A Day in the Life of a Campaign Manager

Campaign Managers: they are the saviours of the day when your campaigns are in trouble. Oh, you’ve never heard of them? Well, then it’s time to find out! In this new blog post, we will get to know more about the perspectives and challenges that three of our Performance team members face every day. Let’s start!

First of all: what is Performance Marketing?

Performance marketing is the field of Online Advertising responsible for optimising online campaigns. This service is provided by marketing and advertising companies to clients that want to make sure they have results.

The professionals who optimise the campaigns, the campaign managers, develop a series of actions (like changing the ad copy or keywords) that make sure the ads run inside the goals that were set initially, e.g. a specific number of clicks. These actions are implemented through data tracking and measuring after understanding the indicators that are ruining the ads’ performance.

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Why is a Campaign Manager important in our team?

Campaign Managers are of a great deal of importance because they are the ones who optimise Leadzai’s partners’ campaigns. Besides that, they are the ones responsible for the support part: answering the questions of the small business owners who resort to our chatbot, when they have doubts about their campaigns’ creation.

Now that you already know what Performance Marketing is all about, let’s get down to business! To help us understand what this position involves, we count on the help of three team members: Pedro Faria, our current team lead Campaign Manager, Eduarda, one of our mid Campaign Managers, and Ana-Lia, our internee Campaign Specialist.

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‍How is the average day here at Leadzai?

The Performance Team starts their day at 10 AM with a meeting that lasts about half an hour. According to Pedro, they start working earlier but that video call is the moment all the members look at the different platforms and distribute their tasks for the day accordingly.

First, they start by opening Hubspot. That’s where the team checks the volume of support that is necessary and distributes it through the members of the team.

Secondly, it’s time to open Data Studio to check on the performance of yesterday’s campaigns. Is the team delivering the necessary clicks (budget fulfil)? These are some of the questions answered after checking the reports created by the Data Science team. If the answers aren’t as positive as expected, the meeting is the right moment to define a strategy for the day that will meet the team’s expectations.

Next, and just like it happens with the tech teams, Jira is the tool where they see if there are tickets to solve. In the Performance Team’s case, tickets are specific problems that are identified in the copy and URLs of the campaigns.

At the end of the meeting, the team has a quick chat to understand if someone needs help with current tasks. If they do, they’ll arrange a space in their schedule to help their colleague. If not, the meeting will end and the day of work will continue.
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What I see is everybody is always motivated at work and this helps other people get motivated. This is the place where I’ve seen the most motivated people. — Eduarda

How is the team organised?

Raquel is the Head of Ads Strategy of the Performance Team, which means she is the team lead. Right after her, there are the campaign managers — Pedro, Vítor, Eduarda, Tânia, Luiz, Ricardo, Mariana, and Duarte — and the campaign specialist interns, Ana-Lia, Frederico, and Jorge.
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The key accounts are split within the team, which means that each person is responsible for the campaigns of a specific client or partner. At the moment, the performance team works mostly in small groups: Eduarda and Frederico are responsible for the Belgium partners and Vítor, Jorge and Tânia work together on our Spanish clients. Pedro handles by himself our Latin-American client but teams up with Ana-Lia to work with our biggest Portuguese client. Duarte, Mariana, Luiz, and Ricardo just joined the team two months ago and are responsible for working with a Portuguese client.

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What tools do you use daily?

General Tools

• Hubspot: used to take care of support & to make contact with the client when he is in need. The tool is automatised for each partner: the campaign manager/specialist responsible for the partner receives the doubts directly in his account;
• Jira: used to solve the tickets, as we addressed in the previous question;

Google Tools

• Google Keyword Planner: shows a good search volume of the right keywords for a specific business. It indicates the cost of each keyword so it’s useful to manage the client’s budget;
• Google Ads: elaborates the campaigns and checks they are running correctly;
• Google Data Studio: used to understand the performance of the campaigns through the daily reports, as addressed previously;
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• Meta Business Manager: used to check if the campaigns on Meta accounts are working;
• Google Drive: helps the performance team to consult documents like daily reports;
• Google Sheets: this allows the team to know all the numbers and analyse the campaign data.

What are your biggest challenges?

Each team member has their challenges, relating to the professional experience they have and the position they occupy in the team.

• Leadership: while Raquel is on maternity leave, Pedro has been filling her spot as the team lead. This was Pedro’s first job so leading, he recognises, was a big moment in his career so he counted on the help of the COO, Diogo Lopes: “The challenge was to stay here with 22 years old and leading a team of six/seven people. ‘Yeah, let’s do it, let’s learn’, I answered when the question was asked. It was not easy in the beginning but I think when Raquel is back she will like the work I did.”
• Digital Marketing’s Mutability: since it’s a never-ending world with changes occurring almost every day, tests have to be made constantly, and learning never stops. “The numbers don’t work for us”, Pedro told us, “what works one day, may not work in the other”. So you need to test, test, and… keep on learning! When Ana-Lia started working at Leadzai, it was her first job in the area so she enrolled in some Google Ads courses and even bought books on the subject to prepare herself better for the job: “I didn’t have a lot of experience in campaign management so I bought some books. I needed to learn more, you know.”
• Clients’ websites: the campaign managers optimise the campaigns on a client’s website but don’t have any influence on its creation, content, or basic keywords. Therefore, Pedro and Eduarda consider it a big challenge to generate clicks and leads to a non-appealing website. In these cases, they have an extra challenge: thinking outside the box to be able to get results!

• Support & dealing with client’s expectations: providing the client the best service possible and, at the same time, being able to answer their doubts is a main concern in the performance team, overall, and Eduarda’s, in particular. Our campaign manager pointed out that sometimes giving detailed feedback to the clients on their campaigns is very demanding. Even though the performance team is growing, the number of campaigns continues to grow as well, so it’s challenging to meet a good performance on all the campaigns and deal with the client’s expectations.
• Write the right copy: each business has its specificities so, for Ana-Lia, creating the right copy and keywords for some specific audiences, may be challenging. However, she pointed out that she disposes of such a big myriad of tools that what may seem difficult at first, is overcome easily.

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Which characteristics does a performance manager need to have to work at Leadzai?

• Be open to learning: Ana-Lia and Pedro consider being proactive in your self-learning as a must-have requirement for a campaign manager. As we said before, this is a field that is constantly changing so you must beto what’s new on the market.
• Having attitude & accepting challenges: as a campaign manager, you will have to deal with support. Since dealing with the final client is not an easy task, Pedro considers that a good attitude is crucial. That involves being nice, being in a good mood & calm down.
• Detail-oriented: put on your Sherlock Holmes intuition skills because in this job you need to be very curious and attentive — especially when you have your hands full of campaigns. According to Eduarda, “you need to investigate everything and to go deeper in the campaigns to understand why things are not working.”
• Team player: all three members consider this characteristic essential. The work that one does truly influences the other since the team works in small groups with the same goal. Besides that, working remotely is always a challenge when working in a team so it’s important to be able to reach out when your colleague is in need — after all, have in mind, his success will be your success as well!

In the beginning, I really didn’t know how to lead but I got better, I’m learning. Fortunately, I have good people to lead; they have always been great and very supportive. They helped me a lot. — Pedro Faria

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Lastly, why do you like to work at Leadzai?

Remote work is addressed as a big perk at Leadzai by our performance team. Because of it, Pedro can work in the place he lives in, a beautiful village in the North of Portugal called Caldas das Taipas. On the other side, Eduarda, who usually works in Lisbon, at her home, loves to attend the new office once in a while because she enjoys the space and hanging with her colleagues.

Our campaign manager also changed her perspective about working remotely after joining Leadzai: before she thought it was difficult to concentrate and do her work properly at home but the experience showed her otherwise. The flexibility of working from wherever you want and asynchronously, allowed her not only to deliver what was expected of her but also to be able to attend doctor’s appointments and other personal tasks that in a regular job won’t be possible.

Pedro also told us about two initiatives that he values very much in the company and that is very useful for the integration of the team:

• Donuts, a 30-minute meeting in which three or four colleagues talk about anything but work. They are dynamized by Mariana, our Chief of Staff, and Puppe, one of our Backend Developers, to help connect colleagues who don’t see each other often since the company is remote-based.
• We are growing Slack posts by João Bogalho, our HR Director. This is a very simple action that makes the newbies feel they are welcome and the rest of the team acquainted and connected with the newcomers.

Last but not least, Ana-Lia, Eduarda, and Pedro all highlight the good work environment on and off work: just like in other A Day in the Life Of… blog posts, the fun team-building events couldn’t help being mentioned, of course! According to them, at Leadzai everyone is very nice and in a good mood, available to help, and motivated.

The three campaign managers also agree on the fact that the company really cares about them as people, not only as employees. When asked this question, Ana-Lia shared she felt very cherished by the company as a whole. Her thoughts on her experience were so warming, we just can’t help but conclude this article with her exact words, in first person:

It’s been amazing, it’s been an incredible ride. Beyond expectations. Everyone in the company is very nice so I think Leadzai is a marvellous place to work so come and join us. The flexibility, the core of the company, the culture, the product, the unlimited vacations… It has so many good things. I’m very happy and I need to share this happiness with everyone around me. I really, really mean it. I want everyone in the world to work with Leadzai because if they are as happy as I am, everything is right.

Are you a Campaign Manager and would you like a new challenge in your career? Then Leadzai is looking for you! Join our team here.

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