Performance Marketing Manager

Job Description

About the role

Navitas is seeking an experienced Performance Marketing Manager to join our University Partnerships Australasia (UPA) marketing team. You will drive awareness, consideration and conversion across paid and organic channels for a portfolio of higher education brands, in domestic and international markets.

This role is audience led. You will start with our prospective students: who they are, where they are in their decision, and what moves them to enquire, visit and accept. You will build and run the paid search, paid social and digital advertising plans that reach them. You’re a digital paid media, search and social expert, comfortable to be measured on applications and acceptances, not clicks.

Reporting to the Senior Digital Marketing Manager, you will set the strategy and run it hands-on, from audience planning to daily optimisation of accounts. You will own the performance commitments in the UPA marketing plan and hold them up with partners, sales, recruitment and contact centre teams.

Key Responsibilities

1. Audience and performance strategy

• Build an audience-led strategy for each brand and market. Segment prospective students (domestic school leavers, low and no ATAR buyers, onshore transfers, international students by market, and parents and influencers) by need, decision stage and buying situation, then plan the channel mix around them.
• Own the acquisition performance plan. Shift investment toward the audiences and channels that convert to application and acceptance.
• Plan and allocate media across paid search, paid social, display, YouTube, programmatic and emerging channels, within the agreed brand, acquisition and nurture investment mix.
• Bring paid and organic together as one audience plan. Work with SEO, AI search (AEO/GEO), owned social and CRM nurture to grow total demand, not just paid leads.
• Grow high intent enquiry. Build click to call, chat and WhatsApp into campaigns and journeys, and drive campus visits and open day attendance as measurable conversion steps.
• Shape performance plans for new markets and product launches, including campuses in Singapore, Indonesia and UAE, and support the direct model.

2. Hands-on campaign delivery

• Build, launch and run campaigns yourself across Google Ads, Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn and other platforms, aligned to intakes and seasonal priorities.
• Manage accounts day to day: structure, bidding, budget pacing, search terms and negatives, audience refreshes and creative rotation.
• Build and maintain audiences, including CRM lists, retargeting, lookalikes and market-specific segments.
• Set up and QA tracking before every launch, including UTMs, conversion events and Google Tag Manager tags.
• Own the conversion journey from ad to landing page, form, enquiry and application. Optimise the full user journey, not campaign landing pages in isolation.
• Run a structured testing program across audiences, creative, copy, landing pages and journeys, with a hypothesis and a result for every test.
• Write and test ad copy, and brief creative with our design and content teams, using performance insight to guide what we make next.
• Manage agency and platform partners, and hold them to account on results.

3. Measurement, data and insight

• Measure success on cost per acceptance, lead to application and lead to acceptance rates, and lead quality, not cost per lead alone.
• Partner with MarTech to build lead to acceptance attribution, standardise GA4, Google Tag Manager and platform tracking, and feed Salesforce outcomes back to ad platforms through offline conversion imports.
• Set baselines and targets for organic and engagement measures, including non-brand organic sessions, organic share of sessions, AI engine referrals and website revisits.
• Deliver weekly performance reports via live dashboards, replacing fragmented business unit reporting with a clear divisional view and benchmarks.
• Turn data into plain-language insight and recommendations, and use AI and automation to speed up analysis, QA and reporting.

4. Stakeholder partnership

• Be the voice of performance in monthly reviews and quarterly reviews, reporting progress against plan commitments.
• Work with Heads of Recruitment, admissions and contact centre teams to improve lead quality, sales qualified leads and conversion, and build a shared culture of quality over volume.
• Consult with partner universities and colleges on full-funnel, target-led plans. Hold the line on priorities, and redirect requests that do not support the plan.
• Manage campaign brief intake on the UPA brief template, with a minimum four week lead time.
• Support the team with performance input on share of search, social engagement and investment cases for future brand spend.
• Build and maintain playbooks, templates, naming conventions and budget trackers so performance scales across the portfolio.

What success looks like in your first 12 months

• Cost per acceptance falling, with lead to application and lead to acceptance rates rising.
• A growing share of sales qualified and high intent leads, including phone, walk in, online enquiry and campus visits.
• Baselines set, and growth shown, for non-brand organic sessions, organic share of sessions and AI engine referrals.
• Lead to acceptance attribution live, and stakeholders who trust and act on the numbers.

Qualifications

Essential Skills, Knowledge, and Experience

• 5+ years in performance or digital marketing, building and running paid media campaigns yourself, with significant budgets across multiple brands or markets.
• Expert in paid search and paid social, with deep Google Ads and Meta experience and exposure to TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube and programmatic.
• Proven audience strategy and segmentation skills, including first-party and CRM audiences, retargeting and lookalikes.
• Strong measurement skills across GA4, Google Tag Manager and Looker Studio, including conversion tracking and offline or CRM conversion imports.
• A commercial mindset, with experience optimising to cost per acquisition and downstream outcomes rather than cost per lead.
• Working knowledge of SEO and AI search, and how paid and organic work together.
• Strong stakeholder management. Able to influence senior stakeholders, explain results in plain language, and hold firm on agreed priorities.
• Experience managing agency partners.
• Highly organised and self-directed, able to balance strategy with hands-on delivery across many accounts at once.
• Excellent written and spoken English.
• Relevant qualifications in marketing or a related field.

Desirable Skills

• Experience in international education, higher education or another long-consideration lead generation sector.
• Experience with Salesforce and Marketo.
• Multi-market campaign experience across Asia, the Middle East or other international markets.
• Experience with AEO/GEO and getting brands surfaced in AI answers.
• Practical use of AI in marketing workflows.
• Strong conversion copywriting skills.
• Google Ads and Meta certifications.

Additional Information

What we can offer you:

• Career progression and professional development pathways
• A strong, positive and values driven workplace culture
• Flexible/hybrid working environment
• Collegial and collaborative environment with a commitment to education
• Access to, and support from, a comprehensive and experienced sales and marketing workforce

Diversity Equity and Inclusion 

• At Navitas we promote and embrace an inclusive and diverse workforce. We believe equality, flexibility, and diversity deliver a rich collaborative environment. We strive to ensure that all our staff – no matter where they are from or who they are – feel safe, supported, and given opportunities to thrive.
• We encourage applications from candidates with disabilities, of all ages and genders, First Nations and Indigenous peoples, and people of diverse community groups.