Hire performance marketers
who show their math.
A dedicated specialist, or a pod, who treats your paid budget as something to be accountable for, not just spent. Vetted on real accounts before they ever see yours, working inside your tools and stand-ups, and scaling up or down monthly without a hiring cycle. You meet the specialist who'd actually run the budget before anything is signed.
Interview before signing · First working session inside 14 days · Scale monthly
Tell us about the role
Start Your Enquiry
Send a short brief; an itemised proposal follows within 48 hours.
Hiring a performance marketer through PixelCrayons gets you a vetted cross-channel specialist inside your team within 14 days. They run Google, Meta and LinkedIn as one accountable budget: attribution with assumptions stated, spend rebalanced monthly toward revenue, all in your tools, with a named project manager and a weekly review in Prism behind them. You interview the specialist who would hold the budget first, resize monthly, and avoid a full recruiting cycle and the risk it carries. 21 yrs of paid-media delivery stand behind the bench.
Judge the record,
not the adjectives.
Outcomes tied to real engagements, not averages.
Rates for brands and companies buying for themselves.
Cross-channel skills,
commercially wired.
A performance marketing specialist whose job is the budget itself: where it goes, what it returns, and proving both, not a channel operator who happens to know two platforms.
Channels
- Google Ads: Search, Shopping, Performance Max
- Meta Ads: prospecting, retargeting, creative testing
- LinkedIn Ads: B2B pipeline campaigns
- Programmatic display and video
- Remarketing architecture across channels
Measurement
- Cross-channel attribution modelling
- Server-side and consent-aware tracking
- GA4 and conversion API implementations
- ROAS and blended-CAC optimisation
- Incrementality thinking: knowing what the numbers can't say
The commercial layer
- Budget planning and monthly reallocation
- Creative test design and analysis
- Landing-page collaboration with CRO and design
- Client-ready reporting tied to revenue
- Forecasting without invented precision
What a performance marketer
does between the dashboards.
The day-to-day of paid media, what to probe in an interview, and what to settle before anyone touches your budget.
The week is mostly checking, not launching
New campaigns are a small part of the job. Most of the week goes on reading search term reports and pruning waste, checking that conversions still fire after a site release, comparing platform-reported results with your analytics and your CRM, and deciding which creative tests have run long enough to call. There is a budget pacing check, often more than once a week, and a written note on what changed and why. If your marketer launches something new every week but can't tell you what they switched off, the account is getting busier, not better.
What to ask in the interview
Ask them to open an account they have run (under NDA if needed) and explain one decision to cut spend. Strong candidates talk about what the platforms over-claim, how they reconcile platform numbers with actual orders or pipeline, and which results they would not trust. Ask how they would structure a test to find out whether branded search is adding sales or just collecting them. Ask what they need from your sales team to judge lead quality. Be wary of anyone whose answers are all about bidding tricks and say nothing about tracking or margin.
Get tracking and targets settled first
Before the first day, give admin access to every ad account, your analytics property and your tag manager and, if you sell to businesses, a read-only view of the CRM. Share your real margins, or at least the cost per acquisition you can afford, since a target without a margin behind it is a guess. Tell them which conversions actually matter: a purchase, a qualified lead, a booked demo. Flag anything that has broken recently, such as a checkout change or a consent banner update. The first fortnight usually goes on measurement, and that is time well spent.
How the hire goes wrong
The usual failure is judging the marketer on the platform's own numbers. Every ad platform credits itself generously, so a specialist rewarded on in-platform ROAS will chase it, often by leaning on retargeting and brand terms that would have converted anyway. The second failure is splitting channels between people who never compare notes, so Google and Meta both claim the same sale. The third is changing the target every month. Pick the business number you care about, agree how it will be measured, and hold it steady long enough for the data to mean something.
Where they hand off to others
Paid media sits between several teams. Creative produces the ads, so agree a regular cadence for new concepts and a way to report which ones worked. Your web or CRO team owns the landing pages, and a performance marketer who can't get a page changed will end up buying traffic into a leak. Developers own the tracking code and server-side events. Sales owns lead follow-up, which decides whether a cheap lead was actually cheap. Make sure the marketer has a named contact in each team and a standing slot to raise problems before they cost money.
When paid media is not the answer
If your site converts poorly, more traffic makes the problem more expensive, not smaller: fix the page or the offer first. If you can't yet measure a sale or a qualified lead, the first hire is someone to fix tracking, not someone to spend against it. If your product has little search demand and a long sales cycle, content and outbound may do more for the same effort. And if the budget is too small to produce clear results in a reasonable time, a good marketer will spend it carefully but struggle to learn anything from it. Say so early, and plan around it.
Brief to embedded,
in two weeks.
Brief & shortlist
You describe the accounts, the stack and the gap; we propose the specialist, or pod, whose actual delivery history fits it. No generic CVs.
Interview them
You meet the specialist directly, not an account manager relaying numbers on their behalf. Question their attribution and budget calls; if the fit isn't right, we propose someone else.
Inside your tools
Accounts connected, tracking reviewed, your stand-ups joined. Their first working session in your ad accounts happens within fourteen days of the NDA, not after a quarter of onboarding while spend runs on autopilot.
Scale either way
Add a second specialist when spend grows; step down when it doesn't. Paid media capacity resizes monthly, without anyone making a headcount decision.
Requests, approvals and the weekly review for this engagement live in your Prism workspace. Each decision is recorded against the outcome it expected. See how Prism runs an engagement →
Meet the actual people before anything is signed
The person,
plus the system.
Hiring a performance marketing manager gets you their skills. Hiring one through a delivery organisation puts those skills inside a structure that keeps your budget managed when life happens.
Vetted on real accounts, not puzzles
Every specialist on the bench has run live budgets before yours. Those budgets ran under our own delivery standards, reviewed each week against the same revenue reporting you'll receive. Vetting by delivery history beats vetting by interview performance: one shows what they've actually done with real spend, the other shows how well they talk about it.
A second specialist who already knows the account log
Your budget also has a named project manager, an escalation path, and a second specialist named up front. Briefed on your accounts from day one, following the change log and reporting notes the first one keeps. If the first specialist is on leave or moves on, the second steps in without a ramp-up, not someone opening Ads Manager cold. A lone freelancer can't offer that continuity, and a solo in-house hire has nobody to hand the budget to when they're out.
Team integration, not a portal
They work in your Slack and stand-ups, your ad accounts and project tools, and on your email domain if you prefer. Dedicated means making budget calls inside your planning rhythm, not tickets thrown over a wall into someone else's queue.
Quality governance you can audit
A weekly review in Prism, written up and tied to revenue, monthly budget-rebalance decisions on the record, and creative tests logged win, lose or inconclusive. If you ever question what a month of paid media work bought, the rebalance notes and test log answer before we do.
How you typically hire,
versus through us.
An in-house performance marketer still makes sense when paid media is a permanent, full-time job at the heart of your growth, and we'll say so when it is. This is for every other case.
| Hiring it yourself | Through PixelCrayons | |
|---|---|---|
| Time to a working specialist | A full recruiting cycle: sourcing, interviews, notice periods, onboarding | Inside 14 days of a signed NDA, interview included |
| Vetting | CV screening and interview performance: you find out the truth on the job | Delivery history on real accounts under our own standards, reviewed weekly |
| Management overhead | Yours entirely: budget priorities, creative review, tracking audits, coverage | A named PM handles the admin; you set the revenue target, not the reporting cadence |
| Scaling | A new hiring cycle each direction: months to find a cross-channel specialist, severance to lose one | Resize monthly: add a specialist or step down with a conversation |
| Risk when it doesn't work | A mis-hire costs velocity until it's caught, then a difficult exit | Propose-again is built in; the next specialist inherits the attribution model, not a cold account |
Paid media that answered to one roadmap.
When a D2C fragrance retailer rebuilt its store and its search presence, the paid programme ran through the same team: one budget, tracking verified before spend scaled, and the channel mix rebalanced monthly against attribution. The case study itself carries the full numbers and the timeline behind that spend.
Read the case study →Frequently
asked.
A written proposal with roles, rates and availability arrives within 48 hours of the brief and the shortlist follows within days; you interview the specialist the same week (a live account they've run is available to walk through under NDA on request), and the first working session inside your tools happens within 14 days of a signed NDA. If your accounts have tracking problems (most do), expect the first fortnight to prioritise measurement before spend moves.
NDA first, then account and tracking access. Next is a review of your current setup, written up so you see what they found, and agreement on the first month's priorities before anything changes. They're in your stand-ups from week one, so onboarding runs through your planning and approvals instead of beside them.
Weekly, written, tied to revenue: what ran, what it returned by channel, what's being tested, and what moves next. Platform numbers sit beside analytics numbers, with differences explained. Monthly, the budget-rebalance decision is documented with its reasoning. Agencies placing a performance marketer on a client's accounts get these reports in their own templates.
One is the normal starting point: a single cross-channel paid media specialist covers most budgets comfortably. A second pair of hands (a creative-testing specialist, an analytics engineer) joins when spend or scope genuinely justifies it, and the monthly resize works in both directions. We'd rather start with one specialist on your budget than sell you a pod your spend doesn't justify yet.
Tell us early. Proposing a different paid media specialist is part of how this works, not a concession you have to negotiate. The replacement inherits the documentation the first specialist kept (setup notes, test logs, decisions), so a switch costs days, not a restart. And if your accounts turn out to need a project rather than a person managing spend, we'll route you there instead. The proposal names the second paid media specialist who would cover your accounts and states whether that cover is in the monthly rate.
Interview the person,
not the pitch deck.
Brief us on the accounts and the gap, get a written proposal within 48 hours and a shortlist within days, and interview the specialist who'd actually run the budget. If what you really need turns out to be a project rather than a person, we'll say so on the first call.
Proposal in 48 hours · Interview before signing · Scale monthly
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