Director of Performance Marketing

We’re a Houston digital marketing agency. We run paid media, SEO, and websites for about 65 local service businesses: auto repair, roofing, concrete, remodeling, med spas, flooring. Most of them are owner-operated. When their phone stops ringing, they feel it that week. We’ve grown every year since 2020. The thing holding us back now isn’t sales. It’s that nobody owns whether the work is right. Why this job exists: Right now the founder is the last line of defense on every account. When a client has a question nobody can answer, it comes to him. When something breaks quietly, it stays broken until he happens to look. Some real examples from the last two weeks. A campaign was serving nationally because it had no location targeting at all, and had been for months. Five accounts were counting phone leads in a way that fed bad data straight into automated bidding. One client’s lead forms were emailing to a web developer who stopped working on the site over a year ago. Another account is giving up almost half its available impressions to a budget cap nobody has revisited. None of that happened because the work is hard. It happened because there’s no written standard for what a correctly built account looks like, and nobody whose job it is to check. That’s this role. What you’ll do: First 90 days: Write down what a correctly configured account looks like at Symphony. Location targeting, conversion actions and counting, negatives, tracking, form routing, naming, budget review. One document, specific enough that someone else can follow it. Audit all 65 accounts against it and fix what’s broken. Build the recurring check so it can’t drift again. Ongoing: Own paid performance across the book. Google Ads, Local Services Ads, Meta. Decide how a client’s budget splits across channels and defend the call. Be the person who answers a client’s performance question today instead of escalating it. Set the standard our account managers execute against, and tell them when they’ve missed it. Know when to raise a budget, kill a campaign, or tell a client their problem isn’t advertising. What we’re looking for: Five or more years running paid acquisition, with real depth in Google Ads and working command of Meta. You should be comfortable owning both sides of a client’s paid budget and able to say which channel a given dollar belongs in. Experience across many accounts rather than one big one. Sixty-five small accounts is a different job than one enterprise account, and we need someone who has done the former. Local service businesses specifically. Home services, trades, auto, medical. If your background is ecommerce or SaaS, this will be a harder transition than you expect. Enough SEO to be dangerous. You don’t need to write content or run technical audits, but you should be able to read Search Console, tell a client why their rankings moved, and know when an SEO vendor is selling them nothing. You’ll oversee SEO delivery, not perform it. Local Services Ads experience is a real plus. Most people don’t have it. The ability to talk to a frustrated contractor without hiding behind jargon. Willingness to write things down. A lot of this job is documentation that outlasts you. What this job is not: It isn’t a seat where you take tickets from account managers. You set the direction, you don’t service requests. It isn’t a pure strategy role either. You’ll be in the accounts. We’re 65 clients, not 600, and the person who writes the standard here is the person who applies it. If you’ve spent three years in decks and QBRs and haven’t touched a campaign, this will feel like a step back toward the work. It isn’t an SEO role. You’ll direct SEO and you’ll be the client-facing answer on it, but execution sits elsewhere. If SEO is your craft and paid is your side interest, you’d be unhappy here. And you should know what you’re walking into. Some of these accounts need real cleanup. If you want to inherit something tidy, this isn’t it. If finding a campaign that ran nationally for six months makes you want to go fix it, we should talk. Details: Houston based. We’ve deliberately built the team here. Salary Range: 85K-110K Health insurance, paid time off, and the shortest approval chain you’ll ever work in. You report to the founder. #J-18808-Ljbffr Symphony Advertising