Paid Media Specialist - Contractor

Contract Paid Media Specialist – Google Ads & Emerging Channels
Location: Austin, TX or Remote

Type: Contract (fixed-term, transition-scoped) ·
Duration: ~3 months, Nov 2026 – Jan 2027, with potential to extend

About Furnished Finder:
Furnished Finder is the leading two-sided marketplace for monthly furnished rentals, connecting landlords with traveling professionals, remote workers, and relocating families seeking stays of 30 days or more. Trusted by over 7 million travelers each year, the platform offers a growing network of over 300,000 listings and more than 240,000 landlords nationwide — connecting renters to real homes in real communities, without booking fees or hidden costs. Newsweek named Furnished Finder one of America's Best Online Platforms in both 2025 and 2026, ranking it top 5 in the Real Estate category each year. Founded in 2014, the company continues to redefine flexible housing for the modern renter.

Why Join Us 
When you join Furnished Finder, you’re joining a leadership team with 70+ years of combined experience across real estate and travel. As we enter our next phase of growth, we’re looking for curious, motivated self-starters who are excited to learn, build, and grow alongside an industry-leading team. With roles based in Austin, TX (our HQ) and remote opportunities available, we’re growing quickly—and we’d love to meet you.

Job Overview:
You'll own the full weekly optimization cycle across our paid media portfolio and run it on repeat:
Observe → Recommend → Act → (and the cycle begins again)

Google Ads — Search, YouTube, and App (Universal App) campaigns — is the core of the role and where most of the weekly work lives today. But our channel mix is growing, and we want someone who can carry the same loop into platforms like Reddit Ads, TikTok Ads, StackAdapt, and emerging/AI-native ad surfaces (e.g., ChatGPT and other conversational-search ad products) as we expand and test into them. Platform-specific tactics differ; the discipline — watch the metrics, diagnose, recommend, execute, measure — is the same everywhere.
This is a hands-on-keyboard role, but it's more than execution. We want someone who watches the metrics that matter, turns what they see into clear, prioritized recommendations, and then makes the changes in-platform — closing the loop end to end every week. We set the overall strategy, objectives, and guardrails; within them, you own the analysis, the call on what to change, and the change itself.

Responsibilities:
What you'll do — the weekly cycle
1. Observe — monitor performance and the metrics that matter
- Monitor performance across every active channel — Google Ads (Search, YouTube, App) today, plus Reddit, TikTok, StackAdapt, and new platforms as they come online — against our KPIs ( CPA /CPL, ROAS , spend pacing, conversion volume and quality, impression/share metrics, and marketplace supply/demand signals by geo).
- Keep every account healthy: watch pacing, disapprovals, policy issues, broken links, and conversion-tracking integrity across platforms.
- Alert proactively — flag anomalies, pacing drift, performance drops, disapprovals, and emerging opportunities before they become problems, with the right urgency and the right people looped in.
2. Recommend — analyze and provide actionable insights (a core part of this role)
- Diagnose why performance is moving — not just that CPA rose, but what's driving it (query or audience mix, competition, creative fatigue, bid/budget, targeting, tracking) — and account for how each platform behaves differently.
- Turn the data into a prioritized, actionable weekly recommendation set : specific proposed changes with the rationale, expected impact, and risk level — ready for quick review and sign-off.
- Spot and size opportunities: new keywords, audiences, and placements; budget reallocation toward marginal return (including across platforms); creative tests worth running; structural fixes; and which emerging channels are worth leaning into or pulling back from.
- Bring a point of view. We're hiring you to think, not just to wait for a task list — you own the "what should we do about it" step.
3. Act — make the changes in the platform
- Implement the approved changes cleanly and on time across platforms: bids and budgets, keyword/audience/placement and negative updates, targeting changes, ad/creative/asset rotations, new campaigns and ad groups, RSAs, and video/app/native assets.
- Operate within our autonomy guardrails — low-risk, repeatable changes run on a standing cadence; higher-impact changes land paused or go through approval first.
- Enforce account hygiene everywhere: naming conventions, UTM standards, and campaign taxonomy so every account stays organized and reportable.
- Log every change (what, where, which platform, why, when) so there's a clean audit trail — then measure the result, which feeds the next Observe cycle.
Keeping the loop turning
- Join a short weekly sync to align on priorities and review the prior cycle's results.
- Continuously tighten the loop: each week's changes become the baseline you observe, analyze, and build on the next — within and across channels.

Qualifications:
- 3+ years hands-on managing and optimizing paid media , with deep, recent execution in Google Ads across Search, YouTube/video, and App ( UAC ) campaigns — not just oversight of someone who did the clicks.
- Multi-platform range — hands-on experience running paid campaigns beyond Google (e.g., Reddit Ads, TikTok Ads, StackAdapt, Meta, Microsoft/Bing, or other native/programmatic platforms), and the adaptability and curiosity to pick up new and emerging ad surfaces quickly.
- Analytical and self-directed — you can read a performance picture, diagnose the cause, and come back with a prioritized set of recommendations and a clear rationale. This is the part of the role we care about most.
- Fluent in the Google Ads UI and Google Ads Editor , and comfortable getting fluent in any platform's manager/editor; able to make bulk changes safely and quickly.
- Strong on the mechanics: automated/Smart Bidding (tCPA/tROAS and platform equivalents), match types, negatives, audiences, placements, creative/asset formats, and campaign settings.
- Disciplined and detail-obsessed — you double-check your work, follow conventions, and document as you go.
- Reliable on cadence: you consistently close the weekly loop on time across channels.
- Comfortable operating within someone else's strategy and guardrails — you own analysis and execution, and escalate genuinely strategic calls rather than freelancing them.
- Clear communicator who can explain what changed, why, and what it did in plain language.
Nice to have
- Strong with conversion tracking and tag validation (Web analytics platforms, Google Tag Manager, platform pixels) and quick to spot when tracking breaks.
- Two-sided marketplace or lead-gen experience (or real estate / rentals / travel).
- Experience standing up and testing newer or AI-native ad platforms (Reddit, TikTok, StackAdapt, conversational-search/ChatGPT ad products) from scratch.
- Familiarity with programmatic display buying platforms (DSPs), competitive-intelligence tools (e.g., Adthena, Auction Insights), or app measurement (SKAdNetwork, MMPs like Branch/AppsFlyer/Adjust).
- Experience running paid media inside a documented playbook / guardrail system.
- Platform certifications (Google Ads Search/Video/Apps, and others).

Engagement details
- Commitment: [~15–25] hours/week, scaling with the weekly workload and the number of active channels; heavier at the start as you get oriented, steadier once the cadence is set.
- Term: Fixed-term contract, ~Nov 2026 through end of January 2027, with the possibility of extension.
- Setup: Remote, U.S.based, working [Central time-zone overlap]. You'll work in our accounts using access we provision — we retain full ownership of all accounts, data, and assets.
- Tools you'll use: Computer to be provided for access to tools like slack, confluence, etc…. + Google Ads + Google Ads Editor, the manager/editor for each active channel, and [Amplitude, GA4 , Looker Studio, Adthena, and our change-log/PM tools as applicable].
 
Furnished Finder is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.