Senior Performance Marketing Manager (Remote, Philadelphia)

About the role

Blacksmith Agency runs PPC and SEO for clients across multifamily, B2B and technical verticals. As Senior Performance Marketing Manager you lead that department. The PPC strategist and the SEO strategist report to you and they are the specialists in their channels. Right now nobody owns this function, which is the whole reason this seat is open. This is a management seat, not a senior individual contributor one. You will not be building campaigns, and on technical SEO your strategist will know more than you do. That is the arrangement, not a gap. You carry channel strategy and where budget goes as accounts scale. The strategists carry the execution of it, and you carry whether the department delivers.

Responsibilities

• Own the quality bar, development, reviews, and performance‑management decisions for the PPC strategist and the SEO strategist.
• Define the standard the work is held to: what a good audit looks like, what gets checked before work leaves the agency, and how an account is reported.
• Hold two specialists to the defined standards and own client results across the whole function, including the honesty of reporting.
• Escalate when an account is at risk: diagnose the issue, direct the strategist who fixes it, and join the client call.
• Determine channel strategy and allocate budget as accounts scale.
• Articulate what the agency can credibly deliver to sales before a deal is sold.
• Create the hiring plan for the department and conduct first‑round interviews for your own team within about a quarter.

Requirements

• Experience managing strategists or specialists who have reported to you, including responsibility for their reviews, development, and performance‑management decisions.
• Managing accounts alone does not satisfy this requirement.
• 7+ years of experience across paid media and SEO.
• Owning only one channel while sitting beside the other does not meet the requirement.
• Sufficient depth in Google Ads, GA4, Search Console, Meta, and Microsoft Ads to distinguish good work from work that merely looks good (a lower bar than doing it, a higher bar than reading a report).
• Ability to discuss one account you turned around: the metric, the figure before, the figure after, and why the change worked; the diagnosis must be yours, regardless of who executed the changes.
• Comfortable being the client‑facing owner when an account underperforms; the escalation call comes to you, not to the strategist.
• Agency‑level experience managing many accounts simultaneously.
• Do not apply if you have never had anyone report to you, never owned someone’s review, or never had to performance‑manage anyone.
• Do not apply if you have only ever run one channel.
• Do not apply if all of your experience is in‑house on a single brand.
• Do not apply if your primary goal is to keep building campaigns yourself; this role is a management position, not an individual‑contributor role.