ZATO - Key Persons
Chris is tasked with growing and developing the Google Ads for Small Budget program at ZATO. He's passionate about marketing, with 10+ years of sales and management experience and has succeeded in those fields by streamlining operations and making his team and procedures as efficient and productive as possible.
While employed at a local non-profit organization, Chris stumbled across PPC and was instantly enthralled by the possibilities of the digital marketing world. His extensive background and relentless optimism made him a great fit to build ZATO's Small Budget program.
Outside of work, Chris spends his time with his wife, daughter, and their 2 dogs. He has called Billings home since 1988 and he enjoys seeing and playing concerts (that's right... he's in more than one band), spending time with friends, and hiking around the Montana mountains.
Job Titles:
- Senior Paid Search Strategist
Diana moved to the United States in 2004 from Russia, while pursuing a career in sales. In 2013, she became a contractor representing Google to agencies where she worked closely with a variety of companies and agencies, helping them achieve their goals, providing strategic advice, assisting with troubleshooting, and educating them about the Google Ads platform.
Diana has an insatiable curiosity regarding Google Ads algorithms, and does all she can to figure out "why" things are the way they are in her client accounts, not simply "what" is happening.
Diana lives in Chandler, Arizona with her husband, two kids, two dogs, and a cat. She loves nature and enjoys hiking, gardening, biking with her dogs, and horseback riding.
When Elise isn't chasing after six children or running her photography business, she can be found handling the business side of things around the office for ZATO.
Job Titles:
- Paid Search Specialist
- PPC Program Director
Eric is a ZATO Paid Search Specialist. A marketer at heart, he's passionate about developing big picture marketing ideas but also loves getting his hands dirty while sifting through click and conversion data, testing ad copy and digging into analytics to find hidden insights.
Eric's career in digital marketing has spanned over a decade and he has been working specifically in PPC since 2009. Eric received a bachelor's in Business Marketing from Montana State University and has since spent time in-house as the digital marketing manager at an award-winning international adventure travel company and most recently was the digital marketing director at a local web design and marketing agency. He has a broad range of industry experience including extensive time spent doing SEO, Social Media Marketing and Email Marketing. He is certified in Google AdWords and Google Analytics.
Eric spends most of his time outside of work with his wife and 3 kids. They have called Billings home since 2006 and enjoy spending time with friends, family and neighbors.
Job Titles:
- Owner
- Owner & Chief Pondering Officer
Kirk is the owner of ZATO, his Paid Search & Social PPC micro-agency of experts, and has been working in Digital Marketing since 2009. His personal motto (perhaps unhealthily so), is "let's overthink this some more." He even wrote a book recently on philosophical PPC musings that you can check out here: Ponderings of a PPC Professional.
He has been named one of the Top 25 Most Influential PPCers in the world by PPC Hero 6 years in a row (2016-2021), has written articles for many industry publications (including Shopify, Moz, PPC Hero, Search Engine Land, and Microsoft), and is a frequent guest on digital marketing podcasts and webinars.
Kirk currently resides in Billings, MT with his wife, six children, books, Trek Bikes, Taylor guitar, and little sleep.
Kirk is an avid "discusser of marketing things" on Twitter, as well as an avid conference speaker, having traveled around the world to talk about Paid Search (especially Shopping Ads). Kirk has booked speaking engagements in London, Dublin, Sydney, Milan, NYC, Dallas, OKC, Milwaukee, and more and has been recognized through reviews as one of the Top 10 conference presentations on more than one occasion.
Job Titles:
- Senior Paid Search Strategist
Sarah started her career in digital marketing by working as a contractor at Google.
Over the last 6 years, she has worked with thousands of Google Ads accounts, gathering specific insight into industry benchmarks, trends and data. Because of her time representing Google, she excels at implementing Google Ads best practices in ZATO clients to maximize machine learning applied intelligently through a human framework.
Sarah is also passionate about educating others regarding Paid Search products, and actually taught the existing ZATO team about a specific product on her first day ever working at ZATO!
Sarah lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan with her husband, two sons and dog. She enjoys spending time with her family, beautifying her house, and visiting new places.