-
How many campaigns does 1 person normally manage at an agency?
Posted by on June 21, 2023 at 4:08 pmHello all,
I’ve been working at an agency as the head account manager for about 6 months now. This is my first PPC gig and I was curious how many campaigns one person usually manages? Right now I have about 250 campaigns spread across about 20 clients.
We’re also hunting for more clients right now that are outside of our niche, and I’m expected to sell/plan strategy/manage those clients when they become available.
Is this normal? I feel like it’s impossible to keep up with optimizations and I find myself stressing at all times of the day.
-
1 Reply
-
Someone already asked a similar question earlier. 20 small clients are manageable by one person, but judging by the number of campaigns, these are rather mid-size clients with budgets from $5k upwards. If that is the case then you probably don’t have any more room to take more clients, as the 20 will keep you busy full-time. Start planning to hire a junior PPC guy to help you with some of the repetitive stuff. Hiring the right candidate takes time so better get that sorted asap, before even landing any new clients.
-
It’s less about the number of campaigns, and more about the number of clients, requirements for reporting/client management, and total spend.
1 client with 500+ campaigns and $1m+/m budget might be the same workload as 5 clients with 20 campaigns and $50k/m spend on each.
I generally prefer people only spend 10-15% of their time reporting out to clients, and 10-20% of their time pitching or working on non-billable agency projects. The rest should be focused on managing the day-to-day of the account.
If that balance gets out of whack, as an agency you usually want to churn the lower spending clients and focus on the higher spending ones (or bump their fees up so that they can now be a higher priority client and you can bring more staff on to help free up time).
-
It’s going to come down to workload. There comes a point where you might not be working a full 40 – 60 hour work week like much of us in paid media, but if you’re juggling 20 accounts you’re bound to get your wires crossed, make mistakes, not be able to report on all your accounts and work on them in a timely manner, your flow state gets interupted, and you get burnt out. My limit caps out around 3 clients spending 100k plus and a handful of other smaller 10k – 40k spend clients. After that, I get burnt out and just don’t want to keep working as I have to hop around to 3 different client calls, two internal meetings a day and all that other bullshit. Unless these are low touch clients, like local services $1000 a month spend kind of clients where you check your search terms once a month, I don’t think it’s healthy or logical to have one person managing 20 different $10k clients rather than 5-10 50k+ clients. Tell your sales team to go after bigger fish, less meetings, more quality, more budget to scale and test and grow.
-
Depends on the size of the client. Large national businesses? Like 3-4.
Small businesses with brick and mortar locations only seeking a presence online? 100+
Log in to reply.