Growth Specialist, Paid Search

About the role

You will own a number of brands within SmartSign's paid search program end to end, hands on keyboard, in the accounts every day. This is an in-house seat at a pure-play ecommerce business: no agency layer, no account manager between you and the bid. You will run Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising against a large, long-tail product catalog, and you will make the calls yourself on structure, budgets, bidding, feed and creative.

We are hiring an operator, not a manager of operators. If the last three years were spent writing briefs and reviewing an agency's QBRs, this is not the right seat.

Hybrid — [X] days per week in the [City] office. Reports to [Title].

Team: [Team name] · Level: Individual contributor · Budget owned: [$X]M annual paid search spend

What you'll own

Paid search is the whole job. You own the channel's revenue, spend and efficiency targets.

• Recommend optimizations for accounts. Campaign and ad group architecture across Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising, including Search, Shopping, Performance Max and remarketing, built for a catalog with tens of thousands of SKUs and heavy long-tail demand.
• Run the daily operation. Bids and bidding strategies, budget pacing, negative keyword management, search term mining, query routing, geo and device modifiers, dayparting, and audience layering.
• Own the product feed as a paid search asset. Title and attribute optimization, custom labels for margin and velocity tiers, disapproval triage in Merchant Center and Microsoft Merchant Center, and feed rules that change what actually serves.
• Write and test the ads. RSA asset development and pinning strategy, asset group creative for PMax, extensions, and landing page hypotheses run with the ecommerce and merchandising teams.
• Set and defend the efficiency targets. ROAS, CPA, contribution margin and new-customer mix — you decide where the next dollar goes and you can show why.
• Run a real testing calendar. Structured experiments on bidding, match type, structure, landing pages and creative, with documented results and a clear read on significance.
• Report to the business, not to a dashboard. Weekly performance narrative, monthly channel review, forecasting, and budget scenarios for peak periods.
• Keep tracking honest. Partner with analytics on conversion tracking, offline and phone conversion imports, consent mode, and reconciling platform-reported numbers against the warehouse.
• Watch the competitive set. Auction insights, impression share loss, competitor bidding on brand terms, and pricing pressure on shopping surfaces.

What we require

These are screens, not preferences.

1. 3–5 years managing paid search, with paid search as the primary responsibility for the majority of that time.
2. In-house, brand-side experience is mandatory. You have carried a revenue or efficiency number for a company that sells its own products. Agency experience is welcome as part of your background, but it cannot be all of it — at least [2] of your recent years must be brand side.
3. You have personally managed the Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising accounts. Logged in, built the campaigns, set the bids, pulled the search terms, uploaded the changes. Overseeing an agency that did this work does not qualify, however large the budget. Be prepared to walk through account structure decisions you made and why.
4. Ecommerce, ideally direct-to-consumer. You understand the mechanics of a transactional funnel: AOV, repeat rate, margin by category, cart abandonment, and how a product feed becomes a revenue stream.
5. Shopping and Performance Max at depth, including Merchant Center administration, feed diagnostics, and the tradeoffs of consolidating versus segmenting asset groups.
6. Fluency with the numbers. Excel or Google Sheets at a serious level (pivot tables, lookups, cohorting), plus GA4 and comfort reading platform data critically rather than accepting it.
7. Bid strategy judgment in an automated era. You can explain when a smart bidding strategy is the right tool, when manual control still wins, what a tCPA or tROAS target actually does to volume, and how you diagnose a strategy that is underperforming.
8. You write and defend your own recommendations. Clear written reasoning, a point of view, and the willingness to say when a spend increase will not pay back.