Paid Digital Media Manager – Lead Generation, SaaS

About the role

We are a leading digital lead generation and comparison website for professional services hiring a Paid Digital Media Manager to take direct ownership of how we acquire leads across every paid channel, starting with the multi-million-pound Google Ads and Microsoft Ads operation we already run, reducing our heavy reliance on Google PPC, and expanding into the channels we haven’t yet pressed on.

This is not a role to maintain an existing playbook. It’s a role to work closely with the Company’s executives and build a new high performing function from scratch. You’ll inherit a small legacy working paid search engine team (consisting of both employees and agency consultants). Paid media is too critical a function to outsource, so a core part of this mandate is bringing it fully in-house. Our goal for this role is simple: build a new world-class team that amplifies our core competencies and drives exceptional results at scale. The right person is a hands-on operator with the ambition to grow into broader leadership as we scale the business across the UK and internationally.

We are looking for a hands-on manager who leads from the front, rolls up their sleeves when needed, and believes hard work, relentless execution, and a willingness to outwork the competition and their co-workers are competitive advantages.

What you’ll own

1. The existing paid search engine - make it sharper.

We’re spending real money on Google Ads and Microsoft Ads. Your first lever is making every pound of that work harder: tighter campaign structure, smarter bidding strategies, better audiences, cleaner attribution, and a measurement layer leadership trusts. Multi-million-pound budget, immediate impact on ROAS and CPA, no committee.

2. New channels - test, launch and scale them.

We are too dependent on Google PPC. The mandate is to extend paid acquisition well beyond search. Meta, LinkedIn, programmatic, YouTube, paid social, content syndication - you’ll experiment and evaluate which channels actually fit our funnel, build the business case, launch them with the same rigor we apply to search, and scale what works. We expect constant experimentation: a continuous pipeline of channel, format and ad tech tests, so we adopt new platforms and technologies ahead of the market, not after it. You set the channel roadmap. You hold the outcomes.

3. The team, the systems, and the AI-native way of working.

You’ll build and lead a small, hands-on team of paid media and performance marketing professionals. You will be expected to do the work yourself, not just manage it. That means setting the bar, hiring against gaps, and building the operating model - reporting cadence, experimentation framework, QA, the unglamorous infrastructure that lets a paid marketing team move fast without breaking things.

You’ll run this team as an AI-native operation. We expect you to deploy AI tools across campaign planning, creative iteration, audience development, bid optimization, and reporting as the default way work gets done. Faster creative variants, faster time-to-insight, agentic workflows for the work that today eats channel-manager time. We’re hiring someone who is already operating this way and wants to push it further.

You will build, mentor, and manage a small, high-performance, office-based team that thrives on collaboration, accountability, and working together in person five days per week. This team will not operate in a silo: integration with company strategy and the product roadmap is critical. You’ll work directly with leadership and product, so that what paid media learns about customers, channels and conversion shapes where the business goes and what we build.

4. Conversion - own it with product and UX.

Paid media does not stop at the click. You’ll work hand in hand with our product and UX teams on landing pages, funnels and on-site journeys, feeding search and audience insight into the product roadmap and running a continuous conversion testing programme. Better conversion lowers CPA across every channel, so this is core to the role, not an add-on.

What good looks like in the first 3 months

• Immediately improve Google and Microsoft Ads ROAS and CPA.
• Hire a high performing in-house team.
• A plan agreed and underway to bring agency-managed paid media fully in-house.
• A brand-new reporting and attribution layer, Studio/Looker, leadership uses to make budget decisions.
• Develop and start execu…