How to hire a media buyer for your digital campaigns

A media buyer plans, buys and manages ad placements across platforms such as Google, Meta, LinkedIn and others. In digital advertising, much of the buying happens in auctions. Google's help page on Ad Rank explains that Ad Rank is a set of values used to determine whether your ads are eligible to show and where they appear relative to other advertisers' ads.

That means a media buyer's job includes more than choosing where to spend. It covers the factors that decide how much each click costs and where ads show: ad quality, relevance, targeting and landing pages. A skilled buyer spends as much time on those as on budgets.

Day to day, the work usually includes researching audiences and keywords, setting up conversion tracking, writing or briefing ad creative, testing variations, pacing budgets across the month and reporting on what the spend produced.

• Referrals from businesses like yours. Ask owners in similar industries who manages their ads and whether they would hire that person again.
• Agencies with platform credentials. Google's Partners program sets requirements in three categories: performance, spend and certifications. A Partner badge does not guarantee results, but it shows the company meets Google's bar in those areas.
• Freelance specialists. Independent buyers can be excellent for smaller budgets. Ask for the same proof you would ask an agency for.

1. Which platforms have you managed, and at what budgets? Experience at your spending level matters. Managing a large national budget is a different job from managing a small local one.
2. Can you walk me through a campaign that did not work? Every experienced buyer has one. How they diagnosed it tells you more than any success story.
3. How will you measure success? The answer should be leads, sales or cost per acquisition, not clicks or impressions alone.
4. What do you need from me? A good buyer asks about your margins, your sales process and what a customer is worth.
5. How do you handle testing? Look for a clear process, such as testing one variable at a time.

A buyer who understands platform mechanics will protect your budget. Meta's help page on the learning phase explains that ad sets go through a learning period after they launch or after a significant edit, and that they usually exit it after about 50 results in the week after the last significant edit. Meta also says that during learning, performance is less stable and cost per result is usually higher, and it recommends avoiding unnecessary edits and very small or inflated budgets.

In practice, a buyer who changes campaigns every day may be resetting that learning over and over. Ask candidates how they decide when to change a campaign and when to leave it alone.

This is the most important rule in hiring any media buyer. Your business should own its ad accounts, pixels and analytics, and the buyer should work inside them with the access they need.

Google Ads offers several access levels, from email-only and billing up through read-only, standard and admin. Give the buyer the level the work requires, keep admin control with someone at your company and remove access when the engagement ends. If a buyer insists on running ads only in an account they own, your history and data leave when they do.

A strong media buyer usually spends the first weeks on foundations before scaling anything.

1. An audit. They review your current accounts, tracking and past results, and tell you what they found, good and bad.
2. Tracking checks. They confirm that leads and sales are recorded correctly, because every later decision depends on that data.
3. A written plan. Goals, budgets by platform, audiences and the first tests, in a document you can keep.
4. A first report. Results against the plan, what they learned and what they will change next.

If a buyer skips straight to spending, ask why.

• Guaranteed results or guaranteed rankings.
• No access to your accounts or reporting until after you sign.
• Reports that show only impressions and clicks.
• Constant budget increases without a clear reason.
• No questions about your business, margins or customers.

Begin with a defined test, such as two to three months with clear goals and a set budget. Agree on the metrics up front and on a regular reporting schedule. A good buyer welcomes that structure because it gives them room to show results.

For more on running paid media well, see our guides on PPC campaign management and how to build an ad campaign.