Should I Fire My Media Buyer? The Honest Framework
You should fire your media buyer if most of what you pay for is a daily loop you could write down as rules, if the reporting tells you less than your own ads manager does, and if nobody on your team could run the account tomorrow because the knowledge lives with the buyer. You should keep them if they own offer and creative strategy you genuinely cannot replace, and you should move the daily loop off their plate either way. Here is the five-question framework I would use before deciding, and the one rule about sequencing that protects you whichever way you land.
First, separate the fee from the function
The emotional version of this decision is "are they good or not." That is the wrong question, because "media buyer" is a bundle of jobs, and you can be very good at some and overpaid for others. On my own account I count six: creative production, audience building, launching, reading the daily numbers, trimming and scaling, and reporting. Most of those are rule-shaped. One or two, depending on the buyer, are judgment. The job-by-job comparison goes deeper on this, but hold the six in your head while you run the framework.
The five questions
1. Could you write down what they do each day?
Ask your buyer to describe their daily routine on your account. If the answer is a sequence of checks and threshold decisions, "I look at cost per result, I pause anything above X, I scale anything below Y, I refresh creative when frequency gets high," you have just heard a rule set. Rule sets are what agents run. You are paying a retainer for something that could be written on one page and executed on a schedule.
If the answer is mostly about what they are testing and why, what they learned about your customers last month, and what they would change about the offer, you are hearing strategy. That is harder to replace and worth more.
2. Does the report tell you more than the platform does?
Open your own ads manager next to the last report your buyer sent. If the report is the same numbers in a prettier layout with a paragraph of reassurance, it is not adding information. A report worth paying for tells you what changed, why, what was tried, what was learned, and what happens next. Many agency reports are designed to make the month look fine, not to help you decide. If yours hides more than it shows, that is a signal on its own.
3. Who owns the account, the pixel and the audiences?
This should be an easy yes: you do, with full admin access, and the buyer works inside your account. If instead the campaigns run in the agency's account, or you have view-only access to your own, you have a dependency problem before you have a performance problem. The history, the pixel data and the audiences are assets you paid for with ad spend. Get the access sorted before you make any other move, because it changes what firing them even means.
4. Is the result the buyer or the offer?
Go back through your results and mark the big moves in cost per result. Now mark what changed at the same time. Price changes, new offers, new creative angles you drove, seasonality, a product launch. If the big moves line up with your changes, the offer is doing the heavy lifting and the buyer is maintaining. If they line up with structural decisions the buyer made, the buyer is earning the fee. Be honest here. In my experience most accounts are more offer than buyer, and most buyers would privately agree.
5. Could your team run it tomorrow?
Not "could they learn to." Could they, tomorrow, if the buyer vanished. If the answer is no, the question is why. Usually it is because the knowledge was never written down and nobody on your side was asked to own a weekly read of the numbers. That is fixable, and fixing it is the first step whether you fire the buyer or not. An owner who cannot run their own ad account for a week is not making a free choice about who to pay.
Scoring it
| Question | Points toward firing | Points toward keeping |
|---|---|---|
| Daily routine | Rules you could write down | Strategy and learning |
| Reporting | Prettier version of the platform | Decisions, learnings, next steps |
| Ownership | You lack admin access | Your account, your access |
| Results driver | Your offer changes | Their structural changes |
| Team readiness | Nobody could run it | Someone already reads it weekly |
Three or more in the first column and the fee is mostly buying a daily loop plus a dependency. That is the case for firing, or more precisely, for bringing the loop in house and keeping only the strategy if there is any. Three or more in the second column and you have a buyer who is doing judgment work; move the daily loop to an agent anyway so their time goes where it is valuable, and renegotiate the fee to reflect what you are actually buying.
The sequencing rule
Whatever the score says, do not fire first. Keep paying the buyer until the replacement loop is running on your own account, with your own caps and thresholds written down, and the weekly numbers have held for long enough that you trust them. The step-by-step replacement is built around that overlap. Owners who fire first and figure it out second are the ones who end up hiring a second agency to clean up the first one's exit, and that costs more than the retainer you were trying to save.
The cost of getting it wrong in either direction
Keeping a buyer who is mostly running rules costs you the retainer, the dependency, and the spend wasted during the gaps between their check-ins. We go through that in what a bad media buyer actually costs you. Firing a buyer who was genuinely driving strategy costs you the strategy, and you may not notice for a quarter. The framework exists to tell those two cases apart before you act, because from the outside they can look identical: a monthly invoice and a report that says things are fine.
If you run the five questions and land on bringing the loop in house, that is the thing I help owners do: not become their agency, but stop needing one. The application on the home page is where that conversation starts.
FAQ
Should I fire my media buyer before I have a replacement running?
No. Keep paying them until the replacement loop is live on your own account and the weekly numbers hold for long enough that you trust them. Firing first and figuring it out second is how owners end up paying a second agency to clean up.
What if my media buyer is good but expensive?
Then the question is which part of their work you are paying for. If it is the daily loop, that is agent work and you are overpaying for it. If it is strategy and judgment you cannot source elsewhere, keep them for that and move the daily loop off their plate so the fee buys the part that matters.
Is it a red flag if my buyer will not give me admin access to my own ad account?
Yes. The account, the pixel, the audiences and the history are your assets. Any arrangement where you cannot see or control them is a dependency you did not agree to. Fix the access before you decide anything else.
How do I know if the results are the buyer or the offer?
Look at what changed when results changed. If the big moves in cost per result line up with offer, price or creative changes you drove, the offer is doing the work. If they line up with structural changes the buyer made, the buyer is. Most accounts are more offer than buyer.