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Salary: USD 125,000 - 135,000 / annual
FirmPilot is seeking a Director, Paid Media to lead the paid media function and Google Ads strategy across a portfolio of law firm clients. This role reports to the Performance team and is responsible for leading, developing, and holding accountable a team of paid media professionals while maintaining oversight of campaign strategy, execution, and client outcomes. The focus is primarily on Google Search in competitive and expensive legal markets, where success is measured by qualified leads, signed cases, efficient acquisition costs, and sustainable client growth—not vanity metrics like impressions or traffic.
Key Responsibilities:
Team Leadership: Lead, coach, and develop a team of paid media professionals. Establish clear performance expectations, operating standards, quality controls, and accountability. Review team capacity, account assignments, and execution quality. Provide regular feedback, training, and development while addressing performance gaps. Support hiring, onboarding, and team development. Serve as the senior escalation point for complex campaign, performance, tracking, budget, and client issues.
Paid Search Strategy: Lead Google Search strategy across the client portfolio to generate qualified leads and signed cases. Establish standards for campaign structure, keyword strategy, audience strategy, bidding, account architecture, testing, and optimization. Guide development of scalable strategies aligned with client business goals, markets, case priorities, and growth objectives. Review and approve major campaign launches, restructures, recovery plans, and strategic budget changes.
Campaign Performance and Optimization: Oversee analysis of Quality Score, Auction Insights, search terms, competitor activity, and conversion data. Ensure continuous improvement through keyword expansion, negative keyword management, ad testing, audience segmentation, bid optimization, landing page recommendations, and Google Ads experiments. Identify declining performance early and lead recovery plans. Evaluate emerging Google Ads features and AI capabilities. Establish disciplined testing and document learnings across the portfolio.
Conversion Tracking and Analytics: Oversee implementation and maintenance of offline conversion tracking connecting qualified leads and signed cases to Google Ads. Partner with internal teams to ensure accurate tracking across Google Ads, Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics 4, CRM platforms, and reporting tools. Ensure reporting focuses on business outcomes. Maintain data accuracy and resolve tracking issues. Use portfolio-level data to identify trends, opportunities, and repeatable strategies.
Budget Planning and Forecasting: Oversee media budgets across the client portfolio with focus on ROI and business impact. Guide monthly forecasting for spend, lead volume, acquisition costs, signed cases, and performance trends. Identify opportunities to scale efficiently while protecting lead quality and client profitability. Provide strategic budget recommendations. Ensure clients understand how budget allocation affects growth and performance.
Client Partnership: Serve as senior strategic paid media advisor for key clients and executives. Lead high-level performance discussions, strategic reviews, and difficult conversations when results underperform. Present campaign performance, recommendations, risks, and opportunities clearly. Ensure proactive, accurate, and consistent client communication. Collaborate with Performance, SEO, content, creative, technology, and client success teams.
Requirements:
Required:
- 7+ years of experience managing Google Ads campaigns with strong focus on lead generation
- Previous experience leading, coaching, and developing paid media professionals
- Experience managing high-budget search campaigns in highly competitive markets
- Deep understanding of Google Ads, Google Analytics 4, Google Tag Manager, and conversion tracking
- Experience implementing offline conversion tracking and value-based bidding strategies
- Strong understanding of Quality Score, Auction Insights, bidding strategies, audience targeting, campaign structure, search intent, and Google Ads experiments
- Demonstrated ability to diagnose declining performance and lead effective account recovery strategies
- Experience using AI to improve campaign creation, optimization, reporting, analysis, and team efficiency
- Strong analytical, problem-solving, leadership, and decision-making skills
- Excellent client communication, executive presentation, and relationship management skills
Preferred:
- Experience managing paid media for law firms or other local service businesses
- Experience building automated CRM to Google Ads conversion workflows using Zapier or similar platforms
- Experience auditing and improving landing page performance
- Experience with Meta Ads and Local Services Ads
- Familiarity with Performance Max and value-based bidding strategies for lead generation
