Performance Specialist (Search)

The role at a glance

Level	Junior to Mid
Employment type	Full time
Remuneration	$65,000 to $80,000 including super
Reporting to	Squad Lead, with a craft line to the Head of Google
Location	Remote. Local Australians and overseas
Specialisation	Paid search. Google and ChatGPT Ads

Who we are

Ecom Nation is Australia's fastest growing, 100 percent ecommerce focused agency. We are paid search and paid social specialists. That means Google and ChatGPT Ads, Meta, TikTok, Pinterest and whatever comes next, plus the product feeds underneath all of it.

We are a remote agency, built with local Australians and people overseas. We hire the best person for the job and we have never much cared which timezone they sit in. What holds it together is how much we talk: Slack all day, cameras on for the calls that matter, and squads small enough that everyone knows what everyone else is working on.

How it all works

Work happens in Squads. A Squad is a small team that owns its clients outright, led by an Ecommerce Strategist who is also the Squad Lead. You would sit in a Squad as its paid search specialist.

Your Squad Lead

Your day to day lead. They set the strategy with the client and own the relationship. You bring them the account read, they bring you the commercial context, and the plan comes out of that conversation rather than a brief thrown over a wall.

The Head of Google

Bia leads Google and ChatGPT Ads craft across every squad. She sets the standards, reviews the builds, runs the training and is who you go to when you want a second opinion on a structure or a feed decision. This is your craft line, and it is where most of your growth will come from.

Account management

Strategists own the client relationship and the reporting rhythm. You are on the calls and on the channel too, because the person who built the campaign usually gives the best answer about it.

Daily comms on Slack

We are unusually active with our clients. Most have a shared Slack channel and we are in it every day, answering questions, flagging things early and sharing wins as they land. No waiting for the monthly report.

What the job actually is now

Five years ago this role was manual work. Keywords, bids, ad groups, negatives. Most of those levers now sit inside Performance Max and AI Max, and Google decides them.

So the job moved up. You are not pulling the levers any more, you are setting the conditions Google optimises inside, then proving it is behaving. Those conditions are the feed, the asset set, the audience signals, the exclusions, the conversion actions and the budget boundaries.

Get them right and automation compounds in your favour. Get one wrong and it compounds the other way just as quickly. That is why care and quality control matter more in this role than they used to, not less, and why we back our specialists with real training and review rather than leaving you to find out the hard way.

What you would own

The build

Campaigns, asset groups, audience signals and exclusions to agency standard. You challenge a build that does not meet it, including your own.

The feed

Merchant Center diagnostics, custom labels, feed rules, disapprovals and exclusions. The feed is a channel here, not somebody else's problem.

The guardrails

Brand and term exclusions, URL exclusions, budget boundaries, conversion action hygiene. The frame automation is allowed to run inside.

The client relationship

This is a client facing role. Clients get to know you as the person on their account and come to you directly, which is one of the more rewarding parts of the job.

Where the time goes

Band	Share	What it covers
Execution	50%	Builds, feed, guardrails, tracking checks, structure audits
Client	20%	Questions and requests, onboarding, planning sessions, meetings
Commercial	10%	Flagging gaps early, finding wasted spend, working to MER and ROAS targets
Administrative	20%	Timesheets, task hygiene, documentation

What we are looking for

If you do not tick every box, apply anyway. We have hired on trajectory before and been very glad we did.

Three or more years in paid search, across multiple clients and accounts. Agency or high growth ecommerce ideally.
Detail obsessed. You find a broken conversion action, a duplicate audience or a feed rule excluding half the catalogue in seconds.
You govern automation rather than trusting it. You know what PMax and AI Max took away, what you still control, and how to tell whether either is working.
You read the business, not just the platform. You know what MER is, why it is not ROAS, and which one the client is judged on.
You work well with room to move. We will give you real ownership early and we would rather support you than supervise you.
You use the tools available. We run an internal AI brain with skills for audits, reporting and analysis. You will use it, you will improve it, and you will never publish a number from it you have not checked against source.

Why Ecom Nation

Access to cutting edge knowledge from industry leading ecommerce experts
A team named Best Digital Agency by the National Online Retailers Association
Fully remote, with genuine flexibility about where and when you work
Additional birthday and anniversary leave
Continuous career development, with craft training run by the Head of Google
Bi-annual whole company offsites

Apply

About you

Full name

Phone

Where you are based

Work rights

Notice period

Salary expectation

Years running paid search

LinkedIn or portfolio optional

Screening questions

Six questions. A few hundred words each is plenty. We are reading for how you think and how carefully you work, so specifics beat polish, and we would rather have a real number you are unsure about than a tidy answer with nothing in it.

1. A new Shopping or Performance Max campaign is built and about to go live on a client's budget. What do you check before you turn it on?

Be specific and be exhaustive. This is the part of the job that goes wrong most often and costs the most when it does.

2. What is the hardest thing you have fixed in Merchant Center or Google Tag Manager, and how did you work out what was wrong?

We want the diagnostic path, not just the outcome. What you checked, what you ruled out, and what you would do differently now.

3. Tell us about a time the product feed was the actual problem.

What the symptom looked like in the account, how you traced it back to the feed, and what you changed. Custom labels, feed rules, disapprovals, missing attributes, whatever it was.

4. Performance Max took most of the manual levers away. What do you still genuinely control, and how do you tell whether it is working?

Signals, exclusions, feed segmentation, asset groups, conversion actions, budget boundaries. And then: what evidence would convince you it is doing something a Shopping campaign would not have done anyway?

5. Where have you found wasted spend in an account, and what did you do about it?

A real example with real numbers. If you cannot recall the exact figure, say so and give the range. We would rather have an honest estimate than a tidy one.

6. A client emails you directly, results are down this month, and your Squad Lead is on leave. What do you send back?

Write the reply, or describe it. This role is client facing and this situation is not hypothetical.

Anything else we should know optional

Documents

Your CV

PDF or Word, up to 8MB.

Your cover letter

PDF or Word, up to 8MB.

Your details go to the Ecom Nation hiring team and nowhere else.

Application received

Thanks for taking the time. Your CV and cover letter are with us and we read every application. If it looks like a fit you will hear from someone on the team.