Torchora
Back to Home

Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Advertising Operations Specialist

💰 $ - $

AdvertisingMarketingOperationsProgrammatic

🎯 Role Definition

The Advertising Operations Specialist is responsible for the end-to-end trafficking, execution, monitoring, and optimization of digital ad campaigns across direct, programmatic, mobile, video, and social channels. This role ensures accurate delivery of creative assets and targeting, maintains ad server and demand-side platform (DSP) configurations, validates tracking and measurement, troubleshoots delivery and reporting issues, and partners closely with sales, account management, data science, and creative teams to deliver campaign performance and business outcomes. The ideal candidate has strong technical ad ops experience with Google Ad Manager (GAM), DV360, or similar ad servers and DSPs, excellent attention to detail, and the ability to communicate clear technical recommendations to non-technical stakeholders.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Junior Advertising Operations Specialist / Coordinator
  • Digital Marketing Coordinator or Assistant
  • Media Buyer / Programmatic Trafficker

Advancement To:

  • Senior Advertising Operations Specialist / Lead Ad Ops
  • Programmatic Lead / Trading Desk Manager
  • Advertising Operations Manager or Director of Ad Operations

Lateral Moves:

  • Account Manager / Client Services (Digital Media)
  • Media Planner / Buyer
  • Analytics or Data Insights Specialist

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Manage end-to-end trafficking and launch of digital ad campaigns across ad servers (e.g., Google Ad Manager), DSPs (e.g., DV360, The Trade Desk), social ad platforms (Facebook/Meta Ads, LinkedIn), and video platforms, ensuring correct creative, targeting, scheduling, and pacing.
  • Build and maintain campaign configurations: line items, orders, creatives, placements, frequency caps, audience targeting, day-parting, and priority settings in ad servers and DSPs.
  • Conduct rigorous QA of creative assets, tags, third-party trackers, pixels, viewability and verification tags, and campaign parameters before and after flighting to guarantee accurate measurement and uninterrupted delivery.
  • Monitor campaign delivery daily using ad server/DSP dashboards and analytics tools, identify pacing or delivery anomalies (under-delivery, overserve), and take corrective action to meet KPI goals and SLAs.
  • Troubleshoot and resolve technical delivery issues, including creative rendering problems, tag firing failures, ad blocking impacts, creative MIME types, and caching conflicts, collaborating with engineering and vendor support as needed.
  • Implement and verify tracking and reporting mechanisms: third-party impressions, click trackers, conversion tags, postbacks, S2S events, UTM parameters, viewability tags, and impression-level data feeds.
  • Reconcile ad server and third-party reporting to ensure accuracy of impressions, clicks, conversions, and spend; investigate discrepancies and document root causes with corrective steps.
  • Optimize campaign performance through iterative adjustments to creative rotation, bidding strategies, targeting refinements, frequency capping, and inventory prioritization to maximize ROI, CTR, and CVR.
  • Manage private marketplace (PMP) deals, programmatic guaranteed deals, and preferred deals: set up deal IDs, negotiate technical specs with partners, validate whitelists/blacklists, and ensure deal delivery integrity.
  • Configure and manage creatives across formats (HTML5, VAST/VPAID, MRAID, in-banner, native), ensuring creative compliance with platform specifications, file sizes, and testing across desktop, mobile web, and in-app environments.
  • Coordinate with account executives and sales operations to translate IOs and client requirements into technical ad ops specifications and timeline estimates.
  • Prepare and deliver campaign setup documentation and runbooks: trafficking sheets, creative specs, audience lists, whitelist/blacklist instructions, and acceptance criteria.
  • Maintain campaign naming conventions, taxonomy, and tagging standards for consistent analytics and BI ingestion across platforms and reporting pipelines.
  • Execute ad server and DSP migrations, scale-ups, and creative refreshes with careful version control and rollback strategies to minimize downtime or data loss.
  • Manage inventory controls, ad prioritization, and ad blocking/brand safety settings using verification vendors (e.g., DoubleVerify, Integral Ad Science) and content categorization tools.
  • Build automated alerts and monitoring rules using platform APIs, dashboards, or internal tools to highlight pacing, spend thresholds, and delivery anomalies in real time.
  • Support end-of-flight reconciliations, billing validations, and data exports for finance and client billing teams, ensuring spend and impression counts are auditable and accurate.
  • Maintain up-to-date knowledge of privacy regulations (GDPR, CCPA), consent frameworks (TCF), and cookieless solutions; implement consent-compliant tracking and measurement strategies.
  • Collaborate with creative and UX teams to advise on ad unit feasibility, technical constraints, and creative formats that optimize performance and user experience.
  • Create and deliver technical training and onboarding materials for junior ad ops colleagues, fostering consistent best practices and documentation.
  • Leverage impression-level and event-level data to support attribution modeling, incrementality testing, and advanced measurement projects with analytics and data science partners.
  • Use platform APIs and SFTP feeds to extract campaign-level and impression-level data for custom reporting, analytics pipelines, and BI dashboards.
  • Maintain vendor relationships with ad tech partners, troubleshooting partners’ technical issues, managing escalations, and coordinating validation tests.
  • Ensure platform access and role-based permissions for ad ops tools, maintaining security best practices and change logs for account modifications.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc analytics requests, build custom reports, and provide insights to sales and client teams to inform optimizations and renewals.
  • Assist in defining ad ops process improvements, build repeatable templates, and document standard operating procedures (SOPs) for campaign launch and troubleshooting.
  • Participate in cross-functional project teams for platform migrations, creative tool rollouts, data integrations, and privacy compliance initiatives.
  • Run QA audits and periodic health checks of active accounts, reporting on technical debt and remediation priorities.
  • Partner with finance and billing to validate monthly invoicing, inventory reconciliation, and any programmatic discounts or makegoods.
  • Evaluate and recommend new ad tech vendors, tools, and automation solutions that reduce manual work and increase campaign reliability.
  • Maintain an updated roadmap of ad tech dependencies and planned upgrades to reduce platform downtime and unexpected behavior.
  • Assist marketing and product teams in developing test designs for A/B and multivariate creative experiments and analyzing results.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Expert-level experience with ad servers and trafficking platforms (Google Ad Manager / AdX / GAM) and demand-side platforms (DV360, The Trade Desk).
  • Proficiency with HTML5 creatives, VAST/VPAID for video, MRAID for in-app, and creative testing across browsers and devices.
  • Strong knowledge of tagging, tracking, and measurement: impression and click trackers, conversion pixels, server-to-server postbacks, and SDK implementation.
  • Practical experience with ad verification and brand safety tools (DoubleVerify, Integral Ad Science, Moat) and setting up viewability/reporting tags.
  • Familiarity with programmatic deal types: PMP, PG, RTB, header bidding, and private auction setups.
  • Data extraction and manipulation: experience with platform APIs, SFTP ingestion, CSV/JSON exports, and basic scripting (Python, JavaScript) for automation.
  • Proficient in Excel (VLOOKUP, pivot tables) and SQL for reconciling large datasets and resolving reporting discrepancies.
  • Knowledge of attribution models, conversion tracking, and basic analytics (Google Analytics, GA4) to align campaign metrics with business KPIs.
  • Understanding of digital privacy, consent frameworks (IAB TCF), and best practices for cookieless tracking and ID solutions.
  • Experience with monitoring and alerting tools, dashboarding platforms (Looker, Tableau, Data Studio) and building operational dashboards.
  • Exposure to mobile app ad platforms and SDK integrations (e.g., AdMob, MoPub) and in-app measurement nuances.
  • Familiarity with programmatic optimization strategies and bid management tactics including bidding algorithms, floor pricing, and inventory controls.

Soft Skills

  • Exceptional attention to detail and reliability: meticulous QA mindset to prevent delivery errors and measurement gaps.
  • Strong troubleshooting and problem-solving skills; able to diagnose technical issues with limited information and propose practical fixes.
  • Clear written and verbal communication skills to translate technical issues and optimization recommendations for clients and stakeholders.
  • Excellent time management and prioritization; comfortable managing multiple campaigns and high-volume workloads under tight deadlines.
  • Client-facing demeanor with strong stakeholder management; able to set expectations and provide transparent status updates.
  • Collaborative team player who partners with sales, engineering, creative, and analytics teams to drive campaign success.
  • Adaptability and learning agility to rapidly adopt new ad tech platforms, industry updates, and privacy changes.
  • Analytical mindset with the ability to derive actionable insights from performance data and recommend experiments.
  • Process-oriented: experience documenting SOPs, runbooks, and maintaining operational checklists.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Marketing, Advertising, Communications, Business, Computer Science, Data Analytics, or related field preferred; equivalent practical experience will be considered.

Preferred Education:

  • Bachelor's or Master's degree in relevant discipline; certifications in Google Ad Manager, DV360, or programmatic advertising considered a plus.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Marketing / Digital Marketing
  • Advertising / Media Studies
  • Computer Science / Information Systems
  • Data Analytics / Statistics
  • Business / Economics

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 2–5 years of hands-on digital ad operations or programmatic trafficking experience.

Preferred: 3–5+ years with demonstrated expertise in ad server trafficking (GAM), DSP management (DV360/The Trade Desk), campaign optimization, and measurement reconciliation. Prior experience in agency, publisher ad ops, or in-house ad operations for a tech/commerce company is highly valued.

Explore More Careers