How to hire the right ad manager: first up, the media buyer under $1,500/mo.

It's always shocking to hear the horror stories of paid ads "experts" spending clients' money with little to no result, and this pattern is repeated over and over. Every high level media buyer hears this story on every sales call. Sometimes they hear about 2 or 3 terrible experiences a client has had before talking to them. And the client, sometimes beyond jaded, sometimes straight up desperate, is still hoping they can find someone GOOD to manage their ads and bring them success.

The nature of paid ads is actually a breeding ground for this situation, because the barriers to entry are 0. It costs $0 to sign into your ad account and add a client to your Business Manager. It's the client's credit card on the account. There is no "paid ads" degree in school, and YouTube is where most of us have learned a lot of what we know.

If you're lucky, maybe your ad buyer took a course of some kind, or ran their own ads for a product or business they had in the past. But for the most part, media buyers (including myself) learn by doing. I worked for many ad agencies before I started media buying myself. But I can tell you, doing it for the first time yourself is SO DIFFERENT than managing ad spend as an agency employee.

I got lucky in a way, because I started my media buying career as an affiliate. Maybe I'm biased, but I personally think this is the best way. I was spending my own money to try to make money. It wasn't my own product, but it's the closest simulation you can get to what a true client experiences without having your own product. I also set up my own Shopify store at one point and ran ads (break even, I might add) when I first got started. So I was used to risking my own money and knew what that felt like. It's easy now for me to put myself in the position of the client and make decisions "as if this were my own money."

But even if some of these media buyers getting started WANT to feel that way and act that way, if they haven't bought ads for themselves, how can they really know? Again, doing it for the first time feels like it might be the same as running an ad account for an agency, or as an internal employee, but it's SO DIFFERENT.

Even now, I'm running ads for an offer to try to generate leads for my ad agency, and I've noticed myself doing things slightly against best practice to try to squeeze every last drop out of the lemon for my ad spend. This isn't always helpful for an ad account, but it just goes to show that even with 12-13 years of experience, my brain works a little different when I'm running ads for myself with my own money compared to clients with their money. Being able to tap into that feeling, to make sure you're doing everything you can each day to spend the client budget to the best of your ability, this kind of training usually only comes from doing it.

Then we add on top of the above that running ads is spending money, and sometimes A LOT of money. When you look at other similar industries, the stock market comes to mind, day trading maybe. They are more highly regulated. You have to earn licenses to trade certain things or amounts. But with ads, it's still the wild west. There are no certifications that matter. In fact, sometimes the more "certified" ad buyers are actually the worst at driving results, because they are too cookie cutter with their strategies. And there are no regulations. So that's why these horror stories for clients keep happening. And unfortunately, this will most likely continue to happen.

Because of this, I am writing a series of articles on how to hire a media buyer, to help you hire the right people and know the pros and cons of each type of ad manager resource. Today we are going to discuss how much you should pay for ads management at the entry level: the media buyer who costs under $1,500/mo, and whether a cheap media buyer is actually worth it for your business.

Before we get started, one thing I want to mention is assessing your needs based on your business size, ad spend amount, and the complexity needed to run your ads well. Do you have 20K SKUs? Do you have 5 brands under 1 umbrella? Do you run ads on 15 platforms? Or are you just getting started with a $2K/mo budget, just Meta Ads, and you already have "ads" working well from your organic posts or content? All of these things matter when you are hiring the right person to help you. The more complexity in your business, the more exacerbated the pros and cons will be of the different levels of ad managers or agencies.

Media buyer under $1,500/mo.

How many clients does a cheap media buyer actually have?

The first thing to assess is how many clients you think this person has. You can ask, but they won't always be transparent. They will know to say less than they actually have if they have a lot of clients. I always try to assess the cost of living in their area, and how many clients they need to do well. I also try to assess how successful they seem to be. For example, if someone is living in a large city, they present themselves strongly, and they seem to do really well for themselves, but they are charging $1,500/mo, I know they are probably brokering the business and aren't doing the work themselves, or they are working with 10-15 clients at a time. Much less likely I will be a priority.

I've seen this with small agencies charging $500/mo too, based in really large cities. That means they are running VOLUME, and that means no one client will be a priority. The only way this works out is if this media buyer or agency has an incredibly narrow niche that allows them to do one thing across many clients and have success without needing a lot of touch points or hand holding (this almost doesn't exist in ads, just fyi).

The reality of working with contractors, consultants or media buyers is that whoever is paying the most usually gets the most attention. It's very rare for this not to be the case, unless they are independently wealthy. So you want to assess where you are in the pecking order to the best of your ability.

When a contractor is telling me about a lot of big accounts they are working on now, I think, no way would I be the priority, and I immediately shy away. But on the contrary, if you are their largest client, they might not have the experience to spend your budget well. Different sizes of accounts, different amounts of data, different average order values, all of these things require specific expertise.

Are they honest about what they don't know?

Once I assess where I am in the pecking order, I want to assess how honest they are about what they do and don't do. What they know and don't know. If I have a media buyer coming in promising me results, saying they can 100% make me money, the only way I would move forward is if they can prove they've done it for 10 other brands exactly like mine. Even if they have 1 or 2 success stories, it doesn't mean they will have success for your brand. Maybe your brand doesn't have the brand awareness or the product market fit their big success stories have.

Otherwise, I want someone who isn't that confident. Obviously confidence matters, but coming from being an ad buyer myself, I have the most success from not thinking I know anything. The DATA is what shows us what works and doesn't work. It's how we test ads, audiences, offers, funnels, landing pages, etc. and that is our guide. When you have someone too sure about what's working and not working, they are often the one-trick-pony, and are quick to blame the product, or the conversion rate, when things aren't going as expected. When you hire someone who has a process of receiving inputs and reacting on a fast feedback loop, that is what usually drives the most success with paid ads.

Do they have a real process for running ads?

The next thing I look for is a process. How do they run ads? The problem with paid ads is there is a lot of testing and "waiting to see." But there should still be a process around all of that to organize it. If not, you have someone randomly taking action when they think they should, and that spins off in the wrong direction more often than not. The reason this happens is because, even though it's true the granular testing and feedback loop to optimization has to be super tight and it's hard to plan for that, you still have to connect that process into something bigger picture. The business. The goals. The brand.

So when ad buyers optimize with blinders on, they become too reactive.

That's when you end up in one of those situations where there is one ad working, and when you look at it, it doesn't even really represent your brand that well. It's not telling the story about the brand. It's not introducing the brand to new people successfully. And then when performance starts saturating from there, there isn't a higher level strategy or connection into the big picture. When you have an ad buyer like this, you feel it, because it's like the ad account goes into a little hole, and you can't seem to get out of that hole. That can be with ad creatives, or sometimes only one audience working, or just damp performance that you can't seem to fix.

Are they responsive?

The last thing I look for is responsiveness. I have learned the hard way over the years to always tell media buyers on the front end that I am a very hard person to work for (this isn't exactly true). But when I have contractors or media buyers who have that expectation, it gives me the freedom I need to ask for what I need, when I need it. I message outside of hours if I need to (I rarely do), and the expectation of quality of work is set very high. This is SO MUCH BETTER than trying to be the "cool client."

Is a media buyer under $1,500/mo worth it?

Unless this media buyer just happens to be living in a very affordable area, the chances of getting someone GOOD within this budget are slim. The reason is that an ad buyer who is really good KNOWS they are good, and they know how much money they make their clients. If they don't know that, they aren't good at tracking data. When you track data as a media buyer, you know how much money you are making your clients by improving their ad accounts. And when you are a confident person making your clients money, you know how much you can charge.

When does hiring a media buyer under $1,500/mo make sense?

If you don't know this, you are either not able to drive those kind of results, don't know if you can yet, or you are timid as a person (not the best personality trait for media buying, as we discussed). So when you work with someone in this category, there are a few scenarios where this makes sense. 95% of the time, you are getting someone in the experimental phase of their media buying career. And different people will be better or worse in this phase. All of us high level media buyers started here at some point, so there are some great people out there in this category. But the risk to you is greater than working with someone more established. However, if your cash flow and P&L don't allow for a higher level media buyer yet, this makes sense.

Another time it makes sense is if you too are in an experimental phase of your business. You are still trying to find product market fit, you are still figuring out messaging, funnel, etc. This means you aren't ready for scale yet, and more expensive media buyers are typically only worth their fee with scale.

The pros: a motivated up-and-comer

One of the big pros of finding someone good in this price range is they are MOTIVATED to grow their own skillset and business. They have motivation beyond just making money to do well for you. The up and comer can be one of the best hires because of this. They will get to know your brand, they will explore, and they aren't so attached to their own strategies or thought process, so it makes them really good at following the data. But again, this is for the small % of the total in this category who will rise to the top later in their career.

The cons: you will hit a ceiling

A lot of times what happens when you hire someone in this category is they can get you beyond where you are now. But then you will feel a ceiling with their growth on the account at some point. They will have reached the end of their knowledge base, and when the account hits growth ceilings or harder times, performance dips, seasonality, etc. they don't know how to fix it or how to prepare for it.

What makes a great media buyer?

The last thing I want to touch on here is what kind of personalities tend to be the best media buyers. For social ads, it's important to either have a really strong performance advertising creative solution on top of your media buyer OR make sure they have this skillset. At the base of this skillset is a copywriter plus recognizing visual nuance like video editing details. They don't have to execute necessarily on either of these areas, but they have to be able to direct those who do. Saying "we need more" is not directing, by the way. Directing is scripting down to the second, or giving very specific examples of other ads and what they want. It's also organizing the process of testing, and then reporting on those tests in a methodical nature.

Then you absolutely have to have an analytical mind. But when people think "data analysis," they think "complicated data science stuff." This trips up a lot of people when it comes to running successful ad campaigns. Ads are so simple at the end of the day.

1. Are you aligning with the platform goals? On social, this means do you have engaging content compared to others trying to show their ads?
2. Where are you losing the most people throughout your funnel?
3. How can you improve the area with the most friction?
4. Do this on a weekly schedule.
5. Make sure this fits into the larger business strategy.

That's it. So you want someone who gets how to track and organize each of the above things. And this is data analysis, but it's not complicated. When ad buyers make this complicated, it means they don't actually understand it, and it feels complicated to them.