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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Digital Advertising Specialist

💰 $ - $

🎯 Role Definition

The Digital Advertising Specialist owns day-to-day management and optimization of paid advertising channels to drive qualified traffic, leads, and revenue. They translate business objectives into measurable campaign strategies, use advanced targeting and bid strategies, implement tracking and attribution frameworks, and deliver actionable insights to stakeholders. This role requires a blend of technical ad-platform expertise, analytical rigor, creative testing, and stakeholder communication to continually improve campaign performance and support broader marketing goals.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • PPC Analyst or Paid Media Coordinator with 6–18 months of hands-on ad platform experience.
  • Social Media Coordinator managing paid social campaigns.
  • Marketing Coordinator with exposure to digital campaigns and analytics.

Advancement To:

  • Senior Digital Advertising Specialist or Performance Marketing Manager (managing larger budgets and strategy).
  • Paid Media Manager / Ads Team Lead (owning multi-channel strategy and junior hires).
  • Head of Paid Media / Director of Performance Marketing (leading cross-channel paid strategy and budgets).

Lateral Moves:

  • SEO Specialist (focused on organic search and technical growth).
  • Growth Marketing Manager (broader mix of acquisition channels and growth experiments).
  • Analytics or MarTech Specialist (focusing on tracking, attribution and data infrastructure).

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Design, launch and manage high-performing paid search campaigns across Google Ads and Microsoft Ads, including account structure, keyword strategy, match types, negative keywords, ad copy testing, and budget pacing to maximize conversions and ROI.
  • Build, execute and optimize paid social campaigns on Meta (Facebook/Instagram), X/Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok and Snapchat, including audience segmentation, lookalike and custom audience creation, creative rotation, placement optimization, and campaign objective selection.
  • Execute programmatic display and video campaigns using DSPs (e.g., The Trade Desk, DV360), including audience targeting, PMP deal management, frequency capping, creative specs and inventory quality controls to improve reach and efficiency.
  • Implement and refine bidding strategies (manual CPC, enhanced CPC, target CPA, target ROAS, maximize conversions/bids) across channels and continuously tune bids for performance and budget constraints.
  • Set up and troubleshoot conversion tracking across platforms using pixels, server-side tagging, Google Tag Manager, UTM parameters and event-based analytics to ensure accurate measurement of conversions, revenue and micro-conversion events.
  • Conduct regular campaign performance analysis using GA4, platform insights, and BI tools to identify trends, surface issues (e.g., conversion drop-offs), and recommend optimizations that improve CPA, ROAS, and LTV.
  • Plan and execute A/B and multivariate tests for ad creative, landing pages, audience segments, bidding strategies and offer messaging; document test designs, results and business recommendations.
  • Create and maintain detailed campaign forecasts, pacing plans and budget allocations by channel, product line, and geography to ensure spend efficiency and goal attainment.
  • Develop targeting strategies including demographic, interest, behavioral, contextual, remarketing, and CRM-based segments to increase relevance and conversion probability while minimizing wasted spend.
  • Collaborate with creative, content and CRO teams to produce ad assets (static, video, carousel) and optimize landing pages and funnels for conversion rate, page speed and mobile performance.
  • Manage tag governance and data quality checks across marketing tech stack; coordinate with engineering or analytics teams to resolve tracking discrepancies and maintain clean event taxonomy.
  • Lead paid media launch plans for product releases, promotions, and seasonal campaigns—creating timelines, creative briefs, and tracking plans to align teams and maximize campaign impact.
  • Monitor and enforce policy and brand safety for ads, including platform compliance (ad policies), content approvals, and working with legal when required to prevent disapproved creatives and account issues.
  • Produce clear, stakeholder-ready performance reports and executive summaries that translate technical metrics into business impact, action items and next-step recommendations.
  • Liaise with external partners—agencies, platform reps, creative vendors and publishers—to scale campaigns, test new inventory types, negotiate deals and secure technical support.
  • Implement and maintain audience and conversion lists (CRM uploads, offline conversion imports, enhanced conversions) to improve attribution accuracy and enable smarter optimization on ad platforms.
  • Diagnose performance anomalies and execute root-cause analyses when metrics change unexpectedly; propose corrective actions and contingency plans to maintain performance.
  • Manage day-to-day budget pacing, ensure efficient spend allocation across campaigns and provide weekly/monthly reconciliations against targets and forecasts.
  • Establish and track core KPIs (impressions, CTR, conversion rate, CPA, ROAS, LTV, CAC) and secondary metrics (quality score, viewability, bounce rate) to inform optimization priorities and strategic decisions.
  • Architect cross-channel attribution models and experiments (incrementality tests, holdout groups, MMM collaboration) to understand true incremental lift and guide budget decisions across channels.
  • Mentor junior paid media team members and contribute to hiring, onboarding and training processes to scale team capability and standardize best practices.
  • Keep up to date with platform changes, ad tech developments, privacy and consent regulations (GDPR, CCPA) and evolving measurement solutions (server-side tracking, clean rooms) to future-proof campaigns.
  • Create and maintain playbooks, SOPs and runbooks for campaign setup, naming conventions, audience creation, reporting templates and escalation paths to ensure operational consistency.

Secondary Functions

  • Support cross-functional marketing initiatives such as email acquisition, CRM retargeting, affiliate programs and organic collaboration to ensure cohesive user journeys and messaging.
  • Conduct competitive analysis and share market intelligence on competitor ad creatives, bid strategies and landing pages to inform strategic defensive or offensive campaigns.
  • Assist in producing creative briefs and performance feedback loops for design and video teams to ensure ad creatives meet platform best practices and performance objectives.
  • Facilitate knowledge sharing sessions and training for non-paid teams on paid advertising fundamentals, attribution limitations, and campaign impact on business goals.
  • Contribute to marketing technology evaluation and vendor selection by testing new ad platforms, measurement tools and attribution providers and presenting findings to leadership.
  • Support ad-hoc deep-dive analyses, cohort analysis and LTV modeling to refine audience strategies and justify long-term acquisition investments.
  • Participate in weekly or biweekly growth meetings and sprint planning to align paid activities with product launches, promotions and roadmap priorities.
  • Help maintain ad account security and admin access controls, documenting user roles and permissions and coordinating audits with IT/security teams.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Advanced hands-on experience with Google Ads (Search, Display, Shopping, Video) including account structure, scripts, automated rules and shared libraries.
  • Proficiency with Meta Ads Manager for campaign setup, audience creation, creative testing and pixel/Conversion API implementation.
  • Experience with programmatic DSPs (DV360, The Trade Desk) or other display/video buying platforms and knowledge of RTB, PMP, private deals and inventory types.
  • Strong analytics and reporting skills using Google Analytics 4, BigQuery, Looker/Tableau/Power BI or similar BI tools to query data, create dashboards and derive insights.
  • Familiarity with tag management and tracking solutions (Google Tag Manager, server-side tagging) and debugging tools (Tag Assistant, Pixel Helper).
  • Practical knowledge of bid strategies, budget pacing, automated bidding algorithms and use of scripts / automation to scale optimizations.
  • Experience implementing and evaluating attribution models, running incrementality and holdout tests and interpreting results to inform budget allocation.
  • Competency with conversion tracking setup (pixels, events, offline conversion imports, enhanced conversions) and troubleshooting cross-domain tracking issues.
  • Ability to build and manage audiences from CRM exports, customer lists, or CDP integrations and apply them across paid channels.
  • Strong Excel/Google Sheets skills including pivot tables, VLOOKUP/XLOOKUP, and basic SQL for ad-hoc queries and data manipulation.
  • Basic understanding of HTML/CSS and landing page optimization best practices, as well as familiarity with A/B testing platforms (Optimizely, VWO) to coordinate experiments.
  • Experience with ad policy compliance, creative review processes and detection/prevention of fraud and low-quality traffic.

Soft Skills

  • Analytical mindset with a strong bias for data-driven decision making and the ability to communicate insights to non-technical stakeholders.
  • Excellent written and verbal communication skills to craft clear reports, creative briefs and cross-functional updates.
  • Problem-solving and troubleshooting skills to quickly isolate performance issues and implement practical solutions under tight timelines.
  • Detail-oriented project management with proven ability to manage multiple campaigns, deadlines and budget priorities concurrently.
  • Curiosity and continuous learning orientation to keep pace with fast-evolving paid media platforms, measurement innovations and industry trends.
  • Collaborative team player who can influence cross-functional partners (creative, product, analytics) without direct authority.
  • Adaptability to prioritize opportunistic tests and react to platform outages, policy changes or competitive shifts.
  • Strong time management and organization skills to maintain campaign hygiene, naming conventions and documentation.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Marketing, Advertising, Business, Communications, Economics, Data Analytics or related field OR equivalent practical experience managing paid media campaigns.

Preferred Education:

  • Bachelor’s or Master’s in Marketing, Digital Media, Analytics, or MBA with a concentration in digital marketing.
  • Certifications such as Google Ads Certification, Google Analytics Individual Qualification (GA4), Meta Blueprint, DV360/The Trade Desk certification are highly desirable.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Marketing / Digital Marketing
  • Advertising / Media Studies
  • Business / Economics
  • Data Analytics / Statistics
  • Communications

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 2–5 years of hands-on paid media experience for individual contributor roles; 4+ years preferred for higher complexity accounts or larger budgets.

Preferred:

  • 3–5+ years managing multi-channel paid media (search, social, programmatic) with direct responsibility for campaign P&L, budget management and measurable business outcomes.
  • Proven experience scaling acquisition campaigns, improving ROAS/CPA, and implementing tracking and attribution solutions in privacy-first environments.
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