What a media buyer costs in Egypt, and what you're paying for

"How much does a media buyer charge" gets asked every day in Egypt, and the usual answer misleads because it skips the variable that matters most. The service is not standard. One person takes 7,000 EGP and launches campaigns. Another takes 50,000 and hands you a working system. Both call themselves media buyers.

How much does a media buyer cost in Egypt?

The Egyptian market prices this work in three tiers, and the fee usually lands at 10 to 15 percent of your monthly ad spend. Junior freelancers charge 5,000 to 10,000 EGP a month. Experienced buyers charge 15,000 to 40,000. Specialists who deliver a full system start at 50,000 and go up from there.

Those are market tiers, not my price list. If you are still deciding who to hire rather than what to pay, start with how to hire a performance media buyer in Egypt, because the screening questions there matter more than the quote.

Are you asking about a salary or a service fee?

Two very different people ask this question. If you want a job as a media buyer, you are asking about a monthly salary, and the Egyptian average sits around 14,000 EGP, rising with experience and platforms. A brand pays a fee priced at 10 to 15 percent of its ad spend instead, which is a different calculation. This post is not for you, and I will not waste your time.

If you own a brand, you are asking about the cost of having your paid campaigns run from outside. That is a service fee, priced against your ad budget rather than against the hiring market. The gap between the two numbers can be two or three times. That is not a markup. The fee covers production, tools and time that are not split across a payroll.

What do you get for 5,000 to 10,000 EGP a month?

This is the junior tier, usually someone in their first two years. They take the ads you prepare, upload them, set targeting and budget, and send a report now and then. It suits a brand spending under 50,000 EGP a month that needs execution, which keeps the fee inside the 10 to 15 percent rule.

What it does not suit is expecting a creative strategy, a profitability read or a tracking repair from the same person.

What changes at 15,000 to 40,000 EGP a month?

This is the experienced buyer running mid-sized accounts, and at this tier roughly a 10 to 15 percent fee should buy you the following:

• An account structure built from scratch, with clean naming and a clear split between testing and scaling.
• Pixel and Conversions API set up correctly, with events checked by hand.
• A written creative strategy: angles, hooks and scripts.
• A weekly written report with spend, revenue, orders and next week's decision.
• A review of the product page and checkout when the numbers say the problem is after the click.

When is a specialist at 50,000 EGP and up worth it?

When 1 percent of efficiency on your monthly spend is worth more than the fee itself. Below that spend the maths does not work, and you will get further with someone less specialised.

The price at this tier is for a system, not for pressing buttons: 40 to 60 original ads a month, a live dashboard connecting Meta, Google and TikTok to the store, server-side tracking that is set up properly, and a written learning log for each account.

Fixed fee or a percentage of sales?

My preference is a fixed fee that covers the work plus a small percentage on growth above an agreed baseline, counted on delivered orders, because the gap between what Meta reports and what the store confirms regularly reaches 40 percent in Egypt. A fixed fee gives both sides stability and lets the buyer say no to a bad decision. Its weakness is that it is not tied to the result.

A percentage of sales looks fair and hides a real trap: it rewards volume, not profit. A buyer paid on revenue has a reason to spend more even while profit shrinks. On cash on delivery, the percentage has to be calculated on orders that were actually delivered, not on orders that were placed. A commission on the reported number pays for orders that never arrived.

Does the fee include creative production?

Not always, and it is the most common source of disputes. Even a fee at the full 15 percent of spend often leaves production out. In the 15,000 to 40,000 EGP tier, production is often only partly included, so an active account that needs 40 to 60 ads a month can end up with a separate production budget nobody mentioned.

Ask it word for word: how many original ads a month does this price include? If the answer is "you prepare them and I upload them", you still need to budget for production yourself.

Is there a minimum ad budget to work with a media buyer?

There is no fixed floor, but the 10 to 15 percent rule sets one for you. A 15,000 EGP fee fits a monthly spend of about 100,000 to 150,000 EGP. Put the same fee on a much smaller budget and the fee becomes a second media budget you are not spending on ads.

If the fee you can afford falls under 5 percent of your spend, you are not saving. You are buying less time and less attention on your account.

Why does the cheap option end up costing more?

If your ad budget is 100,000 EGP a month and you pay a 7,000 EGP fee, you saved 8,000 compared with a pricier buyer, about 8 percent of the budget. That 8,000 is not the number that counts.

The number that counts is half the 100,000 going to ads that were never tested properly, or a Pixel firing a duplicate event so Meta learned the wrong thing for two months. The fee is the cheapest line in the whole operation. The ad budget is the expensive one, and the buyer decides how efficiently it is spent.

Measurement is where this shows most. On one Egyptian account Ads Manager reported a 5.48 ROAS. Re-measured on a 7-day click window, with view-through removed and cancelled and unsettled cash-on-delivery orders taken out, the real figure was 1.80. No fee difference between two buyers comes close to that gap. The full breakdown is in reported ROAS versus real.

You are not buying the media buyer's time. You are buying the efficiency of every pound you spend.

What should you ask before agreeing to any price?

Five questions, and a buyer worth 10 to 15 percent of your spend will answer all of them without hesitating:

1. How many original ads a month does this price include?
2. How many accounts are you running right now?
3. When does the report reach me, and in what form?
4. If the numbers are not moving after two months, how does the agreement change?
5. If we part ways, do the data and the accounts stay with me?

Seif Gomaa sets his fee after seeing the business. If you want to know your own numbers before any of these conversations, the free audit returns three of them in 48 hours: your maximum cost per order, your ROAS after delivery, and your biggest leak.

Do not ask "how much do you charge". Ask "what will I get". A price alone tells you nothing. A price next to a clear list of deliverables is a decision you can hold someone to.