Centralized Structure:

  • Difficult to understand any local markets in depth
  • Problems with campaigns that involve local languages in most European and Asia-Pacific regions – may require local search agencies for help

Decentralized PPC Team Structure

  • PPC strategies are planned and executed locally
  • Marketing budgets are allocated to each region
  • Each region acts completely independently

An example of the decentralized team structure:

  • US team in Silicon Valley manages US and Latin America Google Adwords campaigns
  • UK team in London handles EMEA’s Adwords PPC campaigns
  • Singapore team are responsible for the entire Asia-Pacific’s Adwords campaigns

Pros of Decentralized Structure:

  • Highly efficient when executing PPC strategies
  • Local teams understand the local markets better than anyone else
  • Effective for regional campaigns (Europe, APAC, etc)

Cons of Decentralized Structure:

  • Resources and expertise on PPC and other supportive roles in some regions (e.g. APAC, EMEA, etc) are stretched really thin
  • Industry best practices and updates need to be regularly disseminated across each region
    Difficult to maintain the consistency of marketing messages
  • Highly difficult to communicate across overall marketing and brand strategies

Hybrid PPC Team Structure

  • The hybrid approach gets the best of both centralized and decentralized structures, when it is properly executed
  • The central PPC team provides oversights and set strategies
  • The central team initially builds the framework (keywords, ad copy, etc) and then let regional PPC teams to translate and localize against nuances in each market according to consumer behavior
  • The regional teams execute the oversights and strategies which was initially set out by the central team based on each region’s customer behaviour
    Hybrid PPC Team Structure for Global Companies

Pros of Hybrid:

  • Industry know-how and expertise are disseminated across all teams
  • Easy for globalization and localization – Central team has insights about the global market while local teams understand the local markets
  • On regular basis, the central team can run special campaign tests and distribute results to the regional teams – This saves time and resources from the regional teams for running tests that are uncertain of any success
  • Easier to coordinate with other non-PPC marketing efforts
  • Regional teams manage their respective local search agencies, but the central ensures the industry best practices are applied by all

Cons of Hybrid:

  • Low efficiency on communications: Regular communications are required between the central team and each regional team and among different regional teams
  • Require more thorough upfront planning on marketing budgets for each region

Comments

One Response to “Global PPC Team Structure”

  1. Ryan Beale on January 2nd, 2009 8:24 pm

    Hi Gordon,

    Avinash Kaushik would agree with you that the Hybrid model is the best option, however, he refers to it as “Centralized Decentralization” (See page 96 of “Web Analytics”).

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