Media Buyer & Performance Analyst
Location: Cape Town, hybrid (Workshop17 Newlands)
Employment type: Full-time, permanent
Compensation: Competitive, plus performance-based incentives
About the company
Our client is a fast-growing premium outdoor lighting brand, founded in South Africa. It is an 8-figure USD direct-to-consumer business, now scaling across the USA, UK, Australia, Canada and Europe, and building toward 9-figure annual revenue.
The role
You will own the day-to-day performance of the brand's Meta advertising, managing significant spend across multiple products and markets. You will also be the person who explains what is really driving growth: across acquisition, creative, conversion, customer behaviour and commercial results.
You will work closely with senior marketing leadership, two experienced Creative Strategists, a data partner and external paid-media partners.
What you'll do
Meta media buying
- Own day-to-day Meta performance across the South African and global accounts
- Decide when to scale, hold, reduce or restructure spend within agreed CPA, NCPA, MER and contribution targets
- Manage spend across multiple product CBOs and markets
- Understand the role each ad plays within a CBO and the wider customer journey, not just ad-level metrics
- Cut underperforming or fatigued ads with discipline, and graduate proven creative-test winners into scaling campaigns
- Keep improving account structure, efficiency and scaling strategy, and stay ahead of Meta platform changes
Performance analysis and diagnostics
- Monitor DTC performance across spend, revenue, contribution, MER, NCPA, conversion rate, AOV, traffic and product mix
- Diagnose whether a change comes from media, creative, landing pages, offers, seasonality, tracking or product mix
- Separate genuine performance issues from normal volatility
- Turn data into clear insight: what changed, why, and what to do next, and raise risks before anyone has to ask
Data, reporting and AI
- Work with the data partner to improve data accuracy, attribution and reporting across markets, products and channels
- Spot tracking, attribution and data discrepancies early
- Build automated monitoring and alerts that flag unusual changes in performance
- Use AI to speed up recurring analysis, anomaly detection and reporting
Creative performance insight
- Identify winning, declining and fatigued creatives and share clear insights with the Creative Strategists
- Make sure new creative tests get the right spend and data before conclusions are drawn
- Take part in Creative Sprints and feed learnings back into the creative testing system
Paid media oversight
- Oversee outsourced paid-media channels, including Google Ads, and hold partners to agreed commercial targets
- Make sure learnings across Meta, Google and other channels are shared, not siloed
- Help evaluate new paid-media platforms as the channel mix grows
What success looks like
- Meta spend scales while acquisition economics stay healthy
- Winning creatives are found and scaled quickly; declining ads are managed intelligently
- Performance issues are caught early, before they become expensive
- Leadership can clearly see what is driving DTC performance
- AI and automation cut the manual monitoring and reporting
Requirements
You bring
- 3+ years of hands-on Meta Ads experience in DTC e-commerce
- Experience managing meaningful paid-media budgets and making independent scaling decisions
- A strong understanding of Meta campaign structures, ad funnels and creative testing
- Commercial instinct: you understand how media spend, CPA, MER, conversion rate, AOV, contribution and profitability connect
- Strong analytical ability and real curiosity about why performance changes
- Confidence across Shopify, Meta Ads Manager, analytics platforms and reporting dashboards
- A solid grasp of attribution and tracking fundamentals
- AI fluency: you already use AI tools, automation or agents in your workflow
- A structured, detail-oriented and proactive approach
- Clear communication with both creative and commercial teams
Strong advantages
- Managing Meta across multiple international markets
- Experience with high-spend DTC brands
- Familiarity with Google Ads, even if it wasn't your main channel
- Data visualisation, automated reporting, APIs, AI agents or workflow automation
Benefits
- Real influence: work directly with senior leadership and shape how the marketing budget is deployed
- Serious scale: run Meta for an 8-figure USD international DTC brand building toward 9-figure revenue
- A strong team: two experienced Creative Strategists and a strong in-house marketing team
- Build something modern: help create a performance function that combines media buying, commercial analysis, data, automation and AI
- Real ownership: autonomy from day one in a fast-moving, globally ambitious business
- Earning potential: meaningful performance-based incentives tied to measurable results
- Flexible hybrid working from Workshop17 Newlands
