Paid Media Manager

Paid Media Manager

Full-time · Fully remote · South Africa

Correlate

About us

Correlate is a Johannesburg-based performance marketing and strategy agency, founded in 2017 by Alex Wright and Jake Rubinstein. We run demand generation for considered-purchase brands in energy and solar, industrial, professional services, financial services, luxury goods, hospitality and iGaming, across Africa, Europe, the Middle East, APAC, Australasia and North America. The work spans B2B and B2C: lead generation, eCommerce, subscription services, SaaS and iGaming.

We are small by design. Every person on the team is visible, trusted with real accounts and expected to carry their weight. There is nowhere to hide, and we like it that way.

Our line is "the glue between digital ambition and success." We are building technology on top of our services, which means the person running our media has to run it with structure, because structured work is what our technology learns from.

Read this before you apply

We have hired for this role before and got it wrong. The pattern was always one of four things, so we are naming them.

• Tasks written on scraps of paper with no order and no priority. Nobody could tell what was being worked on or why.
• Fixing a performance dip by moving money between campaigns, without asking what caused the dip.
• Running campaigns without understanding what the platform was doing underneath. If you cannot explain why an account did what it did, you cannot fix it.
• Falling into paid media by accident. People who do not love this discipline outside of work stop paying attention inside it, and attention to detail is the whole job.

One more thing, said plainly. If you are here to collect twelve months on a CV and leave, we are not your agency. We are looking for someone who wants to build a career.

We are a fully remote team and meet in person when the work calls for it. Remote changes nothing about the standard. Our clients are large global businesses and the people inside them have targets that depend on what we deliver. Performance is a daily mantra. You succeed when your accounts succeed, and not otherwise.

If you already keep a written prioritised optimisation log, read platform release notes for fun and get irritated when a campaign is structured badly, keep reading.

The role

The Performance Media Manager owns the day-to-day running of our clients' paid media. You plan campaigns, build them, run them across search, social, display, video and programmatic, work directly with publishers and ad technology partners, and adjust the moving parts of a constantly changing platform set to hit targets. You own accounts, not tasks.

You report to senior leadership and work daily with our strategists, who set the positioning and the plan. You make the plan perform.

This is a hands-on role. From day one you are inside live accounts with real budgets. There is no ramp-up period behind a larger team.

What you will do

1. Own account performance (the core of the job)

• Run a portfolio of client accounts end to end: targets, pacing, structure, bids, audiences, creative rotation, landing page feedback and conversion tracking.
• Check every account every working day. Know its number, know its trend, know its next action before anyone asks.
• Diagnose before you act. When performance moves, find and verify the cause (auction, tracking, creative, audience, landing page, seasonality, competitor) and write it down before you change anything.
• Escalate early. A risk flagged on Slack is a plan. The same risk discovered on Friday is a client conversation we did not want to have.

2. Plan and build campaigns

• Turn a strategist's brief into a media plan: channel mix, budget split, audience architecture, creative requirements, measurement plan and expected outcomes, with the assumptions stated.
• Build campaigns cleanly. Naming conventions, UTM discipline, conversion setup and audience hygiene are non-negotiable, because everything downstream depends on them.
• Work across Google Ads (Search, Performance Max, Demand Gen, YouTube), Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok, Microsoft Advertising, programmatic and direct publisher placements. Add new platforms as clients need them.
• Run structured tests: one variable, a hypothesis, a decision rule and a date. Log every test and its result.

3. Publishers and ad technology partners

• Negotiate and manage direct publisher buys, programmatic partners and affiliate or network arrangements where a client's vertical calls for it.
• Own the technology layer around the media: tag management, consent and conversion tracking, feeds, CRM and offline conversion imports, brand safety and verification tools.
• Keep up with platform changes (automation, privacy, measurement, AI-driven bidding and creative) and tell the team what it means for our accounts before it lands.

4. Budget and pacing

• Manage client budgets to plan. Overspend and underspend are both failures. Track daily, reconcile monthly, flag variance before month-end.
• Keep a documented pacing system for every account. If you leave for two weeks, someone else can pick it up from the file.

5. Structure, reporting and the record

• Run your work off a Monday.com board: every account, every planned optimisation, dated and prioritised, visible to the founders and the strategy team. Paper lists do not exist here.
• Maintain an optimisation log per account: what changed, why, what happened. This is the asset that outlives any single campaign.
• Produce error-free client reports that explain performance in plain language and name the next action. Numbers without a reason are not a report.
• Use AI tools in your daily work to move faster on analysis, build and reporting, and show the team what works.

What good looks like

• Day 30: You have every account on your board, a pacing file per account and an optimisation log started. You can explain each account's structure and current risk to a founder without notes.
• Day 60: Performance conversations are led by you. You have run at least three structured tests with logged results and made at least one recommendation a strategist adopted.
• Day 90: Your accounts are pacing to plan, targets are on track or the miss is explained and being fixed, and you have found and fixed a tracking or structural problem nobody asked you to look for.

Who we are looking for

Character first. Skills second. We can teach a platform. We cannot teach someone to care about the result.

Character

• You love this discipline. You read about it, test things on your own time and have opinions about platform changes before we ask.
• You are structured by nature. A written plan, an ordered list and a dated board are how you think, not a rule you follow.
• You think in causes. You want to know why the number moved before you touch it.
• You tie your own success to the account's success. A good week is one where the client hit target, not one where you were busy.
• You want to stay. You see a small agency with global clients as a place to build a career, not a stepping stone.
• You treat client money as your own. Every rand and dollar of media spend has a reason.
• You work well remotely because you are disciplined, not because nobody is watching. You are available and responsive during working hours and you show up in person when the team needs to meet.

Skills and experience

• Two or more years running paid media accounts you personally owned end to end: plan, build, optimise, report, client conversation. Not a slice of an account inside a large agency team. You will be asked to prove ownership, and we will check with your references.
• Hands-on Google Ads, Meta Ads Manager and LinkedIn Campaign Manager. Microsoft Advertising, DV360 or another programmatic platform is an advantage.
• Working knowledge of GA4, Google Tag Manager and conversion tracking. You can find a broken tag and fix it, or know exactly what to tell the developer.
• Strong in Google Sheets or Excel: pacing, pivots, lookups, basic modelling.
• Experience buying from or negotiating with publishers, networks or ad technology vendors is an advantage.
• Experience across more than one model (lead generation, eCommerce, subscription, SaaS, iGaming) is an advantage. Each one measures success differently and you will run more than one.
• Written English that is short, clear and correct. You will write to clients and report to their leadership.
• Google Ads and Meta certifications current or completed within your first quarter.

What you get

• Your own accounts from day one, with direct exposure to the founders, the strategy team and international clients.
• Paid certifications and protected time to keep your skills current. We treat platform learning as part of the job.
• A seat at the point where our services become technology. The structured account data you produce feeds the intelligence layer we are building.
• A team that fixes problems rather than hides them, and expects the same from you.
• A clear path. This seat grows into head of media as the agency scales.
• Market-related salary

Our process

• Complete the relevant questionnaire, sent via email.
• A 20-minute introductory call.
• A practical designed to test critical thinking, AI use and presentation skills.
• A final presentation and interview.