PPC Specialist

Groupon connects 42 million customers with local experiences - restaurants, events, wellness and travel - and the million-plus merchants who deliver them. Our mission is to get people offline and into the real world at prices that make it possible. We're an AI-native company in the middle of a platform transformation, moving from a deals marketplace to an experience discovery platform that works for customers and merchants at the same time.

We do not run ads by hand. We build the systems that run them.

About the role

Google Ads at Groupon is one of the largest local-commerce search books anywhere: Search, Shopping, Performance Max, Things to Do, Hotel Ads and Demand Gen across North America and 11 international markets, with Microsoft Ads on the same split. Manual optimization stopped being an advantage here a while ago. You will join a team of some of the best search specialists in the world and an army of AI agents: the agents pace the budgets, check every account, score the value of every category and shadow-test bidding logic before it is allowed to act; the people decide what the agents should do next. The question in this role is not whether search gets automated. It is what paid search becomes when AI Max and agentic buying arrive, and you will help answer it with real budgets.

Who you will work with

You report to the SEM Lead, who owns Brand and Non-Brand search across all markets. You work with the international search team, the PLA and Automation team that builds the shared tooling, Analytics and Finance, and directly with Google and Microsoft.

What you will be doing

• Own accounts in the North American Non-Brand and Shopping book: structure, bidding logic, budgets and feeds, so that performance scales without a proportional increase in manual work.
• Bid on value, not clicks: apply our per-category forward-value models to the accounts, measure the lift, and extend the method.
• Build automation that runs without you: Google Ads Scripts, the Ads API, Python and our AI agent toolset. Replace manual bid changes, pacing checks and anomaly hunting with tools the whole team can call.
• AI Search readiness: run and evaluate AI Max, Demand Gen and Performance Max, take part in our pilots on new AI surfaces, and form the team's view on agentic buying.
• Feed and Merchant Center quality: build the visibility on feed health, disapprovals and coverage, and act on it.
• Retargeting: run Criteo and similar platforms on the same margin logic as search.
• Connect spend to business outcomes: return, acquisition cost, contribution margin and lifetime value, and explain your decisions to a non-PPC audience.