What does a fractional Head of UA do?

The role, and the titles next to it

There is no official job taxonomy for this work. Government wage data files it under marketing managers, and live job specifications give the title very different remits. So the table sets out how I use the words, with the one distinction that matters in the last column.

What the work covers now

Buying traffic and reading CPI stopped being the job in 2021. The platforms optimize against the signals you send them, and those signals depend on your app, your backend and your store page. A fractional UA lead has to own all of it, or the parts drift apart.

The channels. Meta, Google App Campaigns, Apple Search Ads, TikTok and the ad networks, run by me, not briefed to someone else. Most budgets start on Meta because creative testing moves fastest there; the channel comparison with real D28 ROAS shows why, and the order I test channels in is written out.

The measurement. On iOS, Apple's AdAttributionKit and SKAdNetwork return three postback windows: days 0 to 2 with a fine value from 0 to 63 or a coarse low, medium or high, then days 3 to 7 and days 8 to 35 with coarse values only. Your real LTV is not known inside those windows, so someone has to decide which early events stand in for it. That decision is the job. On Android, Google retired most of Privacy Sandbox in October 2025, so any measurement plan written around it needs rewriting.

The signal layer. Meta's Conversions API for app events, Google's app conversion setup and your MMP all need access outside the ads console. Change a subscription event without updating the conversion schema and the bidding model reads the signal drop as a performance drop. On an account I take over this is where the first weeks go, because scaling on broken data only scales the problem.

The creative. Creative supply is the binding constraint in most accounts I open, not media buying. The job is the testing loop: hypotheses, test design, reading spend as the performance signal, killing losers before they eat budget. The first stage of the method is written out step by step. Producing every asset is a different job, and my network does that when it is in scope.

The reporting. Revenue, ROAS and payback against the targets we set, weekly, in a format you can forward to your CFO or board without translating it first. One blended number hides a lot, which is why I read accounts country by country.

Is a fractional Head of UA right for you? Four questions

There is no study proving a spend level, company stage or team size at which fractional beats a full time hire or an agency. Research does show that temporary senior operators are an established way to fill a management gap, and that senior hiring takes time. SHRM's 2025 benchmark puts median time to fill at roughly a month and a half from requisition to accepted offer, before notice periods. The criteria below are mine, not industry rules.

I check the first question before the others, and each answer points to the next question or to the format that fits better.

The agency alternative, and the hire you are still searching for

A Head of UA on payroll at this altitude is expensive and hard to find, and most apps do not need one five days a week. An agency puts an account manager between you and the people doing the work. Fractional removes the handoff between the person who reads the data and the person who acts on it, and gives you a senior operator without a full time hire. The three options are set side by side here, and who to hire at which stage has its own page.

I ran more than $1M a month in UA budget at Wooga, and client accounts have scaled past $200K a month to monthly revenue in the seven figures. The rest of the background is here.

The order is audit, then operate. The first thing I do on any account is read it and tell you what is broken and in what order to fix it. That read is the growth audit, and it can be booked on its own, at any spend level, before anyone talks about a retainer.

One senior person accountable for paid UA, next to your team and your agency

Hiring me does not mean firing your agency. Google Ads and Meta both support manager and role based access to the same accounts, so more than one party can operate them. At Deutsche Telekom I built the internal creative testing process and trained the team to run UA on their own. What changes is who owns which decision.

Where fractional leadership goes wrong

The failure modes are better documented than the benefits. Research on interim managers finds that attaining authority is the distinctive challenge of the role, and that the ending and the handover belong inside the assignment. The terms below exist because of that.

What I need to start

Access to the ad accounts and the MMP, your unit economics, and an engineering contact. I set the CPA ceiling from your economics before I spend anything, and I would rather run fewer campaigns with more signal than a structure nobody can read.

The growth audit comes first, delivered within the window we agree on the intro call. If you only want the read, that is a fine place to stop.

If we carry on, the audit is the first of four steps.

Questions people ask