Media Buyer (Google Ads)

Qualifications and requirements

• 5+ years buying Google Ads, and you can prove it. Genuine multi-account experience. Be ready to walk us through real accounts: what was wrong, what you changed, why, and what happened next. Running one large account well is a different skill and it is not this one.
• Lead-gen and local service first. Most of the book is graded on cost per qualified phone call, not ROAS. If ROAS and shopping feeds are all you have done, this is a harder fit.
• Sound judgment on small samples. You know why "40 clicks, no conversions" is usually not a reason to pause anything, and you can explain what would change your mind.
• You can explain a bidding strategy, not just set one. Target CPA and target ROAS, and what happens when a target is too tight versus too loose.
• You understand offline conversion imports. Why Google Ads and a client's booking system disagree, and which one you optimize against.
• Call tracking experience, CallRail preferred. Every account here is graded on tracked phone calls, so the call data is the scoreboard, not a side report.
• You already work with AI and you want more of it. This is not a culture question, it is the job. We use Claude and Claude Code every day and you would too. Not an engineer: someone who reaches for these tools by instinct and can say what they have actually built with them.
• You think in portfolios. Forty accounts is not forty craft projects. What works has to be systematized, not hand-tuned shop by shop.
• Very fluent English, spoken and written. Hard requirement, no exceptions. You will interview shop owners and explain technical findings to non-technical people. We test this on a live call, not from a CV.
• Willing to say "I do not know yet, let me check." Our worst outcomes have all come from confident wrong answers.

No certifications needed. Not a fit if you want to own client relationships, or want part-time alongside other retainers.

Projects

We run Google Ads for about eighteen US small businesses today, heading toward forty. Most are independent auto repair shops in places like Boise, Salt Lake, Wichita and Raleigh. The rest are a mix: a med spa, a pool service company, a forklift dealer, a financial advisor, an e-commerce brand and a home detailing company.What makes us unusual is how much of the account work is automated. We built our own control system that reviews search terms, applies negative keywords inside guardrails, moves bids and budgets within hard drift limits, logs every lever change with attribution, and flags problems before they show up in the numbers. On a normal week it proposes about two thousand changes and asks a human about thirty. The other accounts are run hands-on, and several of them are the more interesting problems in the business.So nobody here spends their day pulling search-term reports. What is left is the deciding, and that is the job we are hiring for.

Job functions

Read this part first, because it is what makes the job unusual: this is not one big account. It is twenty to forty small ones. A typical shop spends $1,000 to $4,000 a month. The largest spends about $7,800.At those budgets you rarely have enough data to test your way to an answer. Forty clicks and no conversion is not evidence that a keyword is dead. Most of this job is making sound decisions on thin data, at volume, without fooling yourself. If your experience is one large account where you could run a clean experiment every fortnight, this will be an uncomfortable fit and we would rather you knew now.You will not be an account manager. We are hiring one of those separately. No monthly review calls, no chasing invoices. You own performance.What you would own:

• Performance across the whole book. Campaign structure, bidding strategy, budget allocation, negative keywords, and knowing when to scale versus protect.
• The decisions the system escalates. Twice a week you work a board of flagged items and rule on them. Early on you stage those rulings for review; once you have earned it, you rule and we read the log.
• Measurement. Conversion tracking, GA4 and GTM, call tracking, offline conversion imports. When the numbers look wrong you find out why before anyone changes a bid.
• Technical discovery for new shops. You interview the owner about what they do and do not do, their service radius, their seasonality. That produces the service definition our automation runs on.

Conditions

Start: immediately. We are hiring now, not for a future quarter.

Base: $2,000 per month, paid in USD as an independent contractor, plus a monthly fee for every account you run:

• Accounts 1 to 20: $25 each
• Accounts 21 to 30: $50 each
• Accounts 31 and beyond: $75 each

Most places pay less per account as the book grows. We do the opposite, so you want the next account rather than resisting it. That is $2,450 today at about 18 accounts, $3,000 at 30 and $3,750 at 40. No bonus scheme, on purpose: you are paid per account, so one that leaves takes its fee with it.

Hours. Full time, overlapping roughly 9am to 3pm US Mountain. Being straight: at today's eighteen accounts the work is closer to thirty hours a week than forty. That will not last, and it is not what we are hiring for.

Process. A paid exercise on a real anonymized account (2 to 3 hours, $150 either way), then two calls.

Desirable skills

• Claude Code or similar AI tooling already in your daily workflow
• Local Services Ads
• Performance Max at small budgets, where the usual playbooks stop working
• Looker Studio
• Spanish
• Experience working inside an agency's own tooling and reporting, not only the Google Ads interface
• You have built or scripted something to take repetitive work off your own plate