Top 5 Most Important Tips for Paid Media Account Managers

March 29, 2022

Managing someone else’s money can be a challenging thing, especially when the amount of money is over $1 million a month! Over the years I’ve developed a few strategies, tricks, and mindset views I’d like to share with all paid media professionals.

I hope you find these helpful in your day to day and feel free to let me know other tactics and/or strategies you’ve implemented in your day to day!

1 – Attention to Detail

Mistakes happen, but limit them! You cannot be constantly making a minor mistake here and there, you’ll lose the trust and confidence of your client which could ultimately end the relationship. Take the extra 5-10 minutes and review things, spellcheck, review all settings at every level, QA the landing page, etc. These things don’t take a long to do, but pay off big time! Nothing is worse than launching an ad with the wrong landing page or targeting the wrong geo. I will follow-up with another blog topic about tips and tricks to QA like a pro!

2 – Build your team up

As the account manager you lead the strategy, execution, road mapping, relationship building, and everything else that goes into maintaining a good client to agency relationship. If you’re fortunate enough to have a few team members backing you up, even more junior, utilize them! Giving them tasks to do or topics to cover on weekly updates will help build their confidence and take work off your plate! Now, this doesn’t mean you now only have to work 30 hours a week because they’re doing the other 10 for you, but allows you to use those 10, now free, hours for something bigger! Think more creatively on ad copy for Facebook, come up with a new landing page based on sound CRO practices, do a deep dive into a competitor and see where they may be beating your client. The more you build your team, the more time you have to think bigger, and the happier your clients will be!

3 – Automate as much as possible

Nothing is worse than running the same report every day. At Four15 Digital we utilize Supermetrics to automate daily spend reports, recurring reports for weekly calls, etc. We’re able to combine Google, Facebook, Linkedin, etc. data into one nicely organized table/chart to share without our client without having to pull a single report! Imagine how much time this will save you! The ad platforms also have automated reporting and notifications you can build out to help save time re-building reports. Check them out and use them!

4 – Documentation and Organization

Documenting things is very important. It allows you to reference back to budget approvals, requests, ad copy approvals, etc. You can’t just document things and throw them into some random folder, however. You need to stay organized! Create a Google Drive or folder per client to maintain important documents. Flag emails that are important to refer back to. Add email labels to quickly get to what client/topic you’re looking for. Again, just a few things I do to help stay organized.

5 – Over communicate

I save this one for last because it’s one of the most important aspects of being an account manager within a paid media agency. No client is going to like a ‘surprise’. Whether it’s a minor performance thing, new campaign/keyword build, or even something you saw “in the wild”. Filling your client in on nearly everything you’re doing within an account will show 2 things. 

1 – you’re spending quality time optimizing and thinking about the account. 

2 – it will build trust and reliance on you. 

You may not always get an email or slack back about the negative terms you added but that’s okay. It shows you’re putting in the work and making improvements to their account constantly. 

They will appreciate this!

I hope you found these high-level points helpful in your day to day, week to week, and so on! I’d love to hear some things you do as well!