Responsibilities

• Own the day-to-day strategy and direction for Sweetwater's paid search program across Google Ads, Google Search Ads 360, Microsoft, and other relevant search platforms.
• Serve as the primary internal point of contact and strategic partner for our paid search agency.
• Oversee agency performance, ensuring campaigns are aligned with business goals, channel strategy, and financial objectives.
• Review and provide thoughtful feedback on agency recommendations, reporting, campaign structure, bidding strategies, creative, keyword strategy, and optimization opportunities.
• Develop and maintain a forward-looking paid search roadmap, including new opportunities, tests, capabilities, and areas for optimization.
• Identify and recommend opportunities to improve efficiency, scale growth, and strengthen the overall customer acquisition strategy.
• Develop and champion a culture of testing, using data and sound experimentation principles to evaluate new approaches.
• Stay closely connected to developments in search advertising, including changes to platforms, automation, AI, consumer search behavior, measurement, attribution, and emerging search experiences.
• Partner with Analytics, Merchandising, Creative, Marketing, and other cross-functional teams to ensure paid search supports broader business priorities.
• Monitor and communicate channel performance, trends, opportunities, and risks to the Director of Performance Marketing and other stakeholders.

Requirements

• 4+ years of hands-on experience managing paid search efforts, ideally with progressively increasing responsibility.
• Proven experience managing paid search at large scale, with significant budgets, campaign complexity, and product / keyword volume.
• Experience managing paid search in a retail or e-commerce environment with at least 5,000 SKUs.
• Strong understanding of Google Ads, Google Search Ads 360, Microsoft Advertising, shopping/product advertising, bidding strategies, campaign structure, keyword management, audience targeting, and paid search measurement. Experience with Google Tag Manager and tagging/tracking technology is preferred.
• Experience working directly with and managing an external paid search agency or other strategic partner, including a demonstrated ability to evaluate agency recommendations, identify opportunities, and provide clear strategic direction.
• Strong analytical skills and the ability to translate performance data into actionable business recommendations, including experience developing and executing testing strategies across paid search.
• A strong understanding of the economics of retail paid search, including ROAS, profitability, customer acquisition, conversion rates, and the relationship between media performance and merchandising/business objectives.
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to work effectively with both highly technical channel experts and senior business stakeholders.

Preferred

• Experience in specialty retail, particularly categories with passionate and highly engaged customers such as music, sporting goods, outdoor, automotive, gaming, or other enthusiast-driven categories.
• Experience managing paid search across a very large and frequently changing product catalog.
• Experience with feed optimization and product data management for shopping campaigns.
• Experience with incrementality testing, attribution, media mix modeling, or other advanced approaches to measuring paid media impact.
• Experience navigating the evolving intersection of search, AI, and emerging search experiences.
• A genuine interest in music, musical instruments, recording, audio, or the broader creator economy.
• WOWs The Customer – You possess a deep passion and desire for creating amazing customer & colleague experiences
• Gets Things Done – You have a great work ethic and move through tasks with a sense of urgency
• Obsesses over the Details – You are committed to paying attention to the details
• Drives Continuous Improvement – You are always focusing on effective and efficient work and ways to get better