Job role: Performance Marketing Assistant Manager

Department: Brand & growth

Job Experience: 5+ years

Location: Mumbai HQ

About The Hosteller The Hosteller started in 2015, when backpacker hostels weren't a category in India yet. Seventy-plus properties later, we're the country's largest self-operated hostel chain — and we've never really sold beds. We sell the common room at 11pm, the trek someone talks you into, the table that had four people and now has seven. Belonging is the product. The whole brand runs on one line: go meet your people.

Role overview

We have strong brand recall, a large organic audience, and a booking website that already converts. What we don't have yet is a performance marketing engine. That is what you are here to build. Not to take over an existing account and optimise it, to set it up from scratch.

The account structure, the tracking, the creative process, the reporting, the way we decide where the next rupee goes, all of it is yours to design. You'll be handson in the accounts every day, and accountable for a CAC or ROAS target from the spend you run.

Responsibilities

Building the foundation

- Set up Google Ads and Meta Ads from the ground up: account structure, campaign architecture, naming conventions, audience library, and exclusion lists that will still make sense two years from now
- Get measurement right before spending at scale: GA4, Google Tag Manager, Meta Pixel and Conversions API, Google Ads conversion tracking, and clean UTM discipline across every campaign
- Make sure a booking on our site is attributed correctly, and that the numbers in the ad platforms, GA4 and our own booking data can be reconciled




- Write the rules everyone else will follow later: budget approvals, campaign QA checklist, weekly reporting format.

Google ads

- Own Search, Performance Max, Demand Gen and Display end to end
- Build out brand and non-brand search properly: keyword research, match-type strategy, negative-keyword hygiene, ad-copy testing and extensions
- Run destination and hostel-level campaigns that scale across a large property portfolio without becoming unmanageable

Meta ads

- Own prospecting and retargeting across Facebook and Instagram: campaign structure, audience strategy, placement mix and bidding
- Build the retargeting stack: site visitors, booking abandoners, past guests, and lookalikes off our best customer segments
- Run a real creative testing cadence, video, static, carousel and UGC, tested systematically rather than swapped when someone gets bored of them

Creative, budget & reporting

- Brief and direct the creative team on what to make based on what the data says is working, not on taste, and work with web and lifecycle on the landing pages your traffic hits
- Own monthly budget planning and daily pacing across both platforms, shifting spend between them on evidence
- Build the reporting layer: CAC, ROAS, cost per booking, blended CAC across paid and organic, and contribution by campaign,



geography and property

AI workflow

- Use AI as part of how you work: creative and copy variants, keyword and audience research, script writing for video, analysis and reporting
- Get real value from the platforms' automated products (Performance Max, Advantage+, smart bidding) without handing over control blindly, you should be able to explain what the algorithm is doing and where it needs guardrails

Qualifications

- 5 years in performance marketing, with deep hands-on experience on both Google Ads and Meta Ads. Not one or the other, and not through an agency you managed
- You have personally been in the accounts, building campaigns, writing ads, reading search-term reports, checking pacing. This is a doing role.
- Experience managing meaningful monthly budgets and being accountable for a CAC or ROAS target
- Solid grasp of tracking and measurement: GA4, GTM, Pixel and Conversions API, conversion setup, attribution windows, and why platform-reported numbers and actual bookings never match
- Solid analytics. Advanced Excel / Sheets, comfortable pulling and pivoting large data sets, and able to build your own reporting without waiting on anyone
- Testing discipline, you know the difference between a real result and noise
- Ability to brief creative clearly and judge what will work before spending on it
- Genuine AI fluency, you already use these tools daily and can show us how
- Stack you will work with: Google Ads, Meta Ads Manager, GA4, Google Tag Manager, Meta Business Suite, thehosteller.com booking engine, Excel / Sheets, Looker Studio, and LLM tooling of your choice.

📌 Digital Marketing Specialist (Mumbai)
🏢 The Hosteller
📍 Mumbai