The PPC Leaders Summit
Thursday 21st September 2023 – 1.30pm to 5pm
Shoreditch Treehouse, London
• Meet other PPC Leaders in a confidential setting
• Break out of your cocoon and rub shoulders with other PPC agency owners
If you run a PPC agency, the only people who understand the pain and thrills of your adventure… are other PPC leaders.
You are invited to join us in London to share your journey with other PPC agency owners and leaders. You’ll get to talk confidentially about your business with people who know what it’s like to walk in your shoes… because they’re currently doing it.
- “This month we have had three people all hand in their notice – one of them a senior manager!”
- “I’ve just invested £300k in non-billable talent to take us to the next level. Should I have sat on the money, banked it for a rainy day, or bought a nice car?”
- “My focus is on building a profitable, growing business that doesn’t need me. I don’t want to be doing this in three years’ time”
We’re meeting up in the amazing Shoreditch Treehouse for a confidential afternoon of down-to-earth conversation and interactive presentations. You’ll hear from other agency leaders about attracting and retaining high performing talent, solving structure and operational difficulties, finding the right balance between growth and profitability, and growing your business through sales, marketing and reputation.
Who will you hear from? 🎤
How Can You Manage Unrealistic Paid Media Expectations?
In PPC, managing client expectations is a gruelling task. The glory days of paid media being cheap and easy are over, and agencies are struggling to keep up with the constant platform and legislation changes.
But clients don’t seem to be getting the gist.
“A lot of clients still have that old-school mentality of PPC being quick, cheap and easy – so when they compare performance to what it was 10 years ago, they can’t understand how it’s so different now,” says Sophie Logan, head of paid media at Victress Digital.
“Different features, platform changes, privacy guidelines – there’s so much that goes on behind the scenes. It’s now much harder, and typically more expensive, to achieve great results.”
Years ago, it was a fairly easy job for businesses to run their own PPC, but so much has changed since then. How can you make your clients understand that?
👉 Hear more from Sophie on how her agency is navigating the constant changes in the sector and managing unrealistic client expectations while staying ahead in the game.
Why Is Paid Media Recruitment So Hard Right Now?
It’s becoming increasingly difficult to hire successfully in the PPC and SEO space right now, and it can also be hard to figure out the right recruitment approach.
Repeat Digital has gone down both the junior route and the top-level talent route – but neither has been the perfect solution to the problem.
“It’s risky, as you can spend all that money on someone with experience, but it won’t guarantee they’ll have the right attitude. But it’s always better to compromise on skillset than attitude, as that isn’t something that’s going to change as easily,” says Rob Sherwood, commercial and operations director.
While Rob has come to realise there has to be some compromise, he’s also realised it’s impossible to find that ‘perfect’ person every single time.
“It’s about finding someone with the right attitude, and the right person to really help the agency develop – but it’s been a battle we’re having to meet in the middle.”
👉 Rob will be talking more about his recruitment obstacles, and shining a light on how tricky it is to find the best talent within the PPC and SEO space right now.
What Value Can Offshore Teams Offer PPC Agencies?
“You can create meaningful, interested teams who like the work that they do, without being in a fancy London office with graffiti on the wall,” says Vicki Jakes, managing director of The Social Ads Squad.
Vicki has over 15 years worth of experience working with offshore teams, and has figured out how agencies can use this model to their advantage.
“The opportunities you get when working with people overseas are really exciting and when I went out on my own a couple of years ago, it was just more cost-effective to look overseas.”
For Vicki, the relaxed approach is key: “Some of the decisions businesses have made about how they manage their remote workers, with key-logging software and cameras checking you out all day… it’s insane.”
👉 Vicki will be discussing how and why offshore teams are the backbone of her PPC agency, what opportunities you’re missing out on, and how you can approach process and training across different time zones.
Meet people who are interested in your story
PPC Leaders is an afternoon that will helps you get inspired, and meet other people you can learn from. We blend interactive talks and group discussion.
- We dot you around the venue so you can interact – and we mix up the groups so you meet different people.
- We poll you before the event to see what you want to talk about.
- We make sure all the talks are original and interesting. We facilitate questions and reflections throughout.
Q: What actually happens on the day?
We start the event at 1.30pm, so try to arrive by 1.15pm.
The afternoon’s format is pretty simple: you will spend some time hearing from guests with interesting stories that you can learn from, and you will also spend some time in small groups discussing your journey with like-minded agency leaders.
The event is hosted by an Agency Hackers facilitator who makes sure that everybody with something interesting to say gets heard. (We poll attendees before the event, so we know who to “pick on” on the day.)
We will serve tea, coffee and sweet-toothed things to keep you going, but please eat a sandwich before you arrive. The schedule doesn’t leave us time to serve lunch, unfortunately.
Q: Who will I hear from? Who are the speakers?
The people you’ll hear from are the actual guests at the event.
We decide who to spotlight based on the information we capture in the weeks before. (Look out for our emails!)
We will publish the line-up a few weeks before, but mostly we hope that you will trust us to select interesting folk from our audience. We find that the people who choose to attend our events are overwhelmingly on fascinating journeys that will resonate with you.
Also, the “talks” aren’t really linear presentations. They’re more like structured case studies, with lots of questions and reflections from the audience.
You could potentially call them “fireside chats”, but these are not rambling cosy conversations. They are planned and structured . We put a lot of work into researching our guests, out of respect for your time.
Q: Who can attend?
This event is only for people who own or run a PPC agency.
Why? Well, the event only works if everybody broadly shares the same pains and challenges, so for that reason we ask that only the person invited attends. Sorry!
Q: Who is Diginius?
We are proud to partner with Diginius for this event. Diginius has partnered with Microsoft to help agencies make the most out of the Microsoft Advertising Network. It’s an overlooked platform, and Diginius has a special program that can make it very worthwhile to move some of your spend across.
We will spend a little bit of time explaining how this works, but the overwhelming bulk of the event will be hearing from other PPC leaders.