How to Choose an E-commerce Media Buyer in Egypt

Hiring the wrong media buyer for an e-commerce store is expensive twice over. You lose the ad budget, and you lose the two or three months it takes to find out — during which the account accumulates habits, campaign structures, and tracking decisions that the next person has to unpick before they can do anything useful. The cost of the mistake is rarely the retainer.

The usual interview opens with which platforms someone has run and what ROAS they hit. Neither question separates a good hire from a bad one. Platforms are learnable, and a past ROAS number without the margin behind it is unreadable — a 4x on a 20% margin product is a loss. Here is what actually distinguishes them.

1. Start with tracking, not with campaigns

Every optimisation decision a media buyer makes is measured against the conversion data the platform receives. If that data is incomplete, the person is optimising against a distorted picture — and so is the platform's own algorithm. A buyer who opens by asking to audit your conversion tracking and Meta Conversions API setup before touching budgets is telling you they know which order these things go in.

There is a simple way to test this in the first conversation. Ask them how they would check whether your current tracking is accurate. The answer you want is some version of: compare purchases reported in the ad platform against orders recorded in the store for the same date range, and look for a consistent gap in either direction. If the answer is that the pixel is installed so it should be fine, that is the whole test.

2. Ask what your break-even ROAS is

This is the fastest filter in the whole process. Break-even ROAS is 1 divided by your gross margin. A product with a 25% margin needs a 4x ROAS just to cover the ad spend — before rent, salaries, or software. A buyer who does not ask for your margin before quoting you a target ROAS is quoting a number they cannot possibly know is good.

The follow-up matters as much. Ask which of your products can carry a higher acquisition cost and which cannot. A buyer who thinks in terms of the account average will scale the whole catalogue evenly and quietly lose money on half of it.

3. Find out how they test creative

Creative is usually the ceiling on an e-commerce account, not targeting. What you are listening for is a process, not a portfolio. A real creative testing process sounds like this:

• One variable moves at a time — hook, angle, offer, or format, not all four at once
• The message gets tested before the production value, because the first two seconds decide whether the rest is seen
• Budget goes behind a creative after it wins a test, not before
• Winners get distributed across segments with different angles, so campaigns stop bidding against each other with near-identical ads
• There is a queue of tested creative ready for when the current winner fatigues

If the answer is that they will test a lot of creatives and see what works, that is not a process. That is a budget.

4. Ask who owns the conversion rate

This question separates media buyers from media spenders. A conversion rate problem shows up in an ad account as an acquisition cost problem, which is why it so often gets misdiagnosed as targeting and answered with more budget. If the person treats the landing page and checkout as somebody else's department, they will keep buying traffic into a funnel that leaks — and the fix will keep looking like a bidding problem. The stronger answer treats conversion rate optimisation as part of the same job.

Red flags

• Guaranteed ROAS, or a guaranteed position, before seeing your margins or your account
• Screenshots of results with the date range or the account cropped out
• Claims like "#1 media buyer in Egypt" with nothing independent behind them
• No question about your gross margin, average order value, or repeat rate
• Treating tracking as a technical task to hand to a developer later
• Reporting that only ever shows platform-reported ROAS, never the store's own numbers

Questions worth asking in the first call

• What is my break-even ROAS, and what do you need from me to calculate it?
• How would you check whether my current tracking is accurate?
• What would you look at first in my account, and why that first?
• How do you decide when to kill a campaign versus give it more time?
• What does your reporting show me that the ad platform does not?
• What would make you tell me not to scale?

How to structure the first 30 days

Do not judge a new media buyer on revenue in month one. The first few weeks should go on fixing measurement and establishing a baseline, which often makes reported numbers look worse before they look better — deduplicating double-counted events, for example, reduces the revenue the platform claims. Agree up front on what gets measured, where the numbers come from, and what an honest month-one outcome looks like. A buyer who is comfortable being judged on the store's own figures rather than the platform's is telling you something useful.

If you are evaluating an e-commerce media buyer in Egypt right now, the published case studies on this site are written the way the answers above suggest they should be — with the date range, the channel, and the store's own dashboard attached to every figure.