Senior Director, Paid Marketing (Remote)
About The Position
U.S. News & World Report is a digital media company focused on providing rankings, data journalism, and advice to help citizens, consumers, business leaders, and policymakers make informed decisions. With a history of 90 years, our platforms on usnews.com cover areas like Education, Health, Money, Travel, and Careers, reaching millions of users seeking expert advice. Our signature 'Best' series of consumer guides, including Best Colleges and Best Hospitals, are authoritative resources. We also host U.S. News Live conferences. We value a diverse and inclusive workplace where everyone can succeed. This role is for a Senior Director of Paid Marketing to lead the strategy, execution, and optimization of performance marketing across paid search and paid social. The ideal candidate combines strategic thinking with operational rigor, using data, automation, and collaboration to drive scalable growth. This position involves managing a significant budget, setting customer acquisition strategy through paid channels, and partnering with various departments like Data Science, Engineering, Product, Design, Partnerships, and Legal.
Requirements
- Minimum of ten (10) years of paid marketing experience
- Inclusive of 4 years leading teams at the Director level or above
- Bachelor’s degree in a related field or equivalent experience required
- Demonstrated track record of scaling paid search and paid social programs at meaningful budget levels (eight-figure annual spend or more)
- Deep technical fluency with major ad platforms and analytics tools
- Strong command of attribution methodology — MMM, MTA, incrementality testing — and the trade-offs between them
- Comfort partnering with Data Science on statistical concepts: causal inference, geo-experiments, holdout design
- Experience driving automation through APIs, scripts, or third-party tools
- Excellent communicator who can translate complex measurement concepts for executives and align cross-functional partners
- Bias for action, strong commercial instincts, and intellectual honesty about what's working and what isn't
Nice To Haves
- Background in a variety of lead gen marketplaces
- Experience in financial services categories, particularly insurance
Responsibilities
- Define and own the multi-year vision and quarterly roadmap for paid search and paid social across all key platforms (Google, Bing, Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn, Reddit, etc.)
- Set and manage budget allocation across channels, campaigns, and audiences to maximize ROI and align with broader business goals
- Lead, mentor, and grow a team of channel managers, analysts, and specialists
- Drive day-to-day campaign performance: creative testing, audience strategy, bid management, landing page experimentation, and budget pacing
- Build a culture of relentless testing — hypothesis-driven experimentation, clean read-outs, and rapid iteration
- Identify and deploy automation opportunities (smart bidding, dynamic creative, feed management, scripts/APIs) to scale efficiently
- Analyze and build segmentations & audiences in and outside of the ad platforms to inform decisions on Revenue, Profit, and Quality of leads
- Lead building a lead scoring system to maximize Revenue, Profit, and Quality across campaigns, including leading cross-sell strategy and utilizing multitouch and LTV models
- Implement and manage advanced attribution models to understand the full-funnel impact of performance spend
- Partner with Data Science to refine LTV/CAC calculations, build and maintain incrementality testing programs, and use deep-funnel signals to inform bidding strategies
- Develop the measurement framework that distinguishes incremental growth from harvested demand and use it to make smart reinvestment decisions
- Own paid marketing reporting: dashboards, exec updates, and the narrative behind the numbers
- Partner with Data Engineering to ensure clean, reliable data pipelines for attribution and optimization
- Work with Product Management to align acquisition funnels and product experiences to maximize conversion and yield
- Collaborate with Partnerships on co-marketing, pricing, and platform-specific opportunities
- Work with design & brand partners to produce performance-grade assets at the volume modern platforms demand
- Engage Legal and Privacy on consent frameworks, compliance, ad policies & creative approval
Benefits
- paid vacation time
- medical
- tuition reimbursement
- training
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Director
