Inside a Media Buyer’s Day: Breaking Down My Day To Day for Automation

In my first post, I shared my journey from manual media buying to system-focused automation. Today, I’m pulling back the curtain on my current daily workflow—specifically for Facebook Ads—and identifying the first processes I’ll be automating.

Why does this matter? Because the first step to building any automation system is understanding exactly what you’re doing manually. Only then can you effectively break it down, systemize it, and eventually detach yourself from the process.

Let’s dive in.

The Current Reality: My Daily Media Buying Workflow

Before I begin, I should note that I manage ads across Facebook, Google, and TikTok platforms. For clarity and focus, this post will cover just my Facebook Ads workflow. I’ll address Google and TikTok processes in future posts.

My day typically follows this pattern:

Morning Check-In and Campaign Management

I start my workday by checking the status and performance of campaigns that have been running since 6 AM PST. Since my company is based in Florida (3 hours ahead), the ads have already accumulated meaningful data by the time I log in.

This initial review involves both evaluating the automated rules I’ve set up and making manual optimization decisions. While I’ve implemented some automation, there’s significant room for improvement—which I’ll detail in a future post dedicated to optimization rules.

Engagement Management and Comment Moderation

Next, I focus on engagement for high-performing ads. This includes actively managing comments through an app called Comments Guard. Proper comment management is crucial for ad performance; negative comments can tank conversion rates, while positive engagement can boost social proof.

This task alone consumes significant time and follows predictable patterns—making it a prime candidate for delegation or automation.

Campaign Optimization and Scaling

The core of my role involves optimizing campaigns and scaling what’s working. This means:

• Reallocating budgets to top performers
• Applying manual bidding strategies
• Evaluating and scaling testing campaigns
• Making data-driven decisions on where to expand

What makes this challenging is the ever-changing nature of the Facebook algorithm and seasonal fluctuations. I continuously test different scaling strategies, campaign structures, and bidding approaches to maintain performance.

Creative Testing Setup

After optimizing existing campaigns, I turn to our creative repository sheet. Our Creative Director provides new images and videos approximately once or twice weekly for testing.

My process includes:

• Reviewing new creatives for compliance and potential
• Downloading and organizing assets
• Setting up proper testing campaigns
• Applying consistent naming conventions
• Implementing automation rules for the tests

Once the creatives have run for sufficient time (typically until the end of the week), I provide feedback to our Creative Director on performance metrics like CTR, CPC, and Cost Per Acquisition.

Next Steps: Creative Testing Automation

Of all these tasks, setting up creatives for testing feels most like “busy work” and is my first target for automation and delegation. It’s repeatable, follows clear patterns, and takes time away from higher-level strategy work.

By breaking this process into discrete steps, I can create clear SOPs that can be delegated to a VA or potentially handled by AI tools. The complete creative testing workflow includes:

1. Checking our creative repository sheet for new assets
2. Documenting each creative in our tracking system
3. Organizing creatives by theme or angle
4. Selecting the appropriate testing environment
5. Duplicating pre-configured base campaigns
6. Updating campaign naming conventions
7. Replacing creative assets in the campaigns
8. Applying automation rules for performance tracking
9. Launching the tests according to schedule
10. Repeating for each batch of new creatives

Looking at this process objectively, I can see that virtually all of these tasks follow predictable patterns that can be documented and systematized.

In the next post, we’ll go these steps into detail. And also an over the shoulders of them being done. I’m thinking, why not make my next post literally the SOP, broken down the busy work that it is, and how I would hand it off to a VA.

The goal is to free up several hours each week that I can reinvest in more strategic work—like building additional automation systems for campaign optimization and scaling.