Senior Paid Search Strategist (B2B SaaS) – Contractor

Key Responsibilities

• Own the day-to-day management of paid search campaigns across Google Ads and Microsoft Ads/Bing, ensuring campaigns are well structured, correctly targeted and aligned to business priorities
• Maintain strong account hygiene, including campaign structure, keyword groupings, naming conventions, tracking and budget allocation. Ensure campaigns are set up to effectively reach Basware’s core enterprise ICP across priority markets, leveraging account-based targeting strategies (customer match lists, ABM audience layering, intent data integration) to focus spend on high-value accounts
• Build new campaigns and actively evolve existing activity, including launching new initiatives, refining structures, and scaling or pausing campaigns in line with performance and business priorities
• Optimise campaigns to improve both efficiency metrics (CTR, conversion rate, CPL) and pipeline-stage metrics (cost per opportunity, SQL conversion rate, pipeline velocity), ensuring optimisation decisions are tied to downstream revenue impact rather than top-of-funnel volume alone
• Develop and refine keyword strategy aligned to high-intent B2B audiences across finance, shared services and IT personas. Ensure keywords are mapped effectively to buyer journey stages and relevant landing pages
• Identify opportunities to improve coverage across priority solution areas, balancing demand capture with demand generation activity where appropriate

Tracking, Attribution & Performance Insight

• Own the paid search attribution framework end-to-end: define and maintain multi-touch attribution models in partnership with Marketing Operations, ensuring paid search contribution to pipeline and ARR is measurable and defensible
• Maintain robust campaign tracking including UTM parameters, HubSpot and CRM/Salesforce data alignment
• Own performance reporting with pipeline and ARR contribution as the primary KPIs, supported by channel efficiency metrics (CPC, CPM, CPL, conversion rates)
• Report on full-funnel economics: cost per SQL, cost per opportunity, pipeline sourced vs. influenced, and paid search contribution to closed-won ARR
• Ensure high-quality conversion signals and audience data are fed back into platforms to improve AI-driven optimisation and bidding performance
• Report beyond channel-level performance to provide a clear view of full-funnel impact, translating insights into actionable recommendations to improve campaign effectiveness, budget allocation and ROI

Collaboration & Cross-Channel Alignment

• Work closely with the Paid Media Manager, Marketing Ops, SEO and Content teams to ensure alignment across keyword strategy, messaging and landing page experience
• Ensure paid search activity complements broader paid media efforts across other platforms, and vice versa, with a consistent and coordinated approach to targeting, messaging and budget allocation
• Provide input into landing page performance and CRO opportunities, ensuring paid traffic is effectively converted

Ai, Automation & Platform Evolution

• Leverage platform automation and AI-driven features within Google Ads and Microsoft Ads, including Smart Bidding, Performance Max, Demand Gen and other relevant campaign types, ensuring they are implemented and optimised effectively
• Apply a structured test-and-learn approach to automation-led campaign types, maintaining the right balance between automation, control and performance transparency
• Monitor and respond to the impact of evolving search behaviours and AI-driven features, including changes that affect impression share, click-through behaviour and overall paid performance
• Test new formats, targeting approaches and campaign types to identify scalable growth opportunities

Platform & Partner Management

• Maintain an effective working relationship with Google and other key platform partners, ensuring Basware benefits from relevant platform updates, beta opportunities, best practices and strategic support
• Use platform partner input critically and commercially, balancing external recommendations with internal performance data, market priorities and business objectives
• Monitor competitor activity through auction insights, share of voice analysis and competitive intelligence tools (e.g. SEMrush, SpyFu), adjusting bidding and targeting strategies based on competitive dynamics in key markets