Review Request: PPC Advertising Strategist (Exceptional Talent)

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Hi Tech Nation Community!

I’m preparing to apply for the Global Talent Visa under the Exceptional Talent route and would greatly appreciate your feedback on my application strength.

Background

I’m a Performance Marketing Strategist and Product Builder with extensive experience in digital marketing, PPC management, and product development. I’ve worked at a legaltech and financial tech company where I’ve built and scaled multiple successful campaigns and products, both of these are niched agencies. I am hoping i fall under this user definitions by tech nation as both agencies were product focused and in specific industries “Work at specific agencies may be considered if the agencies are extremely focused on product innovation in a specific industry and are well-recognised for their contributions to that industry.”

Recommendation Letters

  • CEO of two product-led companies
  • CTO of a product-led company
  • VP of a product-led company
    (All companies are digitally-focused)

Mandatory Criteria 1: Innovation & Recognized Expertise

Evidence 1: PPC Department Buildout and Internalization

  • Transitioned outsourced marketing operations in-house
  • Imanaged $4.96M in ad spend and generated 102,297 qualified leads for one of the products
  • Saved $837,500 in agency fees
  • Delivered 504,000 clicks and 7.32M impressions
  • Since April 2023, oversaw $20.6M in ad spend with 4.18M clicks and 243M impressions

Evidence 2: Strategic Growth of Product

  • Full ownership of strategy, budget, and performance marketing
  • Generated 27,164 conversions with $958K spend (Jan-Apr 2025)
  • Achieved 14.36% conversion rate (nearly 3x industry average)
  • Top-performing regional campaign: 23,659 leads at $33.54 per lead

Evidence 3: Mass Tort Campaign Execution for Revenue Growth

  • End-to-end campaigns for nationwide lawsuits
  • Earned performance bonuses for specific legal campaigns ($2,000 and $5,000)
  • Challenging legal campaign: 250K+ clicks, 800K+ impressions, 669+ conversions with CPCs between $0.44-$0.99

Mandatory Criteria 2: High Earnings

  • Monthly earnings: $6,000-$7,000 USD (~₦9-10.5M Nigerian Naira)
  • 5-10x above typical Nigerian digital marketing salaries (₦350K-₦684K)
  • Performance bonuses including $3,500 year-end bonus (60% of monthly salary)

Qualifications: to show earnings impact

  • Elected Member of Chartered Institute of Marketing, UK (MCIM)
  • Member of American Marketing Association (AMA)
  • MBA in Marketing
  • MBA in Business and Technology
  • Postgraduate Degree in Professional Marketing (company-sponsored)

Mandatory Criteria 3: Peer Reviewed Publication - on digital advertising psychology

  • Published in Journal of Advertising and Public Relations
  • Almost 800 downloads

Optional Criteria 1: Innovation

Evidence 1: Healthcare Platform Development - building this myself - the new update says show innovation for OC1 and not necessarily impact

  • Built digital health platform connecting patients with doctors/nurses
  • Full development lifecycle from database schema to UI
  • Tech stack: MongoDB, Firebase, TypeScript/Next.js, TailwindCSS
  • 100+ users organically without paid campaigns

Evidence 2: Role-Specific Dashboard System - same product

  • Created tailored interfaces for patients vs providers
  • Streamlined healthcare access and workflows
  • Solved core problems: gatekeeping, provider overload, care fragmentation

Optional Criteria 3: Significant Contribution

Evidence 1: Lead Generation Product Development

  • Created pay-per-lead offering for financial advisors
  • Product adopted by 350+ advisors generating $175K+ monthly recurring revenue
  • Developed customer personas, lead flow, qualification logic, and tracking systems

Evidence 2: Lifecycle Advertising Engine - same product and company

  • Built end-to-end campaign lifecycle framework
  • Designed segmentation and targeting strategies
  • Created optimization and reporting frameworks

Would greatly appreciate your thoughts on my likelihood of success and any suggestions to strengthen my application further!

@Akash_Joshi @Francisca_Chiedu @pahuja @May @alexnk

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Hi @Isabella

OC1: what is innovative in these evidences and what is the supporting evidence towards your specific contribution?

OC3: can’t find impact in the second evidence. What is the backing objective evidence in both to validate your claims?

MC: need to connect the evidences to how do they impact the sector and position you as a leader in the industry. What is the objective evidence to validate your claims?

1 Like
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Thank you for reviewing my application and providing feedback. I’d like to address your questions about my evidence:

Optional Criteria 1 (Innovation)

For JourneyDoctors, I built a healthcare platform that innovates by solving three core problems in healthcare access:

  1. My role-based dashboard system eliminates gatekeeping by giving patients direct access to providers’ availability, removing the traditional administrative bottlenecks.
  2. I designed a unified database model with multi-role logic instead of duplicating models - this architectural decision makes the platform more scalable and efficient.
  3. The booking logic reflects real-life conditions (providers set their own schedule, patients can’t double-book) while being optimized for privacy and speed.

What makes this particularly innovative is that I’m not a software engineer by training - I taught myself how to code to build this platform from scratch. Rather than spending over $100,000 to hire developers, I built it myself using a lean approach. This is evidenced in the GitHub repository screenshots I provided showing my commit history across multiple repositories (frontend, API, and waitlist), the video evidence of my development environment and also video evidence of the product itself, the wireframes I designed showing the role-specific UI, and the platform’s growth to 100+ users organically without paid campaigns.

Optional Criteria 3 (Significant Contribution)

For the Booked product, I no longer work at the company so my evidence is somewhat limited, but the screenshot from my former Chief Content Officer’s reference letter “i also attached the reference as a Gdrive link” directly attributes the creation of this product to me. The letter specifically states I led “the creation of our ‘Booked’ pay-per-lead product by mapping the customer journey, developing customer profiles, and establishing quality checks.”

The LucidChart diagrams I’ve included show my frameworks for the product architecture and lead qualification engine that I personally designed. These diagrams demonstrate my strategic thinking in developing a product that generated $175,000+ in monthly recurring revenue and was adopted by 350+ financial advisors.

Regarding the Lifecycle Advertising Engine, I understand more metrics would strengthen this evidence. Unfortunately, as I no longer work there, I don’t have access to additional performance data. The architecture diagram I provided shows my strategic approach to designing the full-funnel growth engine, including awareness, evaluation, conversion, and post-sale journey stages. This system powered the product’s commercial success, but I acknowledge the limitations in quantifying the direct impact without additional metrics.

Mandatory Criteria (Sector Impact and Leadership)

My evidence demonstrates sector impact through benchmarking against industry standards:

For the PPC Department Buildout, I explicitly note that my work in legal PPC was “a benchmark few in my field can claim” due to the exceptional efficiency achieved in “one of the most expensive and competitive verticals, with high CPCs, intense market saturation, and long sales cycles.” The Google Ads account screenshots I provided show the actual performance metrics I achieved, with visual evidence of the 504,000 clicks, 7.32 million impressions, and $6.65 average CPC from January to April 2025 alone.

For the Product, I achieved a 14.36% conversion rate, which I note is “nearly 3x the industry average for legal verticals.” This is an objective comparison showing my leadership in performance. The screenshots from the Google Ads account visually confirm these achievements with 27,164 total conversions and the $35.27 average cost per conversion.

For Mass Tort Campaigns, I demonstrated the ability to navigate extremely challenging targeting requirements like the Camp Lejeune water contamination campaign, which required identifying individuals based on “where they lived decades ago” from 1953-1987, a unique challenge in digital advertising that I successfully overcame. The campaign screenshots I included verify the performance metrics of 250,000+ clicks, 800,000+ impressions, and the competitive CPCs between $0.44 and $0.99. I also added evidences of bonuses for these campaigns, one was $5k and the other $2k for exceptional performance.

While I don’t have testimonials or awards from legal clients (as my work was for a company, not individual law firms), the performance metrics themselves demonstrate leadership in the digital marketing space, particularly for legal verticals where I consistently outperformed industry benchmarks.

I hope this addresses your questions about my evidence. I’d be happy to elaborate further if needed.

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Hi @pahuja kindly review my response when you’ve got a bit of time, thanks.

@Francisca_Chiedu @May @hilory @Akash_Joshi @alexnk i’d greatly appreciate your input, thanks.

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I believe you have a solid foundation with good evidence across multiple criteria. Your recommendation letters from C-suite and VP-level professionals at product-led companies provide strong backing, and your evidence shows both technical innovation and business impact. However, I would suggest reorganizing your evidence to avoid overlap between criteria, as each piece of evidence can only be used once in your application.

For your Optional Criteria 1 (Innovation), I recommend focusin on the technical innovation aspects of your healthcare platform along with user metrics. Consider using a different project for your second evidence if possible. For Optional Criteria 3, you might want to include more quantifiable impact beyond revenue, such as efficiency improvements or market expansion.

Your personal statement (which I don’t see in detail here) should tell a compelling story about why you want to come to the UK specifically and how you’ll benefit the UK tech ecosystem. Make sure to convert any bullet points into narrative paragraphs and avoid an AI-generated feel by personalizing your journey and motivations. Overall, with some refinement in how you present your evidence and making sure each piece is used only once, I believe you have a promising application.

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Thank you very much for your thoughtful feedback. I genuinely appreciate you taking the time to review my application materials.

I wanted to clarify that I have actually already submitted my application - unfortunately, I only discovered afterward that the Google Drive links I included won’t be viewed by the assessors. This is certainly a lesson learned for anyone else preparing their application.

Regarding the concern about using the same project across different criteria, I’d like to explain that for JourneyDoctors, I used this as evidence for Optional Criteria 1 (Innovation) only. Within this criteria, I submitted two separate pieces of evidence:

  1. The first focused on the technical product development aspects - highlighting how I, without formal engineering background, taught myself to code and built the entire platform from scratch (frontend, API, database) rather than spending $100k+ on developers.
  2. The second focused on the role-specific dashboard system design that addresses core healthcare problems through innovative user experience.

These are distinct aspects of innovation within the same platform, but importantly, I only applied them to Optional Criteria 1, not across multiple criteria.

For Optional Criteria 3 (Significant Contribution), I used completely different evidence related to the the product development and the Lifecycle Advertising Engine from my previous employment at a financial services marketing company.

For Mandatory Criteria, I focused on my work with PPC campaigns, product growth, and mass tort campaign execution, all with supporting screenshots from Google Ads accounts showing the actual performance metrics achieved.

I completely agree about the importance of the personal statement telling a compelling story about UK connection and benefit to the ecosystem. I’ve crafted my statement to highlight specific initiatives I hope to contribute to, my plans for knowledge sharing, and my vision for improving digital access using UK-based resources and partnerships.

Thank you again for your feedback - it’s extremely valuable as I await the assessment result, and will certainly help others who are preparing their applications.