Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Head of Performance Marketing

🎯 Role Definition

The Head of Performance Marketing is a senior marketing leader accountable for designing and executing measurable paid media strategies that drive customer acquisition, revenue growth, and efficient unit economics. This role leads cross-functional paid media teams (search, social, programmatic, affiliate), defines media mix and bidding strategies, owns ROAS/CPA targets, partners closely with analytics, product, and engineering to build scalable acquisition funnels, and continuously experiments to improve lifetime value (LTV) and retention. The Head of Performance Marketing is both a hands-on campaign operator and a strategic leader who translates business goals into testable media plans, budget allocation, and attribution-driven measurement frameworks.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Senior Performance Marketing Manager (Paid Search/Social/Programmatic)
Director of Paid Media / Paid Acquisition
Head of Growth or Growth Marketing Lead

Advancement To:

VP of Growth / VP of Marketing
Chief Marketing Officer (CMO)
Head of Digital & Growth Strategy

Lateral Moves:

Head of Growth
Director of Product Marketing
Head of CRM / Lifecycle Marketing

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Lead development and execution of a cross-channel paid acquisition strategy (search, social, display, video, programmatic, connected TV and affiliate) that delivers sustainable customer acquisition at target CPA and ROAS metrics while optimizing for quality, LTV, and incremental revenue.
Own full-funnel paid media planning and budget allocation — set quarterly and annual media budgets, prioritize spend by channel and campaign, and reallocate based on performance and seasonality to maximize ROI and margin contribution.
Build and manage a high-performing performance marketing organization: recruit, mentor, and scale in-house teams and external agency partnerships across paid search, social, programmatic, creative, and analytics functions.
Design and run rigorous experimentation and testing roadmaps (A/B tests, holdout experiments, incrementality and lift studies) to validate channel contribution, creative permutations, bidding strategies, and landing page experiences.
Develop and maintain advanced attribution and measurement strategies (multi-touch, MMM, probabilistic/deterministic hybrid models) in collaboration with analytics and data engineering to ensure accurate ROAS and LTV reporting.
Implement and optimize automated bidding strategies, rules-based optimization, and algorithmic media buying across Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising, Meta (Facebook/Instagram), TikTok, X (Twitter), LinkedIn, and DSP platforms to improve efficiency and scale.
Define and monitor a clear performance metric framework: CPA, ROAS, CAC, LTV, CTR, conversion rate, retention cohorts, and contribution margin — deliver weekly performance reviews and executive dashboards.
Partner with Product, Engineering and Analytics to instrument tracking, events, server-side and client-side data layers, and clean room integrations to reduce data leakage and ensure privacy-compliant attribution.
Oversee creative strategy for paid channels: develop hypotheses for creative testing, approve messaging and creative assets, and implement dynamic creative optimization (DCO) to increase engagement and conversion rates.
Negotiate commercial terms and strategic partnerships with publishers, ad networks, DSPs, and affiliate partners to secure favorable inventory, scale, and first-look or beta access opportunities.
Drive international expansion of paid acquisition efforts by localizing media strategies, measuring incremental lift across markets, and establishing regional channel playbooks and vendor relationships.
Create and present executive-level performance reports, quarterly business reviews, and forecasts for CAC, payback period, and marketing-driven revenue to the CEO and cross-functional leadership.
Establish and enforce governance, SOPs, and escalation paths for campaign launches, budget controls, brand safety, ad policy compliance, and fraud detection across programmatic and social ecosystems.
Lead lifecycle and retargeting strategy across paid channels in coordination with CRM and retention teams to improve activation, retention, and cross-sell metrics while managing frequency and creative fatigue.
Collaborate with data science to build predictive models for audience targeting, propensity scoring, and lookalike strategies that increase targeting precision and campaign efficiency.
Manage complex vendor stack and tech integrations (tag managers, CDPs, ad servers, analytics suites, DSPs) to automate workflows, enrich audiences, and minimize time-to-insight for campaign optimization.
Implement privacy-first solutions for measurement (server-side tracking, conversion modeling, identity resolution, consent frameworks) and ensure compliance with GDPR, CCPA, and other local regulations while preserving signal quality.
Identify and capture new growth channels and platforms (emerging social platforms, programmatic audio/video, connected TV and streaming, native ads, influencer paid collaborations) and test go-to-market approaches with small bets and rapid learnings.
Drive alignment between growth, brand, and product marketing to ensure consistent messaging, brand safety, and measurement across direct response and upper-funnel activities.
Lead quarterly and annual planning cycles — set KPIs, OKRs, and provide hiring and investment plans tied to revenue and unit economics targets.
Serve as the escalation point for high-impact media problems (material drops in performance, account suspensions, major policy issues), mobilize cross-functional responses, and implement corrective action plans.
Foster a culture of data-driven decision making: ensure learnings from paid campaigns are documented, codified into playbooks, and shared across marketing, product and sales teams to accelerate organizational learning.

Secondary Functions

Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
Provide mentorship and training to junior marketers on campaign analytics, bidding strategies, and creative testing best practices.
Manage relationships with legal and privacy teams on ad disclosures, opt-outs, and policy updates that impact targeting and measurement.
Partner with finance to reconcile media spend, forecast marketing investment returns, and comply with budget controls and procurement processes.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

Paid Search / PPC: expert-level management of Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising, shopping campaigns, and search query optimization.
Paid Social: advanced campaign setup and optimization across Meta (Facebook/Instagram), TikTok Ads, X (Twitter), LinkedIn Ads, Pinterest.
Programmatic & DSPs: hands-on experience with DV360, The Trade Desk, MediaMath or equivalent; PMP and private marketplace negotiation and setup.
Analytics & Attribution: proficiency in GA4, Adobe Analytics, attribution modeling, media mix modeling (MMM), and incremental lift testing techniques.
Tagging & Tracking: strong understanding of GTM, pixel management, server-side tracking, and schema for event instrumentation.
Data & SQL: ability to query raw event and attribution data using SQL and interpret cohort analyses and funnel metrics.
BI & Dashboarding: experience with Looker, Tableau, Power BI, or BigQuery for building executive dashboards and automated reporting.
A/B Testing & Experimentation: knowledge of experimentation platforms (Optimizely, VWO) and statistical significance principles for campaign and landing page tests.
CRM & Retention Tools: familiarity with CDPs, email platforms (Braze, Klaviyo), and integrating paid audiences with lifecycle marketing.
Ad Ops & Automation: scripting or automation experience (scripts, rules, APIs) to scale bidding, reporting, and creative optimization workflows.
Privacy & Compliance: working knowledge of GDPR, CCPA, iOS/ATT impacts, SKAdNetwork, and conversion modeling strategies.

Soft Skills

Strategic leadership and stakeholder management — able to translate complex data into clear business recommendations for executives.
Strong analytical mindset with curiosity and a hypothesis-driven approach to problem solving.
Excellent communication and presentation skills for cross-functional teams and external partners.
Team builder and coach — experience hiring, scaling and retaining high-performing marketing teams.
Prioritization and project management — capable of balancing long-term strategy and day-to-day optimization.
Resilience and adaptability in a fast-paced, experimentation-driven environment.
Negotiation skills for vendor contracts, media buys and partnership agreements.
Creative collaboration — partners effectively with creative, product, and brand teams to surface winning ad creative and messaging.
Ethical decision making with a focus on customer privacy and compliant data usage.
Results-oriented with a track record of hitting CAC, ROAS and growth targets.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience in Marketing, Business, Economics, Data Science, Computer Science, or related field.

Preferred Education:

MBA or Master’s degree in Marketing, Analytics, Business Strategy, or Data Science is preferred for senior strategic roles.

Relevant Fields of Study:

Marketing, Digital Marketing, or Advertising
Analytics, Data Science, Statistics, Computer Science
Business Administration, Economics, or Finance

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

8–15+ years in digital marketing with significant experience managing paid media channels and teams; 5+ years in leadership roles preferred.

Preferred:

Proven track record scaling paid acquisition in high-growth consumer or SaaS businesses.
Experience managing six-figure to multi-million-dollar media budgets and achieving predictable CAC, ROAS, and LTV improvements.
Demonstrated success building cross-functional measurement frameworks and running incrementality studies.
Prior experience working with ad tech, DSPs, and data engineering teams to implement privacy-first measurement solutions.
Experience in international market expansion and multi-currency media operations preferred.