Associate Director, Paid Search

New York City, NY (Hybrid)

$90K/yr – $125K/yrMid Level5+ years expFull time

Posted 2 months ago

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Job Summary

Own paid search across retail and ecommerce, driving strategy, testing, and optimization while partnering with senior leads to align with client goals and KPIs.

  • Own planning and strategy: translate business goals into campaign structures, bidding, and budget decisions.
  • Lead cross-functional collaboration: align with analytics, retail, and other media teams to connect paid search to broader priorities.
  • Mentor and manage: guide junior team members, oversee budgets, pacing, reporting, and QA to ensure consistent results.

Job Description

  • Paid Search Planning & Strategy: Partner with senior leads to develop paid search plans aligned to client business goals, campaign objectives, retail priorities, and performance KPIs. Translate strategic direction into actionable campaign structures, testing plans, audience approaches, bidding strategies, and budget recommendations.
  • Campaign Management & Optimization: Oversee day-to-day paid search execution across Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, SA360, and other relevant platforms. Ensure campaigns are launched accurately, optimized regularly, and managed against performance goals such as revenue, ROAS, CPA, conversion rate, traffic quality, and customer acquisition.
  • Retail & Ecommerce Performance: Manage paid search programs with an understanding of retail and ecommerce dynamics, including promotions, seasonality, product/category performance, inventory signals, shopping campaigns, Performance Max, and feed-based optimization.
  • Data Analysis & Insights: Analyze campaign, platform, site, and business performance data to identify trends, risks, and opportunities. Translate reporting into clear insights, explaining what happened, why it happened, what it means, and what should happen next.
  • Testing & Innovation: Develop and manage test-and-learn agendas across bidding, keywords, match types, creative, shopping formats, landing pages, automation, AI-powered campaign types, and measurement approaches. Evaluate new platform features and betas based on client relevance and business value.
  • Client Communication: Serve as a key day-to-day client contact for paid search performance, campaign updates, reporting, optimization recommendations, and issue resolution. Present plans, results, insights, and next steps clearly to clients and internal stakeholders.
  • Team Leadership: Manage, mentor, and train junior team members. Assign work, review deliverables, provide feedback, and ensure consistent executional quality across campaign builds, optimizations, reporting, pacing, and QA.
  • Financial Management: Oversee budget pacing, forecasting, billing inputs, and investment allocation across paid search campaigns. Identify risks related to overspend, underdelivery, inefficiency, or shifting business conditions, and recommend corrective action.
  • Quality Assurance & Operations: Act as a quality assurance lead for campaign launches, account changes, tracking, reporting, deliverables, and client-facing materials. Ensure work follows platform best practices, client requirements, naming conventions, trafficking standards, and measurement protocols.
  • Cross-Team Collaboration & Thought Leadership: Work with broader investment, strategy, analytics, retail media, social, programmatic, creative, and commerce teams to ensure paid search is connected to broader media and business priorities. Contribute to POVs, best practices, platform updates, and client education materials.
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OMD

3.6 Glassdoor

OMD is the world’s largest media network, with more than 14,000 people working across more than 100 countries.At OMD, We Create What’s Next — delivering creative media solutions to drive sustainable growth for the world’s leading brands. Named the best-performing global media network overall by RECMA, the highest-ranked media agency network on the Effie Effectiveness Index, and Media Network of the Year at the 2025 Cannes Festival of Media, OMD is a leader in innovation, creativity, and cultural relevance.

Founded in 1996
New York, New York, USA
4.2K employees (1,415 in marketing)
67% recommend to a friend
82% CEO approval

Traffic Signals

Monthly Visitors
54K
Traffic Source Mix
Search
46.4%
Direct
39.1%
Referral
9.4%
Social
3.4%
Paid
1%

Headcount Trend

Current headcount: ~4.2K

Marketing Team

Marketing Team Size
1,318 (31% of company)
Marketing Roles Posted (Last 30 Days)
27

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