Senior Paid Search Manager

About the role 

SmartBear is hiring a Sr. Paid Media Manager to own our paid search, paid social and third-party paid programs, and to manage our agency partner. You'll run a multi-million dollar budget with a clear mandate: drive pipeline growth at a positive, provable return. 

Primary objective: Drive campaigns that produce pipeline and ARR for the business. 

This role sits in Demand Generation as a centralized service. You'll partner with the product-aligned demand gen teams to turn their goals into campaigns that perform. You'll report to the VP of Demand Generation. 

What you'll do 

• Paid search: Plan, build and optimize campaigns on Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising to hit growth and profitability targets. 
• Paid social: Run campaigns across LinkedIn, Meta, Reddit and YouTube that grow reach and drive qualified leads at a positive ROI. 
• Third-party paid programs: Manage paid placements with review sites, newsletters, content syndication and media partners, and judge each on pipeline contribution. 
• Category awareness strategy: Set the strategy for building market awareness of a new category through paid media programs, including connected TV, paid social and programmatic ads. 
• Agency management: Lead our paid media agency day to day. Set priorities, review performance and hold the team accountable to results. 
• Budget ownership: Manage a multi-million dollar budget, pace spend against plan and reallocate funds to the channels that perform. 
• Return on investment: Partner with Finance to show the return from paid campaigns, then recommend where to pivot or invest more. 
• Cross-team alignment: Work closely with the product-aligned demand gen teams so campaigns support their launches, offers and pipeline goals. 
• Measurement and reporting: Use GA4, Salesforce and Tableau to track performance from click to closed-won revenue, and share clear readouts with stakeholders. 
• Testing: Run ongoing tests on audiences, creative, landing pages and bidding to keep improving results. 

What you'll bring 

• 4–6 years of hands-on paid media experience across search and social. 
• Proven success managing a multi-million dollar paid media budget against plan. 
• Deep working knowledge of Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising, LinkedIn, Meta, Reddit and YouTube. 
• Experience with GA4 and Salesforce for tracking, attribution and pipeline reporting. 
• Experience managing an agency, including setting goals, reviewing work and holding it to performance targets. 
• A strong analytical mindset. You're comfortable building the business case for spend with Finance. 
• Clear communication and the ability to work across teams with competing priorities. 
• Builds AI into repeatable workflows for paid media analysis, from budget pacing to trend detection, and checks the quality of what those workflows produce. 

Nice to have 

• A major plus: Experience running paid media for both a product-led growth (PLG) motion that drives free trials and a sales-led motion that drives leads. 
• Experience in a B2B SaaS environment, ideally with technical or developer audiences. 
• Experience with Marketo or HubSpot. 
• Familiarity with multi-touch attribution and with long, multi-stakeholder B2B buying cycles. 

Why You Should Join the SmartBear Crew 

• You can grow your career at every level. 
• We invest in your success as well as the spaces where our teams come together to work, collaborate, and have fun. 
• We love celebrating our SmartBears; we even encourage our crew to take their birthdays off. 
• We are guided by a People and Culture organisation — an important distinction for us. We think about our team holistically — the whole person. 
• We celebrate our differences in experiences, viewpoints, and identities because we know it leads to better outcomes. 

Did You Know? 

• Our main goal at SmartBear is to make our technology-driven world a better place. 
• SmartBear is committed to ethical corporate practices and social responsibility, promoting good in all the communities we serve. 
• SmartBear is headquartered in Somerville, MA with offices across the world including Galway, Ireland; Bath, UK; Wroclaw, Poland; and Bangalore, India. 
• We've won major industry (product and company) awards including SD Times, DeveloperWeek's Devies Award, the AI Breakthrough Award, and BuiltIn Best Places to Work. 

SmartBear is committed to creating an inclusive workplace for employees where all individuals are treated with respect and dignity. We are an equal opportunity employer and make employment decisions based on merit, qualifications, and business needs. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, gender, disability, veteran status, sexual orientation, or any other protected status under applicable laws. We are dedicated to fostering a workplace that reflects a diversity of thought and experience as well as our values of being smart, open, driven, accountable, and curious. 

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