Mike Smith
VP / Director – Paid Search & Performance Marketing
Performance marketing leader with 20+ years driving paid search, paid media, and demand generation for B2B SaaS, e-commerce, franchise, and multi-location brands.
Career highlights
What I do
Full-funnel performance marketing, end to end.
A founder and hands-on leader pairing rigorous analytics with AI-assisted execution – managing roughly $5M in annual media spend across a team of five specialists.
Paid Search & Media
Paid search built to scale
Most accounts I review have the same problem: spend climbs while results plateau, because the structure was never built to grow. Across twenty-plus years running Google Ads and Microsoft Ads for dozens of clients, I learned scale is a structure decision before it’s a budget one – the accounts that compound are built around buyer intent, not keyword lists. So I rebuilt them deliberately: architecture mapped to real search behavior, bids tied to margin, targeting layered on conversion signal, pacing that chased what worked. Click-through rates rose 200-400%, cost-per-acquisition dropped, and growth held steady instead of spiking and stalling. Today I’d hand pacing and bid signaling to automation sooner, freeing human effort for the strategy and messaging machines still can’t get right.
Demand Gen & Acquisition
Demand that fills the funnel
The trap in demand gen is mistaking volume for pipeline – plenty of leads, few worth a sales call. I saw it across B2B SaaS, e-commerce, franchise, and multi-location brands, and learned the leak is usually below the click, not above it: acquisition and conversion are one system, not two. So I ran them that way, pairing paid acquisition with conversion optimization end to end. Qualified pipeline grew instead of just lead volume. Next time I’d wire sales-qualified signal back into targeting sooner, so spend chases revenue rather than form-fills.
Analytics, GA4 & Attribution
Analytics that tie spend to revenue
Most marketing dashboards measure activity, not money – sessions and clicks that never tie back to what the business actually earned. I kept hitting that gap across a multi-industry portfolio, and learned the fix is translation: data isn’t a decision until a leader can act on it. So I built GA4, Google Tag Manager, and Looker Studio reporting with attribution and forecasting underneath. Spend mapped to revenue, and the numbers became strategy executives could move on instead of charts they nodded at. Next time I’d close the loop faster – feeding forecasts back into bidding so the reporting steers spend in real time, not just explains it after the quarter closes.
AI-Assisted Marketing
AI-assisted marketing at agency scale
The math of agency growth is brutal: more clients means more hours, and production becomes the ceiling. Across the portfolio that ceiling showed up everywhere – campaign builds, reporting, content – and taught me the leverage isn’t in the judgment, it’s in the repeatable production around it. So I deployed AI-assisted workflows and automation to absorb that load. Turnaround tightened and the team scaled output without scaling headcount, and the hours it freed went straight into the SEO and organic work that compounds over time. Next time I’d build the automation as reusable systems rather than one-off fixes, so each workflow pays forward into the next campaign instead of getting rebuilt.
Education & Certifications
Credentials.
B.S., Global Business Marketing
Claude 101 & Claude Code Certification
Google Ads Search & Analytics (GA4)
Contact
Let’s talk performance.
Open to VP / Director-level paid search and performance marketing roles – and to a conversation about scaling your paid acquisition.
Get in Touch