Performance Marketing Manager

London · Hybrid, 4 days in the office · £50,000–£65,000

Reporting to the SVP of Growth & Data

£3m annual media budget. Hands-on ownership from day one. The opportunity to grow into leading digital acquisition strategy

• Immersive Gamebox is an entertainment business with 35+ venues across the UK, US and internationally.
• We create immersive multiplayer games with partners including Netflix, Sony and Paramount — Squid Game, Batman and Floor is Lava among them. Both our venue footprint and game library are expanding, giving Growth a constant stream of new launches, new creative and new audiences to work with.
• It's a highly visual, social product and an unusually fun thing to market. The opportunity is to take great IP, compelling creative and a growing international footprint and turn them into scalable, profitable customer acquisition.

• We're looking for an exceptional performance marketer to take ownership of approximately £3m in annual paid media spend, primarily across Google and Meta.
• This is a hands-on role. You'll be in the accounts every day.
• You'll be responsible for running, improving and developing our paid media operation in-house, rather than overseeing an agency. We want someone who genuinely enjoys the technical detail: optimising keywords, interrogating search terms, refining bidding strategies, testing creative and understanding how the platforms really work.
• But we're not looking for someone who simply executes instructions.
• We want someone commercially sharp, analytical, AI-native and intensely curious about what actually drives growth. Someone who asks the right questions, knows how to find the answers and has the confidence to challenge conventional thinking.
• The opportunity is deliberately bigger than the immediate job.
• You'll start by mastering the accounts and understanding our customers, markets and acquisition economics. As you demonstrate your capabilities, we want you increasingly owning the strategy & commercial decision making behind the spend — where to invest, how much to spend, which channels to scale, how to approach creative and what our wider acquisition strategy should look like & how this feeds into our commercial objectives.

1. Paid media execution and optimisation

• Hands-on campaign management across Google Ads and Meta, with opportunities to test TikTok and emerging channels.
• Account architecture: campaign structure, bidding strategies, budgets, pacing and optimisation.
• Detailed Google Search optimisation, including keywords, search terms, negative keywords, match types and Performance Max.
• Continuous identification of wasted spend, growth opportunities and ways to improve acquisition efficiency.
• Campaign launches for new games, venues, promotions and seasonal demand.

2. Commercial performance and analytical decision-making

• Understanding what actually drives profitable customer acquisition, not just what platform dashboards report.
• Investigating performance changes, asking the right questions and turning analysis into commercial decisions.
• Budget allocation across channels, campaigns, audiences and markets.
• Working with our data and analytics team on attribution, incrementality, experimentation and marketing mix modelling.
• Accountability for contribution after advertising and delivery costs, rather than revenue alone.

3. Creative, testing and growth

• Owning the testing calendar across creative, audiences, offers and landing pages.
• Working with the creative team to develop advertising that captures attention and, crucially, converts.

4. AI, automation and continuous improvement

• Using AI and automation to improve reporting, pacing, campaign analysis and repetitive workflows.
• Building systems and processes that make our marketing operation more effective over time.
• Experimenting with new tools, techniques and ways of working.
• Becoming our internal expert on paid media — the person other teams seek out when they want to understand how best to acquire customers.

Deep, hands-on platform knowledge

• At least a year of substantial, direct experience inside Google Ads and Meta Ads Manager. Not oversight of someone else doing it — actually managing and optimising campaigns yourself.
• Genuine understanding of account structures, bidding, keywords, campaign optimisation and how the platforms' algorithms behave.
• Experience building, rebuilding or meaningfully improving campaigns and accounts.
• The ability to explain precisely what you've done inside the platforms, why you did it and what happened as a result.

Analytical and commercial judgement

• Strong analytical instincts and the ability to break down unfamiliar problems logically.
• A track record of asking good questions, interrogating data and making decisions based on evidence.
• An understanding that advertising is a commercial investment, and that reported ROAS isn't necessarily incremental profit.
• Accountability for real business outcomes, such as sales, bookings, acquisition costs or contribution — not just clicks and impressions.

Curiosity, ambition and ownership

• A genuine obsession with performance marketing. You follow practitioners, engage with industry communities, keep up with platform developments and actively seek out new techniques.
• The confidence to form your own opinions, challenge assumptions and test whether conventional wisdom actually works.
• Intellectual curiosity about customers, businesses and the economics of growth.
• An AI-native, systems-oriented approach to working: you'd rather automate a repetitive task than do it fifty times.
• The ambition to take on significantly more responsibility as you develop.

We care much more about what you can do and how you think than how many years you've worked or which companies are on your CV.

• Experience in physical venues, entertainment, hospitality, ticketing or highly seasonal businesses.
• GA4, GTM, conversion tracking and attribution.
• Incrementality testing, marketing mix modelling or advanced analytics.
• Creative strategy, UGC and paid social content development.
• SQL, Python, scripting or marketing automation.
• CRM/CMS platforms, SEO, GEO or AEO.

Real responsibility, immediately.

You'll be working on a £3m annual advertising budget across an international consumer business, with the autonomy to make meaningful decisions. Few roles offer this level of exposure and responsibility so early.

The chance to become more than a media buyer.

Growth and Data sit together at IGB. You'll work directly with senior leadership and alongside a data science team working on experimentation, forecasting, attribution, incrementality and MMM.

You'll have access to Triple Whale, PostHog, GA4 and internal commercial data, so you can find out whether your work actually worked rather than taking Google's or Meta's word for it.

We don't expect you to arrive knowing everything. We do expect you to be excited about learning.

A genuinely high ceiling.

Our ambition is for the right person to grow into the strategic lead for digital acquisition. As you master the accounts, the scope expands into budget strategy, channel development, creative direction, automation and wider growth leadership.

We want someone who can become considerably more valuable, capable and influential over time.

An unusually fun product to market.

Global entertainment IP, an expanding portfolio of games and venues, visually compelling creative and a product designed to be enjoyed with friends.

Benefits.

• Unlimited holiday.
• One free Gamebox experience per month for you and up to five friends.

If you're early in your career, already obsessed with Google and Meta, analytically minded and hungry for considerably more responsibility than your years would normally buy you, we'd love to hear from you.

Equally, if you're an experienced paid media operator ready to take full ownership of a substantial international acquisition budget and help shape the wider strategy, we'd love to talk.

We're hiring for capability, curiosity and ambition — not a particular number of years on a CV.