8 Tell-tale Signs You Facebook Agency is Failing You - For eComm Brands
Below are the top 8 mistakes we look out for when auditing new potential Facebook ads clients - these are always a telltale sign that the agency is either too naive or too busy to run the account properly and show us when we think we can make a big improvement.
1. Fragmented account - too many ad-sets for the budget.
As a rule of thumb you need enough budget per day to drive 2 sales at your target cost-per sale. For example: if you typically sell each product for £20 then you need at least £40 per day per ad-set.
2. Not using UTMs for tracking.
UTMs are the tracking that is manually added to a campaign URL to give the media-buyer more data on post-click performance, and are an essential part of any tracking set up -especially post iOS14.
Hot tip: in Facebook Ads Manager, in the 'Ads' tab - go to the 'Columns' drop down, toggle to the 'set-up' dashboard, and you will be able to see at a glance all of your UTMs.
Bonus points if your agency is using dynamic UTMs - they look like this: utm_medium={{placement}}&utm_campaign={{campaign.name}}&utm_term={{adset.name}}&utm_content={{ad.name}}
More bonus points for a well-organised naming convention for the Campaigns, Ad sets and Ads.
3. Too few, or too many ads per ad set
You should have a minimum of 3-6 ads per ad set (only have more than three running if the ad-set budget is very high.
It's really important have at least three ads per ad set to allow the algorithm to find the winning ad for that audience, as well as serve new ads to people who have already seen one. If you only have one ad per ad set your account will likely perform much worse.
4. Poor quality creative, and no regular changing of creative
The Facebook ad algorithm in 2021 is a hungry beast and you need to constantly feed it with new, high-quality creative for it to perform well. You creative should clearly sell the benefits of your product - not just it's features and connect with your customers on an emotional level.
A good ad account will have 10-20 creatives running at once, with another 10 ads ready to test and swap out when ad fatigue sets in.
5. Poor quality copy, or lack of copy testing
Good copy can improve account performance by huge multiples. Copy is your opportunity to hook your customer and tell your story.
There is no rule saying copy should be long or short - it really does depend - so that is why it is important to always test both long and short copy. If your agency insist on only using short copy, they are potentially missing the opportunity that testing long copy could bring to your account.
6. Using the same ads for every part of the funnel - including retargeting.
Some people seeing your ads are loyal customers, others have never heard of you, and some of them are sitting on the fence deciding whether you buy. You need to have a different message for each of these different stages. Strangers need to be introduced to your brand and all it's benefits, whereas fence sitters may just need to see a customer testimonial to take the leap.
A well set-up account will have a campaign for each of these funnel stages with unique ads in each campaign.
7. Wrong optimisation goals being used
If you are an eComm store then 90% of the time you should be using 'purchase' as your goal - if your agency is using 'traffic' as a goal and spending a lot of money on it - they are wasting your budget, as your ads will be shown to people who are not in buying mode.
This is something we have tested and shared data with other agencies and we are 100% agreed - purchase is the best goal to use for the majority of campaigns in eComm.
8. Ad-sets being left to run despite poor performance
Take a look at your 7 day performance and then click 'compare to previous week' - if there are a a lot of ad-sets that are performing poorly but the budget hasn't been adjusted then you know your agency isn't making the daily optimisations they should be to get the most efficient use of your budget.
