George Reid

We spent 1.5 years hiring Amazon ads managers, every day. Here's 3 things we learned to process volume and maintain quality, whilst saving you A LOT of time.

Saturday question. If you could only keep one report from Amazon's ad console, which would it be? Search term report, for me, and it is not close. It is the only one written by your customers. Everything else tells you what you did. That one tells you what they wanted.

"They'll use AI on the job anyway. Why does it matter if they use it in the interview?" A fair challenge. The answer is about what you are trying to find out. On the job, AI is a tool in the hands of someone who knows when it is wrong. That person is worth a lot. I want them using every tool going. In an interview, you are trying to learn whether they are that person. If AI supplies the answers, you learn how good the AI is. You already knew that. So the screen has to reach the judgment underneath. A timed test with the whole screen recorded. A live conversation with someone who has 10 years in Amazon ads, where a correct answer is the start, not the end. Use AI freely once you have the job. Getting the job has to show what you know without it. Those two things do not conflict.

$122K. $192K. $228K. Three consecutive months of PPC sales for a global gaming-accessories brand. The shape of that line is the story. A jump in month two is easy to get. Spend more, sales follow. The test is month three. Does it hold, or was it a spike? It held and grew. $542K for the quarter, with PPC sales up 57.5%. Over the same period ACOS fell from 24.5% to 20.1%. Sales rising three months running while each sale gets cheaper to win is what compounding looks like in an ads account. Every month's search term data makes the next month's spend smarter. It was run by one mid-level specialist. The client's review: "Strong at digging into the detail and translating data into action."

Hiring in the uk? Great. I support that. But you’d like a senior Amazon ads manager for up to 70% less, without impacting quality, consider working with Pare to headhunt one.

No amount of ad spend fixes a product with 3.8 stars. It just shows more people the 3.8. Ads buy the click. The listing has to win the sale. A shopper who lands on a weak rating next to a rival with 4.6 has already decided, and you paid for them to do it. Stretched managers keep scaling anyway, because scaling is the instruction and nobody asked them about the product page. A manager with time says the awkward thing. "This one is not ready. Fix the top three complaints in the reviews, then I will spend on it." That advice saves more than any bid change. Budget should follow readiness. Ask which of your products your ads manager would refuse to advertise today, and why. If the answer is none, they are not looking closely enough.

68.2% of Amazon Ads job posts still do not mention AMC. That is the other side of a number that has nearly doubled, from 16.3% to 31.8%. I think the majority is about to have a problem. Method: term frequency across 1,740 high-relevance Amazon Ads job descriptions, the latest 45 days (267 posts) against all earlier ones (1,473). When a third of employers ask for a skill, the people who have it know what it is worth. They apply to the adverts that mention it, because those employers will let them use it. So a spec that leaves AMC out is not neutral. To the candidates you want most, it can read as an account where the interesting work will not happen. The fix is not to paste in three letters. It is to decide whether you want that depth, say so plainly, and be ready to test it. An advert can ask for AMC. Only a proper screen can find it.

"cant see ppc in his resume" Fair enough. Sometimes those three letters just aren't on the page. What a CV shows you: → Titles → Tenure → Tools, if you're lucky → Whatever the candidate thought sounded senior What it doesn't show you: → Whether they've defended a budget in a margin meeting → Whether they've rebuilt a losing structure instead of bidding it down → Whether they say "I don't know yet" out loud → Whether they go quiet when an account goes sideways I've read CVs with PPC in every second line from people who couldn't explain a placement report. And I've had a candidate whose CV barely used the words, then talk for 40 minutes about margin, DSP and inventory like they owned the P&L. One of those two is worth a call. It's just never the one the document tells you 🤔

Friday confession thread for Amazon ads people. What is the setting you changed once, forgot about, and found six months later still running? Everyone has one. A bid multiplier. A test campaign. A budget rule built for a holiday that ended. Accounts do not forget. Only the people running them do.

"We only spend a few thousand a month on Amazon ads. Do we really need a senior full-time person?" Probably not. I would rather say so than sell you a hire you don't need. A dedicated senior ads manager earns their place when there is enough going on to fill their week. Enough products, enough spend, enough decisions for the attention to pay back. Below that, a good freelancer or a small agency is a reasonable choice. You will get a share of someone's time, and for an account that size a share can be enough. The moment to revisit it is when Amazon becomes a channel the business depends on. When a bad month there is a bad month for the company. Shared attention stops being enough at that point. This is not for everyone. It is for brands and agencies where Amazon ads is big enough to deserve one person's full attention.

Who's actually running your Amazon ads? Not who pitched you. Who logs in on a Tuesday. If you don't know their name, that's your answer.

"Ownership was visible early on." Five words from Santhos, who owns an e-commerce brand, about a dedicated Amazon ads hire. The word I would underline is "visible". Every candidate says they take ownership. You cannot test it in an interview. You can only see it, in the first weeks, in what someone does without being asked. What it looked like for him: "Communication is strong, proactive, and responsive." Proactive is the giveaway. Messages that arrive before the question does. And the daily result: "The integration into our team has been smooth from the beginning" and "operations are running well." "Overall, we are pleased with the collaboration." No fireworks in that sentence. For a founder, an Amazon channel he does not have to worry about is the fireworks.

Amazon ads managers: would you rather send 50 CVs or show your work once? If you're good, your CV is probably underselling you. At Pare you create one profile, record a short video interview and sit a timed analytics test. Brands see the work, not just the words. Would you take a test over another application?

My favourite interview question for an Amazon ads manager has nothing to do with Amazon. "Tell me about a decision you reversed." Weak candidates struggle. They have a story about a mistake someone else made, or a setback that was secretly a success. Strong ones answer at once and in detail. "I moved budget into video, gave it six weeks, it didn't pay back, I moved it out. Here is what I should have checked first." Running an ads account is a long series of bets, and some lose. Someone who cannot name a lost one has either never been in charge or is not being straight with you. Listen for three things: the specifics, how long they waited, and who they told. That one answer covers judgment, patience and honesty.

Wait for the perfect applicant, or move before the role closes? By mid October we had tracked 1,651 senior Amazon Ads roles that were filled or closed. Another 182 were still open. Every closed role is a candidate someone else hired. How long has your role been open?

The top of the band for a hybrid senior Amazon Ads role in Germany is $81k in US dollars. The bottom is $58k. If you are offering near the top, be clear what you are buying. Method: the median of 13 LinkedIn job posts for senior Amazon advertising roles in Germany, hybrid only, high-confidence salary extractions, converted to USD. Medium confidence. At the top of a band, the applicants do not get better on their own. You get the same mix, and all of them ask for more. The salary sets the price. It does not do the selecting. What should come with that money is ownership: the budget, the forecast, the argument with finance, the plan for next year. If the role does not include those, you are paying a senior rate for campaign work. And if it does, test for them. Ask the candidate to defend a budget, not describe a campaign. The catch at the top of the band is that the interview has to be as senior as the pay.

"This candidate is out of our price range." Fair enough. Then they told me what they pay their agency. What a retainer buys you: a slice of an account manager a weekly call a monthly deck What the same money buys you direct: all of one person your Slack your standups I watched a $50M brand do this maths in front of me back in the agency days. They took the person full-time at $3.2k instead of my $6k retainer. Cost me the retainer. I let them do it anyway. Still there 18 months on. The strange bit is nobody ever calls the retainer expensive. It's a line item. The salary is a decision, and decisions get argued about. "Out of our price range" is almost never about the price 🙃

Client calls from Patagonia on a budget Dell. I'd love to frame that as discipline. It was mostly stubbornness. I ran the Amazon ads agency from South America for three months. > Colombia: fine. Cafes, decent signal, calls on time. > Peru: patchy. I learned which hours were safe and stopped promising anything outside them. > Patagonia: no signal at all, for days at a time. Clients in the US, Europe and Australia. Ads managers in India. Me, occasionally, in a valley with nothing. Nothing broke. Not because I'm clever. Because my team lead had been managing Amazon ads daily for ten years and didn't need me to sign off a bid change. The uncomfortable lesson: the system was never my availability. It was who I'd hired. Most agencies have that backwards. The person on your call is rarely the person in your account. P.S. Worst wifi you've ever taken a client call on? 😂

The quickest way to lose a good Amazon ads manager: ask for a daily report. Daily numbers on Amazon are noise. Attribution lags, sales shift between days, one large order bends the chart. A manager made to explain noise every morning will stop looking for the signal. Weekly is honest. Daily is theatre.

"Why do you want to be in the room when we interview the candidate?" Because that is where a lot of hiring goes wrong, and it is the part recruiters normally skip. We attend every client interview. Not to sell. To make the hour useful. If nobody on your side has run Amazon ads, the interview drifts to things anyone can answer. Tell me about yourself. Where do you see the channel going. A pleasant hour, and you learn nothing. We already know where each candidate was strong and where they were stretched in testing. We can point the conversation there, so you hear how they think about the hard parts. It also means we hear your reaction first hand. If the fit is not right, the next introduction is closer. Most clients hire after one or two interviews.

Would you do it again? It is the only question that matters after a hire, and most testimonials never answer it. Ulrik at Wallhack did. "We would hire through PARE again and recommend this model for both speed and quality." Speed first. "The execution from screening to onboarding was efficient and well managed." Then quality, which showed up in the work. "Our hire restructured the paid setup across markets early on. We are already seeing higher efficiency and better control." And on candidates arriving already vetted: "It was a major value add compared to traditional agencies."