Most bad Meta ads hires fail for one reason. The person on the sales call is not the person who will be inside the account. If you are hiring a freelance media buyer for an ecommerce brand, that is the first thing to settle.
A freelancer can be a senior buyer who lives in Ads Manager. A freelancer can also be a coordinator who takes the brief and passes the account to someone you will never meet. The title does not tell you which one you are getting.
Ask who opens Ads Manager
On the first call, ask a plain question: who logs into the account on a normal Tuesday? If the answer is “my team,” “a specialist,” or “we have buyers for that,” you are not hiring the person in front of you. You are hiring a handoff.
That handoff is how accounts get a recycled structure. The senior sells the relationship. A junior inherits the budget, a checklist, and a Slack channel. When performance moves, the person who can explain it is in another meeting.
I run the accounts I take. The person on the call is the person opening Ads Manager. If that is the working relationship you want, say so before you sign, and put it in the agreement.
Ask for the account, not the deck
A polished case study can be designed by someone who never touched the campaign. A published Ads Manager view is harder to fake. Ask to see spend, purchase conversion value, and the date range on the same screen. Then ask what was excluded, what the margin looked like, and whether the number is blended or new-customer only.
I keep a few of those views public on the results section of this site. One of them is $24.97M spent with $51.14M in tracked revenue at a 2.05 purchase ROAS. Another is an 8.63 ROAS on $446K in spend. Those are different businesses. A buyer who can only talk about the higher ROAS is reading the screenshot, not the account.
Also ask what they will not promise. Overnight results, a campaign that runs itself, and a secret hack are sales lines. I will not promise any of them. Good ads and disciplined testing beat a trick you have not heard of.
What the first month should look like
Access comes before opinions. A serious buyer wants Ads Manager, the pixel or Conversions API, the purchase event, the catalog if you have one, and a clear view of contribution margin. Creative needs a home too: what you have, what is already running, and who can make the next round.
- Confirm the purchase event is the event you actually care about, and that it is not double-counting.
- Read the last 60 to 90 days before changing structure. Killing a working ad set to “clean things up” is a common unforced error.
- Write down what is already profitable, what is being propped up by returning customers, and what has never been tested.
- Change one class of problem at a time. Structure, offer, and creative on the same day makes the result unreadable.
You should be able to ask, any week, what is working, what is not, and what is being done about it. If the update is a PDF full of impressions and no decision, you hired a reporter.
Put the working relationship in writing
A handshake is not an account plan. Before money moves, write down who logs in, how often you speak, what a normal week contains, and what happens if the person on the call stops being the person in the account. This is not legal theater. It is how you stop a freelance media buyer from quietly becoming a project manager.
The agreement should name the human, not only the company. If I take the account, the contract says I am the buyer. If someone else will touch budgets, creative tests, or the pixel, you hear the name before they get access. A clause that says “the contractor may use assistants” is the door a junior walks through.
- Who has Ads Manager access, and who is allowed to change budgets.
- How often you meet, and what that meeting is for: a decision, not a tour of impressions.
- What you will provide: creative, margin, and a person who can approve an offer without a week of email.
- What the buyer will not do. I do not build the store, shoot the catalog, or promise a ROAS.
- How either side ends it, and how access is removed the same day.
Also decide who owns the ad account. It should be yours. A freelancer who builds campaigns inside an account you cannot enter is holding the business hostage. You grant access. You can revoke it. The pixel, the catalog, and the payment method stay on the brand.
How to read a reference
Ask for two brands you can actually speak to, not a wall of logos. A useful reference is a founder or ecommerce lead who was in the weekly call, not a marketing coordinator who forwarded a PDF. Ask them three things: who they spoke to when something broke, whether the account was rebuilt in the first week, and what the buyer refused to do.
The last question matters. A good buyer will have said no to a bad offer, a tiny budget, or a demand for overnight scale. If every reference says the freelancer agreed to everything and the ROAS was always up, you are hearing a sales story. Performance moves. The person who only reports the up weeks is editing the account.
I keep published Ads Manager views on the results section because a screenshot with spend and purchase value on the same screen is harder to decorate than a testimonial. Still ask what the margin was. A 2.05 purchase ROAS on nearly $25M of spend can be a healthy business. An 8 ROAS on a small budget can be a screenshot. The reference should be able to say which kind of result they lived with.
Questions that waste the first call
Do not open with “what is your ROAS?” as if one number describes a buyer. Ask what they need from you in the first two weeks, which part of the account they will leave alone, and how they decide a creative test has had enough spend. Those answers tell you whether they have operated an account or only presented one.
Skip the tool tour. Every serious buyer can name the same columns. What you want is judgment: when they would cut spend, when they would hold a test that looks ugly on day three, and when they would tell you the landing page is the problem, not the ads. If the call never reaches your margin, your creative capacity, or your purchase event, you had a pitch.
Bring last month’s spend, the contribution margin you can explain, and two ads you believe in. A freelance media buyer who will not look at those before proposing a new structure is selling a template. I would rather spend the call on your numbers than on a recycled sequence of “awareness, consideration, conversion.”
When a freelancer is the wrong hire
A dedicated buyer is the wrong tool when the media budget is still small and the offer is not proven. In that spot the founder usually learns faster by staying close to the account. On calls I take, last month under $10k in Meta spend is a tight budget. It can still be worth a look. It is often not worth a full management retainer.
A freelancer is also the wrong hire when you need a studio: landing pages, email, photo, and media buying under one roof. That is an agency problem. I wrote a separate note on a Meta ads agency or a freelance media buyer.
If the store is already selling and you want a senior person in the account, hire the operator. Then check, in week two, that they are actually in there.
A simple score before you sign
After the call, write the answers down while they are still sharp. You are not grading charm. You are grading whether this person can be left alone with a budget. Four lines are enough, and a no on the first one ends the process.
- Named buyer: you know the human who will log in on Tuesday, and that human was on the call.
- Evidence: you saw spend and purchase value on one screen, and they could explain the margin around it.
- Restraint: they told you what they will not promise, and what they will not touch in week one.
- Fit: your spend, your creative supply, and your offer are big enough that a senior buyer is the right tool.
If those four are yes, book the working relationship and put the name in the agreement. If the first one is no, do not negotiate the fee. You would be paying for a handoff and hoping the junior is good. I would rather lose the account than pretend that arrangement is the same job.