Last week I ran a poll on LinkedIn, asking how many Google Ads accounts a single ad specialist should manage.
For context, in any agency I’ve ever managed ads, I’ve never had a client load under 30 accounts.
The options I gave as responses were:
- Fewer than 15
- 15-30
- Limits are for the weak
- It’s not that simple (Comment)
I was fully expecting to see most people voting for option 4, so I was shocked to see the results.
First, the most shocking thing was that two people actually voted for “Limits are for the weak”. While I appreciate the willingness to work hard, that mentality just shows a lack of experience.
The next thing that surprised me the most was that over 100 people voted for “Fewer than 15”, leaving only 15% of the people to point out the nuance behind the question.
I promise I wasn’t trying to trap people, but these answers hint at a couple of possible conclusions for me:
- Most of the people who answered were ad managers, not agency owners
- Most of the people who answered probably work on bigger accounts ($30k-$100k+/mo)
It Depends
There actually was a correct answer to this question, and it was that “It’s not that simple”.
As many of the agency owners and more experienced ad managers pointed out in the comments, there are many factors that affect how many ad accounts a specialist can handle at one time.
One comment from an agency CEO read “This really depends on (in no particular order): avg. client budget size, the clients’ service and performance expectations and whether or not the specialist is responsible for client communication.”
These factors are huge.
On one hand, the ones who answered the question “Fewer than 15” could be right.
An ad specialist managing accounts spending $50,000 per month or more and handling client communication may struggle with more than 10-12 accounts.
It’s not a blanket rule, though.
If an agency only served accounts spending $1000 per month, they’d go out of business if they hired a new ad manager for every 15 clients they took on.
An ad specialist who has no client interaction and manages accounts spending $1000/mo could realistically handle 100 ad accounts if they had the right structure and a full-time schedule.
However, someone handling only client interaction at that same agency would probably be limited to 50 or fewer of those accounts and someone handling both ads and the client relationship management would probably struggle to exceed 35 accounts.
If the clients were all mattress stores or a company focused heavily on ever-shifting promotions or something similarly hands-on, they may start dropping the ball consistently at 10-12 clients.
If these mattress stores were spending $200,000+ per month, you’d be lucky to get that employee past 3-5 clients before performance starts to dip.
So these factors brought up by the agency CEO have a huge impact on how many clients an ad manager can handle.
There are other factors to consider, however, in this already complicated equation.
Wrenches In The Plan
Another factor to consider is the level of experience the ad manager has.
Someone with a year of experience may struggle with a workload that someone with 5 years would find easy to handle.
Experience can make the difference between an ad manager spending 2 hours digging through the reports editor with no real improvements on the other side and spotting major growth opportunities within a few minutes.
Experience also breeds the kind of confidence it takes to try something well outside the norm because the situation aligns with something similar you tried several years ago. Things like that can pay off and don’t take hours of planning and strategy calls to uncover.
That leads us to yet another proverbial wrench in the plan.
Accounts that aren’t performing well tend to take much more time and brainpower than your top-performing accounts.
They even take more emotional space because they drain morale. Nobody wants to work on an account they can’t get to work.
That pushes ad managers toward accounts that are working better because they’re more enjoyable to work on. A few tough accounts under management by the same ad manager can actually lead to a fair bit of time wasted in just sitting there… completely at a loss for what to do and overwhelmed because nothing is working.
That kind of account is best fired to protect your team and your reputation. If you can’t get them results, the factors are probably outside of your control (or you need to up your strategy game).
On a similar note, you have clients who are never satisfied, who make changes in their account, or who try to take credit for your work.
I’ve actually had several of these clients myself and you often have to spend longer in the account changing your own work, finding and reverting their changes (if you even catch them), or digging through analytics and attribution software to prove your value to the untrusting client.
These clients take time away from other clients and it’s hard to predict how much bandwidth you really have because of their random interference.
How Do You Decide?
With so many factors at play here, how do you determine how many accounts to give your ad managers?
There’s no hard and fast rule, but from the standpoint of the agency owner I like to look at what you’re paying your ad manager and their current bandwidth, what each client is paying you, and how many hours you should be providing to each client.
It looks kind of like this:
Ad manager monthly pay: $6500
Ad manager monthly hours: 150 (Leave at least 5 hrs/mo month free for admin, so 35*4.34 wks)
Client retainer: Client 1 – $4000, Client 2 – $2000, Client 3 – $6,000, Client 4 – $2500, etc.
Client hours to allocate ($150/hr): Client 1 – 26, Client 2 – 13, Client 3 – 40, Client 4 – 16, etc.
If your ad manager is not managing the client relationship, your formula for “profitably allocating workload” is to look at your ad manager’s monthly pay divided by your target hourly rate ($150 in our example) as below:
$6500 / $150 = 43 hours (rounding down to the nearest whole hour)
That’s the number of hours you need to assign before you break even on value.
At 150 hours per month, that leaves you with 107 hours to leverage toward profit, in theory.
You’d then want to look at about 33-67% of the client hours to allocate as “ad management hours” vs “relationship hours”. We’ll say 50% for easy math, but some clients will require less relationship time, some more.
Assigning 13, 6, 20, and 8 hours for clients 1-4 respectively, you’d end up with 47 hours per month for those 4 clients. That leaves about 103 hours to allocate while still giving 5 hours per week of buffer time for admin work.
If your average retainer is $2,000, you’d be multiplying that by the percentage of allocated hours they’d be covering (50% in our case), if you’re assigning roughly 6 hours for ad management to clients at this rate, your ad manager would have bandwidth for 17 more accounts, putting them at 21 accounts max.
If you would rather look at it from the ad manager’s perspective, you can look at the ad spend and assign an hour of management time for every X number of dollars.
That could be an hour for every $1000 of spend, or every $2000.
It’s not a perfect method by any means, but no method is.
Summary
In the end, for the sake of agency profitability I would recommend assigning clients based on the hours you need to provide for them.
Regardless of the method you choose to assign client loads, you should always check in with your ad managers and client-facing team (if they’re separate) and gauge their bandwidth and morale.
Every ad manager is different and math doesn’t take human emotion and mental capacity into account, so while it’s a good idea to have a number to aim for when assigning clients, some employees will be able to handle more or less than your average number.
If you’re curious about how I work with agencies or if you’re frustrated with your agency’s profitability or retention of clients or employees, feel free to reach out to me and I’ll see how I can help. I never charge for the first consultation and if I can solve it in 30-minutes, there’s no reason to pay for my services and you walk away happy.
If you know of someone who may benefit from this newsletter, please don’t hesitate to send them to https://kinglyconsulting.com/newsletter so they can start receiving them.
Also, you can now catch up on past issues you may have missed by visiting https://kinglyconsulting.com/archive/