Technical abilities

• PPC technical knowledge [8/10]: Priya comes across as someone who has spent real time on both Google and Meta platforms, and the way she talks about them reflects genuine hands-on experience. On Meta, she's noticeably more at ease. She spoke with confidence about Advantage Plus, Meta's Andromeda update and how creatives have become a core targeting mechanism, and how to build progressively warmer audiences across each campaign phase. Her thinking on audience exclusions was practical and layered, using location-based exclusions and pixel-based lists to manage overlap between campaign stages. On Google, she walked through brand versus service campaign separation, bid strategy progression from maximize clicks to maximize conversions, the 30-conversion threshold for switching, and how to prevent PMAX from cannibalising brand terms. She also brought up Google Scripts for automated keyword negation, a genuine operational detail you don't always hear at this level.

• Campaign strategy and full-funnel thinking [8/10]: This is where Priya is probably most natural, and we think it's her strongest area overall. The Yacht Week campaign she built had a clear internal logic running through it – she started with T-30 for awareness, built through traffic into waitlist conversions, and then into final bookings, with a deliberate back-loading of budget so 50% fires in the final 15 days when audiences are warmest and intent is at its peak. She connected the audience outputs of each phase to the inputs of the next, so the whole thing reads as a progression. Her Meta structure, combining country-segmented ad groups with Advantage Plus and narrowing the audience as you move down the funnel, reflected a solid understanding of how to balance reach with precision across a multi-week campaign. We also appreciated that she flagged the email flow running in parallel and thought through how paid ads should complement and amplify that channel.

• Data interpretation and analytical thinking [8.5/10]: Priya is comfortable with data and applies it in a practical, grounded way. The clearest window into how Priya thinks analytically came when we posed the high CTR, high CPM, strong impressions, low conversions scenario. She worked through it in a logical sequence, starting with landing page friction, moving to search term quality, and arriving at tracking as a third potential culprit, before proposing concrete fixes including a dedicated booking LP with a stripped-back conversion flow and pixel-based audience checkpoints at each drop-off stage. We found her funnel-stage metric framework genuinely considered – she articulated specific reasons for each metric, explaining why it mattered given the campaign objective at that point in the funnel. For TOFU she landed on click-to-visit ratio as her key engagement gauge, a non-obvious choice for someone thinking carefully about efficiency across the full journey. For BOFU she framed success around cost per yacht as the ultimate commercial metric, tying campaign performance directly back to the business outcome. Her bid strategy logic was similarly specific, setting a 30-conversion-per-month threshold before switching from maximize clicks to maximize conversions, with a weekly proxy of 10-15 conversions if the monthly view wasn't available.

• Adaptability and problem-solving under pressure [8.5/10]: Priya handles pressure in a composed and grounded way. When we kept pushing on the 90/10 Meta/Google budget split, a bold call on its face, Priya defended her reasoning clearly, acknowledged the split was "extraordinary," and responded to the pushback by laying out what a more balanced Google structure would look like with additional budget. She held her position under scrutiny and offered a constructive alternative rather than walking it back. She asked for clarification when she genuinely didn't follow a question. When pushed on the PMAX and brand search simultaneity question, she worked through cannibalisation risk, negative lists, placement exclusions, and creative performance monitoring in a coherent sequence. We believe she'd hold up well in a client-facing environment where standing by a recommendation under scrutiny and recalibrating thoughtfully are part of the day-to-day.

Areas of growth