Why Your Freelance Media Buyer Misses the Small Stuff
Zack AllenOctober 31, 20261:39
It's not a skill problem. It's an attention problem.
On a recent client call, an agency owner described their setup: one media buyer, great at strategy, but execution was lagging behind their requests.
The catch was that he wasn't fully internal. He had his own clients. So the question was whether they'd become a "B-level client" to him: not his priority, because too much was going on elsewhere.
The week-long tracking bug
Then came the example that made it concrete. One of their clients changed a form, events stopped firing, and conversions weren't coming through.
It took a week to notice. And it wasn't the media buyer who caught it. It was the owner.
I asked if a media buyer should catch something like that without the owner having to look. The answer was yes.
As he put it, AI is great, but when a client is spending $1,000 a day on Meta, you need human eyes on the account, not "the next meeting rolls around and oh, something's not right."
Focus and attention
This is the pattern I see over and over. A one-person shop splitting attention across 5 or 10 accounts will put their time where the fire is biggest. That's rational. But it means the smaller things, like a broken pixel event, a creeping CPA or a form change, go unnoticed until they aren't small anymore.
The fix usually isn't a more skilled freelancer. It's a media buyer whose attention is on your accounts, every day, so the small stuff gets caught while it's still small.
Transcript
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It's one person. He specializes in strategy, but I think there's a bottleneck with execution on our request.
Was there like an inflection point recently where you guys realized that you might need to to bring someone else in?
Yeah, I think it could just be cuz again, he's not just fully internal to to our company, right? He does his own thing. He's got his own clients.
Right? So again, is he stretched on his side and we're just, you know, BC level client to him effectively in terms of the work that we can bring him, right? And it's not his priority cuz he's got too much going on somewhere else potentially.
So do you think that him splitting the accounts, like having other clients is might be what causing is causing this delay in response time, a delay in execution?
It's what it feels like. Yeah. Like we decide an issue with one client where they made a change to their form and events weren't firing properly and things weren't going through correctly, and that took a week since it broke and I discovered it. Not our media buyer.
Do you think that's something a media buyer should be able to catch without you having to look at it?
Yes. AI's great, but again, like human eyes on the account when the client's spending, you know, $1,000 a day in Meta is like you we need eyes on it, not just the next meeting rolls around and oh, something's not right, you know?
I think the big thing here is focus and attention. It's like if someone is splitting their attention between five, 10 different accounts and they're a one-man show, they're kind of just allocating towards the ones that are most urgent, that have the biggest issue. And so they they're they're unable to pick up those smaller things as I'm sure you've you understand very well.
Absolutely.
