How To Build Your In-House
Amazon Advertising Team

Build, hire, and manage a world-class Amazon PPC department
without being an Amazon Ads expert yourself.

Built on $200M+ in Amazon ad spend managed, 100+ PPC hires, and
work with some of the Top 100 Amazon brands.

We built it for:

1) $1M+/year Amazon brand owners who want to build an Amazon PPC department in-house.

2) 7-9 figure brand owners with a PPC team in-house who want to see what world-class looks like.

I'm Stefano Pretto, founder of TrainAdz.

We've been doing Amazon Advertising for the past 6 years.

I scaled an Amazon agency to the Inc. 5000 2X in a row, helped 65 brands build in-house PPC teams, and am now working with a team of 40+, helping some of the biggest brands on Amazon.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stefano-pretto/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Trainadz

Why building a PPC team in-house is hard…
but worth it!

When you manage PPC in house, a lot can go wrong…

You might hire the wrong person, or they don't deliver and you don't know why.
Or you can't hold them accountable and train them.

Managing PPC in house is hard, but everything gets easier when you master these 2 skills:
Hiring and managing (specifically for your Amazon PPC team)

Today, you sit in one of these 4 quadrants.


Top right is the goal, and this guide gives you the 80/20 to help you get there.

Let's get started with the hiring side first.

Hiring Process & Scorecard

How can you identify talent?
The Triangle of Talents

All team members are problem solvers.

Problem solving has 2 parts:

  • Identify the right problem to solve
  • Solve it (yourself, or coordinating others)

We aim for Level 3 or above for our PPC role

What do you want from a PPC manager?

  1. Genuine passion for data (and Amazon Advertising)
  1. Knowledge of AI tools and how to apply them
  1. “Everything is possible” attitude.
  1. Self-directed: identifies problems and acts on them
  1. Hands-on operator, not a "manager of managers"
  1. Strong ownership mentality - this person treats the account as if it were their own
  1. Honest, transparent, proactive communication
  1. Fluent English communication
  1. High integrity and reliability

All the above is great…

But how do you assess that during the interview process? With a 5-step hiring process

Amazon PPC Hiring Process

1

Define Scope

2

Cultural Fit

3

Live Audit

4

Who Interview

5

References

Step 0: Make a copy of the Scorecard File

» COPY THIS FILE — Open it in a New Tab «

IMPORTANT: Each step has a dedicated tab in the scorecard

The 5-Step Hiring Process

IMPORTANT: For each step, you'll find a dedicated tab in the Google Sheet above with specific questions and best practices.

Results

This 7-figure brand owner let his “okay” PPC manager go.

He ran this exact hiring process, found an A+ player, and 8 months later he hit his $1M/month goal.

3) Team structure, Responsibilities, and Compensation

Team Structure

The structure varies depending on the number of marketplaces, the size of the catalog, but…

This is the structure we see most of the time based on Amazon PPC Spend:

Under $20k/month in PPC Spend: No dedicated PPC owner

View more

$20k to $100k/month in PPC Spend : Dedicated Ownership

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$100k+/month in PPC Spend : Dedicated PPC Manager

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$250k+/month in PPC Spend : Build a PPC Team

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$1M+/month in PPC Spend: Build a PPC department

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AI adoption at every Stage

It's not the goal of this presentation to go deep into this topic, but worth mentioning…

No matter the stage of your PPC team building journey, having AI as part of your day-to-day advertising operation is a must-have.

Give them the right tools (Claude/ChatGPT), information to follow, and make sure they stay up to date with anything that could benefit your brand (advanced data analysis, AI video creations, MCP connectors, etc.)

For our company, PPC managers increased their capacity by more than 40% after training them.
It's a game changer.

Amazon PPC Manager Commission Structure

Keep it simple.

Pay them a flat fee, not hourly - you want to reward output, not hours.

Additional incentives could be a yearly or semiannual bonus tied to revenue or profit goals (or both).

Pay them 10-20% above their compensation goal if you want to secure the candidate.

Tip: During the interview process, get their current or previous compensation.

Amazon PPC Manager Compensation

Hiring From Asia

Salary: $800 to $2,500 for a full-time role. Cheapest, but harder to find talent and culture fit. Best place to source candidates: http://onlinejobs.ph/

Hiring From Europe & South America:

$1.7 to $5.5K for a full-time position. Where we usually hire the most. Good education, Western work culture, lower cost than the US. A recruiting agency that specializes in European candidates: https://www.scale-jet.com/ Upwork - look for talent with no star rating who are new to the platform.These people are more likely to join full time since they have fewer clients (tip from Josh Hadley, one of our clients)

Hiring from North America

Compensation: $7K+ to $15K Native speakers, easy fit, but hard to justify the salary for PPC alone. We don't have much experience in hiring in North America (we hired only 2 people there) and the best way we found talents was through LinkedIn Outreach.

For PPC Assistants, hiring from Asia is the best option, and compensation vary from $300 to $1,200 a month.
You can also leverage internal team members/VAs with spare capacity to help the PPC manager more.

For the Head of Amazon Ads role, compensation starts at $7,000 per month.

Results

This $30M+/year brand owner was managing most things himself, he had no time, and revenue was decreasing YoY.

We helped him build and train his Amazon team.

  • Amazon Brand Manager from the Philippines - $2,500 per month
  • Amazon PPC Manager from Serbia - $1,800 per month

Now revenue is flat, so at least it's no longer decreasing.

At an MDS event, Nathan (CEO) told me:
"The team changed my life! I now have more time to work on the business”

4) Managing your PPC manager to get
the best results

The best people are self-managed.

If you follow the hiring process above and hire the best people, they'll be able to self-manage.

However, you still want a management system that allows you to get the most out of this talent & be on top of your advertising efforts.

Tip: If you need to micromanage them, you hired wrong.

The 80/20 Rule of Management

We ran a remote company for the past 6 years with 40+ people and we've seen how other successful brand owners manage their team.

These are the 3 things that work best for an effective PPC team:

  • Weekly performance meetings
  • Daily huddle
  • End of week recap

Weekly Performance Meeting (45 Minutes)

Set it on Tuesday morning so your Amazon team can analyze the previous week's data.

Business owners like to change the agenda below based on their company's projects, but a weekly meeting to go over performance is a must-have for all of them.

The best tools to track your Amazon performance are Sellerboard and MyRealProfit

Set up Asana, ClickUp or any project management tool (even a Google Sheet) to track the projects the Amazon team is working on so you can quickly see what their priorities are and what they're working on.

You can create and modify the same Google Calendar event above by clicking here

Daily Huddles (15 Minutes)

Set up daily huddles at the beginning of the day to review yesterday's actions, priorities for today, and any roadblocks.

Very useful during the onboarding (first 30 days) so you can give as much information as needed to the new PPC manager and give them direction and constant feedback.

Weekly Recap

An email or Slack message from your PPC manager to you directly where they explain if the plan discussed on Tuesday has been followed and anything else they're still working on.

Ideally, you want both a written report and video for you to review and give them feedback on their actions, provide help and keep them accountable.

Results

This 8-figure brand owner had a great PPC manager, but he was not properly managing him, with no training and no accountability.

After implementing the system above, they consistently reached $2M+/month while TACoS dropped from 16.7% to 15.5%.
That is about $25K a month in ad spend saved by managing the PPC manager better.

Want More Help?

If you're a brand owner doing at least $1M+/year and you want to see how we can help, book a call below