Paid Media Strategist

Where you can make an impact:

Strategy & Campaign Ownership

• Own paid social strategy, execution, and performance across multiple verticals, aligning campaigns to each vertical's growth targets, funnel dynamics, and audience needs

• Build campaign structures across Meta, TikTok, and other platforms as needed

• Set objectives, bidding strategy, audience approach, budget allocation, and conversion events per campaign

• Manage campaigns end-to-end: setup, QA, pacing, troubleshooting, optimization

• Build testing plans for new verticals, bidding strategies, conversion events, creative angles, and funnel experiences

Optimization & Performance

• Monitor performance and diagnose whether issues stem from creative fatigue, tracking gaps, funnel friction, audience limits, delivery, or data quality

• Make budget and pacing calls based on performance trends and business priorities

• Stay current on platform, algorithm, privacy, and ad product changes

Reporting & Stakeholder Communication

• Own recurring performance reporting — results, trends, learnings, risks, next steps

• Translate platform performance into business impact for vertical leads and leadership

• Communicate tracking issues, data discrepancies, and testing results clearly and proactively

Data, Tracking & Measurement

• Partner with data, analytics, and engineering teams to define measurement needs and map new conversion events

• Troubleshoot discrepancies between platform and backend data (attribution, event firing, duplicates, timing)

• Help build measurement frameworks that optimize toward lead quality and business outcomes, not just volume

Creative Strategy

• Lead creative strategy across verticals: messaging angles, hooks, scripts, static/video/UGC concepts

• Write creative briefs covering business goal, audience, value prop, and key claims

• Review assets for clarity and platform fit; give feedback through concept, script, and production stages

• Build creative testing roadmaps and turn results into next-round recommendations

Landing Page & Funnel Strategy

• Evaluate landing pages and funnels for message match, conversion flow, and drop-off

• Recommend and support tests across landing pages, advertorials, lead forms, quizzes, and prequalification flows

• Ensure creative, landing pages, and tracking are aligned before launch

Platform Partnerships & Competitive Research

• Manage relationships with platform reps; evaluate their recommendations against NerdWallet's goals and data quality

• Track competitor creative, offers, and funnel approaches; feed insights back into strategy

Your experience:

• 5+ years of paid social experience, ideally in performance marketing or lead generation

• Bachelor's degree in marketing, business, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience

• Direct, hands-on experience running campaigns on both Meta Ads Manager and TikTok Ads Manager is required

• Proven track record scaling paid social budgets (six figures+ in monthly spend preferred) while maintaining or improving CPA/CAC and ROAS

• Experience managing toward lead gen, revenue, ROAS, CPA/CAC, or funnel-based goals

• Ability to build paid media strategy from the ground up — structure, testing, measurement, creative, optimization

• Strong analytical skills, comfortable with both platform and backend business data

• Experience troubleshooting tracking, attribution, or reporting discrepancies

• Experience writing creative briefs and giving feedback to creative teams or external partners

• Strong project management skills across multiple concurrent verticals and workstreams

• Clear, confident communicator who can translate data into recommendations for non-technical audiences

Preferred qualifications:

• Experience advertising on LinkedIn, Reddit, Quora, or X

• Experience in financial services (insurance, lending, wealth, banking, investing, mortgage, home equity, or other regulated categories)

• Experience with lead gen funnels, prequalification/quiz flows, marketplace models, or affiliate/partner revenue models

• Experience optimizing toward backend events — funded loans, booked appointments, matched leads

• Experience with CAPI/server-side tracking and conversion signal quality

• Experience with UGC creative, creator partnerships, or video production workflows

• Comfort working with legal, compliance, or brand review processes in regulated industries