Paid Search Strategist, DTC eCommerce (Remote)

Everyone can run a search campaign. Almost nobody can tell you whether it worked.

That is the whole job.

Google will happily show you a 6x ROAS built almost entirely out of people who already knew your client's name. It will auto apply assets you did not ask for. It will report a number that makes a client feel great and tells you nothing about whether you grew the business.

So we do not hire people to manage Google Ads. We hire marketers who can tell the difference between demand they created and demand they harvested, and who can prove it to a client's face.

At Sweat Pants Agency we work with around 50 DTC and eCommerce brands, 20 to 25 of them on paid media. We spend $6 to $9M a month on Meta and $1 to $2M a month on Google. We are the only agency behind two INC #1 fastest growing brands, both from zero.

Google is where we are putting our next round of growth. You would own a set of those accounts end to end.

Here is what "end to end" actually means.

You are the account manager. We do not have any. You talk to the client directly. You write the updates, you run the calls, and you defend the call you made. The reason we do it this way is ownership. When you are the person answering for the account, it is your result, not somebody else's summary of your result.

You own the whole funnel, not the campaign. Feed and Merchant Center, search and Shopping and PMax, Demand Gen and YouTube, the landing page, and the conversion tracking underneath all of it. If the feed is why Shopping is starving, that is yours. If the page is why the clicks do not convert, that is yours too. Our team ships advertorials, comparison pages, and PDPs in Claude Code, deploys them to Vercel, points a subdomain at them, and tests them live before anything touches the client's Shopify theme.

You are expected to have an opinion about attribution and to defend it. We optimize to NC-CPA and NC-ROAS, not blended and not last click. We have turned brand search off to see what actually shifts to organic. We run geo holdouts. If a campaign is not incremental, we would rather know than keep the number.

You can live anywhere. We are remote and we hire worldwide. The one hard requirement is that you can take client calls during US Eastern business hours, because you are the client's point of contact and there is nobody else to cover it. The rest of your day is yours. Nobody here is on a time clock. We judge you on output.

If you want a lane, a ticket queue, and a scope document, this is a bad fit and we will both know it fast.

If you want to own the whole picture and be judged on whether the number moved, keep reading.

Requirements

What the job looks like

• Own a set of DTC accounts as the strategist, the buyer, and the client's direct point of contact. Budgets run from $5k/mo to well into six figures a month.
• Own the client relationship. There is no account manager between you and them. You present the results, the plan, and the reasoning, and you are the one who answers when something is not working.
• Audit before you touch anything. Every account we take over gets a real review first: campaign and ad group structure, keywords versus search terms, negatives, bidding strategy per campaign type, impression share, feed health, landing pages, audiences, and conversion tracking. Then a Loom walking the client through what you found. That Loom is how we sell and it is how we keep people.
• Run brand and non brand as different businesses. Brand is mostly assisted conversion and it usually belongs on target impression share, not target CPA. Non brand is where the growth is and where the waste is. Report them separately or you are reporting nothing.
• Know what PMax is actually doing. The most common mistake we see is optimizing PMax against an incremental CAC when half the volume inside it is branded. If you cannot separate those two, you cannot set a target.
• Keep Google's automation on a leash. Auto applied recommendations, auto applied assets, and auto created sitelinks have cost our clients real money. We audit for them on a schedule.
• Own the feed. Merchant Center hygiene, product titles, disapprovals, promotions, and what the feed does to Shopping and PMax delivery.
• Own the tracking. GA4, GTM, Shopify goal imports versus a raw Google Ads tag, enhanced conversions, offline conversion imports for the lead gen accounts. When the numbers do not reconcile, you are the one who finds out why.
• Diagnose the bottleneck, then go fix it. Creative, offer, AOV, landing page, checkout, tracking. Nobody is going to reassign it to another team.
• Build the things the account needs. Landing pages, scripts, reporting, whatever removes the constraint. We are heavy AI users and we expect you to build, not just prompt.

You are a fit if

• You have done this with real money. Hands on Google Ads at meaningful spend on DTC and eCommerce, with results you can walk us through: CPA, ROAS, revenue, and what you actually changed to get them. Shopping and PMax specifically, not just search.
• You are fluent in the whole stack, not one campaign type. Search, Shopping, PMax, Demand Gen, YouTube, Merchant Center, GA4, GTM. Bing is a nice to have.
• You are AI native, and you build. This is a requirement, not a bonus. You should already be using Claude or equivalent as a working tool rather than a novelty, and you should be able to build and ship a landing page with it.
• You can communicate your ideas in English at a native or near native level. You will be in front of clients constantly with nobody in between. You need to explain your thinking clearly, sell an idea on its merits, push back when a client is about to force the account into mediocrity, and raise a problem before it becomes a fire. This matters as much as anything else on this list.
• You are skeptical of your own numbers. You would rather run the holdout than protect the dashboard.
• You can work US Eastern business hours for client calls. Where you live is up to you.
• Bonus: you have built or operated your own Shopify store, or you have run Meta at spend too.

You are not a fit if

• "That was not my role" is in your vocabulary. It is the fastest way to end an interview here. If the feed was the problem on an account you ran, you should have done something about the feed.
• You want to be told what to do this week.
• You need a ticketing system to know what matters.
• You quote blended ROAS as if it settles the question.

Benefits

Why this role is exciting

This is not a maintenance job. Google is where we are putting our next round of growth, and you would have real influence over how we run it.

You will work on real brands with real budgets. We test aggressively. We learn quickly. We build frameworks that scale.

You get trust on day one. You get a lot of autonomy. Some people thrive with it. You will get feedback fast either way, and if you make it through the first 30 days you will probably be here for a long time. Our retention on this team is very good and that is not an accident.

You will grow into senior strategy. We want people who want more responsibility. If you perform, you will grow.