Director of Paid Media; Remote, Louisville

Blacksmith Agency runs PPC and SEO for clients across multifamily, B2B and technical verticals. As Director of Paid Media you lead that department. The PPC strategist and the SEO strategist report to you and they are the specialists in their channels. Right now nobody owns this function, which is the whole reason this seat is open.

• Marketing
• Full time
• Remote (USA, Canada or South Africa)

Blacksmith Agency runs PPC and SEO for clients across multifamily, B2B and technical verticals. As Director of Paid Media you lead that department. The PPC strategist and the SEO strategist report to you and they are the specialists in their channels. Right now nobody owns this function, which is the whole reason this seat is open.

• The PPC strategist and the SEO strategist: their quality bar, their development, their reviews, and the call when someone is not going to get there.
• The standard the work is held to. What a good audit looks like, what gets checked before work leaves the agency, how an account is reported. You write it and you hold two specialists to it.
• Client results across the whole function, including whether our reporting is honest. Nobody here is auditing attribution and GA4 accuracy today.
• The escalation when an account is  diagnose it, you direct the strategist who fixes it, and you are on the call with the client.
• Channel strategy and where budget goes as accounts scale.
• What we tell sales we can credibly deliver, before it gets sold.
• The hiring plan for the department, and first-round interviews for your own team, within about a quarter.

• Strategists or specialists who have reported to you, where their reviews, their development and the decision when someone was not working out were yours. Managing accounts is not this.
• 7+ years across paid media and SEO. Owning one channel while sitting beside the other does not count here.
• Enough depth in Google Ads, GA4, Search Console, Meta and Microsoft Ads to tell good work from work that merely looks good. That is a lower bar than doing it and a higher bar than reading a report.
• One account you turned around that you can talk through: the metric, the figure before, the figure after, and why the change worked. Whose hands were on the keyboard matters far less than whether the diagnosis was yours.
• Comfortable being the client-facing owner when an account is underperforming. That call comes to you, not to the strategist.
• Agency experience carrying many accounts at once.

Three conversations, then a decision. A thirty minute screen with our recruiter, a first round with the founder this seat reports to, and a final. No take-home project and no panel interview.