Hire Someone to Run Facebook Ads for Your Ecommerce Store

If you want to hire someone to run Facebook ads for an online store, you have four real options: a freelancer, a specialist agency, an in-house media buyer, or a consultant who coaches your own team. For a store spending 20,000 USD a month or more on Meta, a specialist agency on a flat fee usually gives the most work per dollar. Below that, a good freelancer is often the better buy.

This guide compares the options on cost, speed and risk, lists the questions that separate a strong hire from an expensive one, and explains how to keep full ownership of your ad account whoever you choose. Our own prices are public on the pricing page, so you can put them next to every quote you collect.

How much does it cost to hire someone to run Facebook ads?

Hiring someone to run Facebook ads typically costs 500 to 5,000 USD a month for a freelancer or small agency, 2,500 to 12,000 USD a month for a specialist ecommerce agency, or 10 to 20 percent of ad spend on percentage pricing. A full-time in-house media buyer in the US commonly costs 80,000 to 130,000 USD a year before benefits.

These are market ranges collected from published agency price lists and pricing surveys, not quotes, and they move with scope. The fee is always on top of the ad spend itself. A full breakdown of the pricing models, with worked examples at three budgets, is in our guide on how much a Facebook ads agency costs.

Is it worth paying someone to do Facebook ads?

Paying someone to run Facebook ads is worth it when the money they save or make exceeds their fee, which usually happens once a store spends 10,000 USD a month or more. At that level a 15 percent improvement in cost per purchase is worth more than most monthly fees, and a specialist sees mistakes that an owner running ads at night never will.

Below that, the math gets tighter. A store spending 3,000 USD a month would need a dramatic improvement to cover even a modest freelancer. Owners at that stage often get more from a one-off account review and a few hours of training than from ongoing management.

The hidden cost of doing it yourself is time. Running Meta ads properly for a store means checking performance daily, briefing and editing new creative every week, watching the Pixel and Conversions API, and keeping the product catalog clean. That is easily 10 to 15 hours a week, taken from product, operations and customer service.

Should I hire a freelancer or an agency for Facebook ads?

Hire a freelancer if you spend under about 15,000 USD a month and mainly need someone to set up and manage campaigns. Hire an agency if you spend more, need a constant supply of new creative, or cannot afford the account to stall when one person is sick or leaves.

The deciding factor for most stores is creative volume. On Meta today, the ad itself does most of the targeting work, so results depend heavily on how many new concepts you test each month. One freelancer can buy media well, but rarely has the hours to also write, shoot, edit and test 15 to 30 new ads a month. Agencies have designers, editors and creator networks in the same team.

Agencies have their own weak spots. Junior staff sometimes run the account after a senior person sold the deal, and percentage pricing can reward the agency for spending more rather than spending better. Ask who will touch your account each week, and ask for the fee in writing at your expected spend in six months, not today.

What to hand over and what to keep

Whoever you hire, keep ownership of everything. The ad account, Pixel, Conversions API setup, product catalog, Facebook Page and Instagram account should all live in your own Meta Business Portfolio, with the freelancer or agency added as a partner. That way you can remove access in one click and nothing leaves with them.

• Grant partner access, never your personal login and never an account created on their side.
• Keep billing on your card inside your ad account, so ad spend is never marked up or invoiced through a third party without your say.
• Own the creative files. Raw footage, project files and final ads should be delivered to a folder you control.
• Keep a change log. Ask for a written record of what changed in the account each week and why.

We describe how this works in practice, including the exact permissions we ask for, on our security and account ownership page.

Questions to ask before you hire

A short call or email exchange with these questions filters out most weak candidates. Good answers are specific. Vague answers about "data-driven strategy" are a warning sign.

1. Who runs my account day to day, and how many other accounts do they manage? More than 10 to 12 active accounts per buyer usually means shallow attention.
2. How many new ads will you launch each month, and who makes them? Get a number, and check whether creative is included in the fee or billed separately.
3. How do you check that tracking is accurate? They should mention the Pixel, the Conversions API, deduplication and purchase value checks.
4. What will you change in the first 30 days? A strong hire audits before changing anything, then fixes tracking and structure before scaling.
5. What is the minimum term, and how do I cancel? Long lock-in periods protect the provider, not you.
6. Which results do you report, and from which source? Ads Manager ROAS alone overstates results. Look for blended numbers from your store too.

It also helps to know what your rivals are doing before the first call. Spend 20 minutes reviewing the ads in your category, either in Meta's Ad Library or with a tool that lets you see competitors' live ads across platforms, so you can judge whether a candidate's creative ideas are original or just copies of the market. Our longer checklist on how to choose a Facebook ads agency covers contracts and reporting in more depth.

Where can I find someone to run my Facebook ads?

You can find someone to run Facebook ads through freelance marketplaces, Meta's own partner directory, agency review sites, referrals from other founders, and specialist agencies that publish their prices. For stores with a real budget, referrals and specialist agencies tend to produce better results than the cheapest marketplace bids.

Marketplaces are fine for small, defined jobs such as a one-time setup. For ongoing management, the cheapest bids often come from people running dozens of accounts at once. Meta's partner directory lists agencies that meet Meta's own criteria, which is a useful filter but not a guarantee of fit for your category.

Red flags when hiring a Facebook ads manager

• Guaranteed ROAS or guaranteed sales. Nobody controls the auction, your stock or your competitors.
• A request for your personal Facebook password, or an offer to run ads from their own ad account.
• No mention of creative. If they only talk about audiences and bidding, they are working with an older playbook.
• Contracts of six or twelve months with no exit, signed before any audit.
• Reports that arrive once a month as a PDF with no access to the live numbers.

Freelancer, agency or in-house by spend level

The in-house option is costed line by line in our Facebook ads agency vs in-house comparison.

How we fit if you spend 20,000 USD a month or more

MetaAdsAgency runs Facebook and Instagram ads for online stores on a flat monthly fee by spend band: 3,000 USD a month up to 50,000 USD of spend, 6,000 USD up to 150,000 USD, and 12,000 USD above that, with 20 percent off on yearly billing. Every plan includes a set number of new ads and UGC style videos each month, tracking setup and a live dashboard, and you sign up and pay online without a sales call.

We work in categories where creative and catalog details decide results, such as Facebook ads for jewelry brands and Shopify stores. The fastest way to see whether we are the right hire is the free Facebook ads audit, which checks your tracking, catalog and offer in about two minutes and shows the first things we would fix.