Most agencies should not treat this as an either-or choice. If your buyers have good judgment but run out of hours, software that reads every account all day gives those hours back. If nobody on your team can set strategy or own a client relationship, software will not supply that, and you need a person.
So the question behind "hire a media buyer or use software" is really this: where do your buyers' hours go today, and are those hours spent on judgment or on looking?
What a media buyer does that software does not
A good buyer does a set of things that no tool does for you. It helps to name them, because they are the reason you hire people in the first place.
Judgment about what the account is for
A buyer knows that a client in a slow season wants leads at any reasonable cost, and that the same client in a busy season wants only the best leads. The numbers look the same on both days. The right action is different. That context lives in the buyer's head and in conversations with the client, not in the ad platform.
The client relationship
When spend is up and results are flat, someone has to pick up the phone. A buyer explains what happened, what you are doing about it, and what the client should expect next. Clients stay with agencies because they trust a person. Software does not hold that trust.
Strategy and structure
How should campaigns be split? Which audiences deserve their own budget? Is it time to test a new platform? These calls shape the account for months. A buyer weighs them against the client's business, the offer, the sales team's capacity and a dozen things that never appear in a dashboard.
Knowing when the data is lying
Tracking breaks. A landing page goes down. A promotion ends and nobody tells the media team. An experienced buyer smells something wrong before they can prove it. That instinct is hard to replace.
What software does that a person cannot do every hour
Software has one real advantage: it does not get tired or distracted, and it can look at every account on every pass.
Think about a buyer with dozens of accounts. They can review each one properly on a schedule. Between reviews, things happen. A card expires on one account. A campaign drifts away from its target. An ad's frequency climbs while its cost per click rises. A person cannot watch all of that continuously, and nobody should be asked to.
Here is what the software side looks like when it is built for this job.
- It reads the accounts against your targets. You set a fallback target for the account, then a CPA or ROAS per campaign where it matters, and rules for groups of campaigns (for example, all TikTok campaigns judged on link cost per click). The software reads every account through that lens.
- It ranks what to change. Instead of 40 things that might matter, you get a short queue ordered by importance, each item with the reasoning and the numbers behind it in plain English.
- It skips passes when nothing is worth acting on. A queue that always has something in it trains people to ignore it. A queue that is sometimes empty earns trust.
- It spots fatigue across campaigns. The same creative often runs in several campaigns and on several platforms. Reading it as one asset shows what is winning and what is wearing out. Rising frequency, rising CPM or CPC, and worsening CPA together are a strong sign to swap in creative you have staged.
None of this replaces the buyer's decisions. It changes what the buyer spends time on.
Cost and ramp: what each path really takes
Hiring a media buyer
The line items are easy to list: salary, benefits, tools, and a seat. The less visible costs are bigger.
- Recruiting time. Finding a buyer with the right platform experience takes weeks of your attention.
- Ramp. A new buyer needs to learn each client, each account structure, each quirk. Expect a period before they carry a full book without close supervision.
- Management time. Someone senior reviews their work, answers questions and catches mistakes while they learn.
- Capacity limits. One more buyer adds a fixed amount of capacity. If your accounts grow faster than that, you are hiring again.
Hiring is the right move when the constraint is judgment, strategy or client coverage. It is a slow and expensive way to solve a monitoring problem.
Adding software
Software has its own ramp, and it is usually shorter. You connect the accounts, write down your targets and constraints, and the software begins reading. You still need someone to review the queue, and you will spend some time tuning the targets so the recommendations match how you actually run.
Software scales differently. Adding an account does not mean adding a seat of human attention, though it does mean someone still approves the changes. For current pricing, see Ads Arsenal pricing. We do not restate numbers here because they change.
Software is the right move when the constraint is attention: good buyers who cannot watch everything, daily budgets that must land close to plan, and small problems that sit unnoticed for a couple of days.
A worked example and a decision checklist
An example (numbers are illustrative)
Say a campaign has a $50 target CPA and a $200 daily budget. On Monday it spends $200 and records 4 conversions, so CPA is $50. On Tuesday the card on that account expires halfway through the day. Spend stops at $100. Nobody notices until Thursday morning.
That is two and a half days of missed delivery on one campaign. Multiply that across dozens of accounts and a buyer's week fills up with checks that mostly find nothing, plus the occasional miss that costs real money.
A hire does not fix this. A second buyer checking the same accounts by hand still checks them on a schedule. Software that reads every account on every pass and puts "spend stopped on this account" at the top of the queue does fix it. The buyer then decides what to do: update the card, shift budget, tell the client.
Now flip it. Say the same campaign's CPA has crept to $65 over two weeks, and the software recommends cutting its budget. A buyer who knows the client just launched a new offer may dismiss that recommendation, write one sentence on why, and move on. That is judgment doing its job, and the dismissal becomes a rule for the account.
A checklist you can use tomorrow
Ask your buyers to track their time for one week, in three buckets:
- Looking: opening accounts, scanning for problems, pulling numbers.
- Deciding: choosing what to change and why.
- Talking: client calls, reports, internal planning.
Then read the result.
- If "looking" is the largest bucket, you have a monitoring problem. Software is the first thing to try.
- If "deciding" is squeezed because buyers are always catching up, software helps there too, since it brings the reasoning and numbers with each item.
- If "talking" is where things fall apart, with clients unhappy and no one owning the relationship, hire.
- If your buyers are strong but you cannot take on new clients because each one needs too much watching, look at software before you look at headcount.
- If you have no one who can set strategy at all, hire first. Software cannot give you that.
Run this once a quarter. The answer changes as your client mix changes.
Questions agencies ask about this decision
Should an agency hire another media buyer or buy software?
It depends on what is limiting you. If your buyers have good judgment but run out of hours checking accounts, software gives them those hours back. If you lack someone who can set strategy and own a client relationship, software will not fill that gap and you need a person.
What does a media buyer do that software cannot?
A buyer decides what the account is for, talks the client through a bad week, and knows when a number is wrong for reasons the data does not show. Software reads patterns in the numbers. It does not hold the relationship or make the strategic call.
How much does it cost to hire a media buyer?
The real cost is salary plus benefits, the months it takes a new hire to learn your accounts, and the management time you spend along the way. Plan for a ramp before the hire carries a full book. Price the software side on its own terms by looking at the pricing page.
Can software replace a media buyer?
No. Software can watch every account, rank what to change and explain why, but a person has to approve the change and own the result. The useful version of software makes the buyers you already have cover more accounts well.
How do media buyers use software day to day?
They open a ranked queue, read the reasoning and numbers behind each item, then approve, dismiss or ask for a change. Approved changes are written to the account and checked afterward. The buyer's time moves from hunting for problems to deciding on them.
What Ads Arsenal does for this problem today
Ads Arsenal was built by a media buyer, for the problem described above: client accounts with a daily budget that had to land close to plan, where one expired card could go unnoticed for two days. It runs Google, Meta and TikTok from one login. It reads every account against the targets and constraints you write, ranks what to change in an Insights queue with the reasoning and numbers behind each item, and skips a pass when nothing is worth acting on.
Nothing changes in an account until someone approves it. An approved change is written to the account, checked a few minutes later to confirm it landed, and tracked to see whether it worked, with one-click rollback. Dismiss a recommendation with a sentence of explanation and it keeps that as a rule for the account. If you want to see how it fits an agency, start with Ads Arsenal for agencies, or read the product overview at Ads Arsenal. Ads Arsenal is in a free design-partner beta for agencies and in-house teams running real spend on Google, Meta and TikTok. Become a design partner.