You have just hired an ecommerce marketing manager, or you are about to post the job. Good. In our experience that hire usually means growth has stalled: sales are flat, ads are costing more for less, and a founder is still tweaking campaigns late at night. The risk is that your new hire inherits a messy setup, spends three months firefighting, and gets blamed for problems that were there before they arrived. Here is what we would want them to fix in the first 90 days, and in what order.
Why brands hire this role in the first place
Nobody hires an ecommerce marketing manager because everything is going brilliantly. The usual triggers are the same few. Sales volume has stopped climbing. Return on ad spend, the money each pound of advertising brings back, has gone soft. And the founder is still the person running the ads, which means nobody is running them properly.
A new hire can absolutely fix that. But not if they spend their first month launching new campaigns on top of a setup nobody trusts. The order matters more than the effort.
Days 1 to 30: trust the numbers, then check where the ads go
The first month is not for launching anything new. It is for finding out what is really happening.
Start with measurement. Are purchases being recorded once, not twice? Are the sale values right, with VAT and delivery treated the same way everywhere? Are people reading results on seven-day and 14-day windows rather than panicking over yesterday? If the tracking is shaky, every decision made on top of it is a guess. Our guide to fixing website conversion tracking issues covers the usual culprits.
Then check where every live ad actually lands. Click them. A surprising number of accounts send paid traffic straight to the homepage, which is a menu, not an offer. We wrote about why sending paid traffic to your homepage quietly kills results, and it is often the single quickest win a new hire can find.
By day 30 your new manager should be able to say, with confidence, which numbers are real and where every pound of ad spend is going.
Days 31 to 60: build pages for each stage of the buyer
Your customers are not one person. Someone who has never heard of you needs something different from someone comparing two of your products, and both need something different from a customer coming back for a second order. Most ecommerce sites have a homepage and product pages, and expect those to do every job.
The second month is about giving each stage its own page:
- A stranger who has just met you through an ad needs a page that explains the problem you solve and shows the range, usually a collection page grouped by use or need.
- Someone who already knows what they want needs a focused landing page for that offer, with the proof and delivery details up front.
- A product page only earns cold traffic when it is genuinely ready to sell: clear delivery, real reviews, sensible price framing, answers to the obvious questions.
- Returning customers need somewhere that recognises them, such as a page for repeat offers or a members area.
None of this needs a rebuild. Most of it is collection pages and a handful of landing pages, built properly. If the funnel idea is new to you, our introduction to marketing funnels is a good primer.
Days 61 to 90: split search and social by intent
Only now does it make sense to rework the campaigns themselves.
Search and paid social do different jobs. Search catches people who are already looking, so it should send them to the page that matches exactly what they typed. Paid social reaches people who were not looking yet, so it needs to start the conversation and send them to the stranger-stage pages built in month two. Judge each on its own terms. And keep searches for your own brand name separate from everything else, or your brand traffic will flatter the numbers and hide what is really working.
With clean tracking and the right pages in place, this is also the moment to start proper creative testing: a few clearly different angles, run long enough to read, with the losers switched off.
What good looks like by day 90
We are not going to give you a magic number to hit, because the right target depends on your margins, your prices and your market, and anyone quoting a universal benchmark is guessing. What we would expect to see instead:
- Numbers everyone trusts, read on rolling windows.
- Every live ad pointing at a page that matches its promise.
- A page for each stage of the buyer, not just a homepage and product pages.
- Search and social judged separately, with brand searches kept apart.
- A short list of tests run, with clear results, and the next tests lined up.
- The founder out of the ad account.
That last one matters more than it sounds. If your new hire still needs a founder to approve every change, the role cannot do its job.
How to set your new hire up to win
A few things only the business can give them. Access to everything on day one, including the ad accounts, analytics and the website. Honest margin figures, so targets are based on what you can actually afford to pay for a sale. A stable budget for the first 90 days, so changes can be read properly. And patience in the first two weeks after any big change, because the ad platforms need time to learn and the early numbers are noise.
Where we fit in
We are a small team in Maisemore working with a handful of brands at a time. Some of what we do is exactly this groundwork, alongside in-house teams rather than instead of them. It adds up: we have taken brands from £0 to about £150,000 a month on search, and brands on Meta that could barely crack £1,000 a month to somewhere between £20,000 and £30,000 a month.
If you have just hired, or are about to, and want a second pair of eyes on the plan, we are happy to have a free chat, and we will tell you honestly if your new hire can handle it alone. Or pop down to Maisemore, the kettle is on.
Written by the Onward team, Maisemore.
