Senior Paid Search Strategist (B2B SaaS) – Contractor

Job Description

Basware is the clear market leader in Invoice Lifecycle Management, trusted by over 6,000 global customers and recognized #1 by Gartner, Forrester, and IDC. We revolutionized how the world’s largest organizations manage and automate AP, processing more than $10 trillion in invoices with unmatched accuracy, compliance, and control. If you’re inspired by innovation, growth, and a value‑driven culture, this is your chance to help shape the future of finance.

We are looking for an experienced Senior Paid Search Strategist (B2B SaaS) to join our Marketing team on a contractor basis to manage and optimise Basware’s global paid search programme, with a primary focus on Google Ads. This Paid Search contractor role exists to drive measurable pipeline creation and ARR contribution from paid search — not just lead volume.

The contract is expected to run for 6–12 months, with an estimated time commitment of around 20 hours per week. The role is fully remote and ideally starts as soon as possible.

This is a global role requiring strong experience managing campaigns across multi-country, multi-language environments at scale, with a clear understanding of how to structure, localise and optimise activity across different markets, audiences and stages of the buyer journey.

Given the complexity of operating across regions, budget management and allocation will be a critical part of the role. The successful candidate must demonstrate a high level of rigour and control in managing budgets across campaigns, markets and objectives, ensuring spend is aligned to performance, commercial impact and market-specific context.

You will be responsible for driving qualified pipeline and revenue contribution from enterprise audiences, measured by cost per opportunity, pipeline sourced/influenced and ARR impact — through rigorous campaign execution, optimisation and testing. Working closely with the Paid Media Manager, you will ensure campaigns are structured, targeted and continuously improved in line with performance goals, search behaviour shifts and evolving platform dynamics.

This is a hands-on specialist role for someone comfortable operating in the detail while also identifying broader opportunities across targeting, messaging, budget allocation and performance improvement. The role also requires a strong working relationship with Google and key platform partners, ensuring Basware remains informed about platform developments, best practices and emerging opportunities.

Key Responsibilities

1. Campaign Management & Execution

• 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

2. Optimisation & Performance Improvement

• Continuously 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
• This includes keyword expansion and refinement, negative keyword management, bid strategy optimisation and budget reallocation. Maintain strong control over query expansion and search term quality as match types and automation evolve across platforms
• Run ongoing tests across ad copy, extensions/assets and landing page alignment, ensuring learnings are applied systematically to improve performance over time.

3. Keyword Strategy & Search Intent

• 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

4. 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
• Ensure reporting goes 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

5. 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. Act as an extension of the internal team, maintaining clear communication on performance, priorities and next steps

6. 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.

7. 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.