Role: Paid Search Manager
Function: Paid Search | Google Ads | New Customer Acquisition
Responsibility: Drive profitable new customer growth for our DTC clients
Reports to: Head of Paid Search
Location: London (minimum 2 days per week in our Chalk Farm office)
Soar Group drives new customer revenue for DTC e-commerce brands through Meta, Google, TikTok and Performance Creative. We build client relationships around strategic partnership, commercial leadership and the outcomes we create.
As Paid Search Manager, you'll own Google Ads strategy and delivery for a portfolio of challenger DTC brands, managing monthly budgets of £15k to £150k per client. Your job is to make Google a profitable source of new customers and earn the client's trust in how their budget is invested.
You'll join a Paid Search team of five, reporting to our Head of Paid Search, with significant opportunity to help shape the department as it grows. You'll work closely with each client's Growth Strategist, who owns paid social spend, offer strategy and conversion strategy, with your input.
What you'll do:
New customer acquisition
- Own the Google Ads acquisition strategy for your clients, building and scaling non-brand Search, Shopping, Performance Max and Demand Gen campaigns around profitable new customer growth.
- Understand where growth is coming from — assessing brand demand, returning customers and attribution limits when interpreting results, and using testing to evaluate incrementality.
- Translate client growth goals into clear account plans, budget recommendations and prioritised tests, scaling when the evidence supports it and addressing underperformance early.
Client leadership and budget ownership
- Be the client's trusted Paid Search lead, leading strategic conversations about performance, growth opportunities and where to invest next.
- Own budget pacing and forecasting across accounts spending £15k to £150k per month, explaining the expected return, risks and trade-offs behind your recommendations.
- Communicate proactively and clearly, so clients understand what's happening, why it matters to their business, and what you recommend doing about it.
Cross-functional growth planning
- Build a joined-up growth plan with the Growth Strategist — you own Paid Search, they own social spend, offer strategy and conversion strategy — bringing your expertise to those decisions and agreeing shared priorities.
- Connect search intent and product performance with creative, offer and landing page decisions, sharing insights across teams and turning them into coordinated tests.
- Plan around promotions, stock availability, product margins and repeat purchase behaviour, keeping channel decisions grounded in the client's wider economics.
Account delivery and department development
- Stay hands-on with campaign builds, bidding, product feeds, testing and optimisation, maintaining strong standards for account structure, measurement and reporting.
- Keep clients in the loop on current testing, key account changes and ongoing strategy through weekly, monthly and quarterly updates.
- Work with the Head of Paid Search to review performance, resolve risks and improve delivery, sharing useful findings and contributing to team training and playbooks.
- Help build the systems and ways of working that let a small team grow while maintaining quality and client confidence.
Requirements
What you'll bring:
- A proven track record managing Google Ads for DTC e-commerce brands, with hands-on experience of non-brand Search, Shopping and Performance Max.
- Specific examples of non-brand and PMax strategies that delivered incremental new customer growth — you can explain your hypothesis, what you changed, how you measured it, and the commercial result.
- Experience managing budgets comparable to £15k to £150k per month, balancing growth ambitions with acquisition efficiency and profitability.
- Experience leading client strategy and performance conversations, making budget recommendations, and building trust through periods of both growth and underperformance.
- A strong understanding of DTC unit economics, including acquisition cost, product margins, average order value and repeat purchase behaviour. CPG experience is particularly relevant.
- Confidence using Google Ads, Google Merchant Center, GA4, Shopify reporting and attribution tools to diagnose performance and make decisions, with a clear understanding of their limitations.
- Experience working across paid social, creative and conversion teams, managing multiple accounts and keeping priorities, delivery and communication organised.
- A view of Google as a new customer acquisition channel — assessing performance through new customer revenue, acquisition economics and evidence of incremental impact, and able to explain what the results mean for the client's business.
- Comfort leading the client conversation and doing the detailed account work that makes your recommendations credible.
- Full ownership of outcomes — raising problems early, bringing a recommendation and following through.
- A low-ego approach — challenging assumptions constructively and welcoming input from the Growth Strategist and wider team.
- Genuine curiosity about DTC growth, and the habit of turning what you learn into better decisions for clients.
Benefits
Why Join
- 25 days holiday plus public holidays, an extra paid day off on your birthday, and an additional day per year after 2 years' service (up to 30 days)
- Private health insurance (Vitality) and 50% off gym memberships
- Life insurance including unlimited 24/7 GP access
- Cash plan claim back dental, eye care, physiotherapy and counselling costs
- Company pension
- Hybrid working, plus the option to work abroad for up to 30 days at a time
- Professional development support
- Regular team socials and a peer-to-peer kudos/rewards system