Technical abilities

• Campaign structure and technical execution [8.5/10]: Shruti's structural thinking is one of her clearer strengths. She laid out a clean, well-reasoned campaign architecture across branded, non-branded, competitor, and accessories search campaigns, keeping each silo genuinely separate and tightly themed at ad group level. Her reasoning for PMAX Feed Only over standard shopping was grounded in practical experience rather than recited best practice. She explained that feed-only suits accounts with existing historical data, and that a well-set tROAS target would naturally orient the algorithm toward retargeting behaviour, which made sense in the context of this specific brief. Her named campaign nomenclature slide was a small but useful detail, reflecting someone who has built account structures from scratch and understands why clean naming conventions matter across multi-campaign accounts. Where the thinking felt slightly less sharp was in explaining the simultaneous feed-only and full-build PMAX setup. She got there eventually, but it took a few beats to organise the answer verbally, and a tighter explanation upfront would have landed better.

• Bidding strategy and budget management [9/10]: We feel this is one of the more practically mature areas of Shruti's thinking. Her staged approach to bidding, involving starting on max conversion value, running a campaign for at least 60 days, mapping ROAS trends across 7-day and 14-day windows, and then setting tROAS slightly below the observed average to keep spend stable, reflecting real account management experience. She also articulated well why she'd avoid applying tROAS too early on demand gen, drawing a comparison with Meta's ASC behaviour and underspend patterns when a cap is introduced before the algorithm has enough data. Her budget allocation logic across channels was reasonable and showed she had thought through the role of each campaign type, particularly her reasoning behind keeping Microsoft Bing at 5% and demand gen max clicks at 10%. Her pacing and overspend management approach, using Funnel for automated monitoring alongside manual daily checks, felt like something she has genuinely relied on in live accounts.

• Full-funnel thinking and audience strategy [8/10]: Shruti demonstrated a reasonably clear view of how campaigns should work together across the funnel, and we think this is where her agency background has genuinely served her. Her argument for running demand gen max clicks as a top-funnel audience-building mechanism, feeding those signals into PMAX, was well connected and showed she thinks about campaign health over a 3 to 6 month horizon rather than purely on monthly ROAS. She picked up on the 60% female buyer insight early and built it through multiple layers of the strategy, including a dedicated gifting ad group in search, bundle SKUs in the feed, supplemental feed entries around gifting occasions, and separate emotional versus functional messaging in demand gen creatives. Her PMAX full build audience signal stack, covering in-market audiences, GA4 high-intent behavioural signals such as add-to-cart and time-on-site, and female shopper segments, was well-considered for the account context given the constrained budget.

• Optimisation and Performance Management [8.5/10]: On the day-to-day operations side, Shruti comes across as someone who treats account hygiene as a non-negotiable. She talked through her search term review cadence with real specificity, favouring daily monitoring with negation applied every three to four days to avoid over-optimising, and she explained the reasoning clearly. Her PMAX feed hygiene approach, involving identifying high-impression but low-click SKUs and improving titles and images before scaling spend, was practical and budget-conscious. She was also candid about demand gen's tendency to stop mid-day or overspend unpredictably, and she flagged proactively that the first seven days would need hourly spend monitoring. Her tracking setup covered primary and secondary conversion events, UTM standardisation, data-driven attribution as default, and funnel-stage KPI mapping across awareness, consideration, and conversion. For the most part, this felt operational and reliable rather than theoretical.

Areas of growth