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Why do ad agencies exist?
Please do not get offended as most of you are from ad agencies, but why is it a good deal for the customer?
The FB UI is tailored for non tech-savvy people. Almost everyone nowadays runs vertical, broad audience targeting campaigns. I feel like the advertisers salary far exceeds the profit saved going from broad audiences to some super lazer focused 1000iq ad set.
Am I wrong on this? Again, I know most of you work for agencies so I’m taking this with a grain of salt.
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13 Replies
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Depends, if a company is spending 100k then a few thousand for the advertiser is not that big of a deal.
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You make running Facebook ads seem easier then it is. Broad targeting does not work as well in smaller countries with populations the size of Canada. Lots of brands don’t have money to hire someone full time to run paid ads and do all the other jobs in marketing. Using an external vendor… agency or freelancer may make sense. Maybe the brand is in a smaller city where talent is tight and they prefer an agency as it’s less people management on their side. Brand could want an outside point of view that their team won’t have since they are inside the company. Lots of reasons to hire an agency or freelancer.
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Unfortunately, that is the view point of a lot of newer businesses. But in my experience it is wrong. The spray and pray approach of most business on social media is really hurting themselves. It works but it could be done better. The ROI and the conversion rates go up considerably. Tbh I think FB and other sites make it easier to use so people throw more money into it to meet goals. Where they could pay someone with some know how and get the same goal for less money. Even after paying the middleman.
To make it simple a marketer could take $100 and get a better result than a regular person with $500. You are throwing money at people that don’t want or have an interest in your product. This strategy is making it worse because everyone is doing it. The more people do it the less effective it is and the more effective targeted ads will be.
Plus you go to marketers for their other skills. Like how to do a proper and efficient ad. Marketing is a skill. A poor ad or other ineffective part of your sales funnel can really hurt your business but you wouldn’t know. Or you will find out later than you could have.
What’s funny is that Fb and other sites have done marketing to get people to feel that way. And it’s working. I’m sure they used a big agency.
Just my 2¢
Feel free to ask questions.
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Coming from a large corporate perspective, I had the same mindset, but when looking at our agencies cost, they are actually priced efficiently. Also, while a big company could do it in house, smaller tasks like writing daily social media posts across multiple accounts and scheduling ads becomes more administrative and better spent by someone else. I’m just an intern, so take it it with a grain of salt.
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In addition to the other comments, I’ll add that as a business owner who does my own marketing, you reach a point where it’s not worth your time anymore to manage ads – especially on Facebook, which tend to take far more time managing than other platforms.
Eventually, after revenue and sales are good enough, I’d rather offload media buying to someone else so I can work on other projects.
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For Facebook specifically, is very true is becoming a lot easier but would say agencies have the following benefits that you would struggle to get without them:
* Support from FB. How many people makes posts on this sub saying they can’t get access to FB Support? For agencies its a given and especially the FMPA ones, you get access to much wider parts than just account reps (marketing science / solution engineering etc)
* Ad approvals. This is very real especially right now in peak season. You can basically get your ad accounts approved in “flash sale” mode, so all ads get passed audit no matter what. Again a perk of an agency.
* Alphas / Betas. Agencies will generally speaking get access to the more newer elements of Facebook first unless you are a very large brand running in-house. Things beyond Ads Manager like CAPI & FB Attribution also are important to know how to use.
* Technology. The smarter agencies that aren’t just full of account managers actually build on top of Facebook via the Marketing API, which is where you can do very interesting stuff that can drive incremental value on FB.If you are measuring based on Ads Manager numbers and you go broad / Power of 5 / whatever FB are saying to do, is true it will probably perform. But if you take a step back and look at the bigger picture, then this is where it gets complicated which is where an agency can help.
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In theory, I can look up how to fix anything that goes wrong with my car if I rent the equipment. I can also probably fix someone’s broken leg after a few Youtube videos. But it’s best to let professionals do these things to save time and money from costly mistakes. There are a lot of things that professional media buyers know that you can’t find on the internet easily yet just because you wouldn’t know what to look for. For example, I’ve never met a business owner who knew that you can now retarget only your website visitors who spent 30+ seconds with a specific pricing option centered on the screen. Most only retarget all website visitors, including known bots and those who left without reading anything beyond the header.
But you’re right, if the expense of an ad agency is greater than the profit then that agency won’t be in business for long.
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Businesses really need to have a growth mindset, rather than trying to save money on not using an agency much of the time you are missing out on potential returns. You are paying for experiences, best practices, multiple heads, strategy, consultation and direct support with what ever platform your using.
SMB always thinks they are doing the right thing in terms of their strategy as they read it on some blog, some guru has given them crappy advice or just won’t change their old tactics and find it hard to hand it over to an agency they can trust. Most of the time if the agency runs an audit they will find so many gaps and other areas to improve your ROI.
Let a decent agency get your foundations sorted for several years while they grow your returns so you can then shift inhouse by hiring people with more experience to you and can build on those platforms.
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I am not an agency. I am a customer who uses an agency.
Facebook and Google are the enemy. They do everything humanly possible to get you to overspend and broaden the search to unnecessary things to trick you to make an unnecessary spend.
Google software constantly has pop ups to try to get you to broaden search filters after we intentionally limited them.
Google’s salesmen (excuse me “consultants”) would constantly call to try to trick the customer into increasing spend, until I stopped taking their calls.
Google has a history of trying to hide data in order to stop the client from organizing effective targeting and this forcing the client to overspend. They got rid of Average Position, then they got rid of search term reports.
Only a fool does not use an independent PPC consultant.
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Ad agency veteran turned client-side here. I am blown away at how complicated tools like Google Ads are. It’s ridiculous. I am new to digital advertising hands on but an experienced programmer, web developer, know database tools, salesforce, etc. I am just shocked at how complicated and poorly documented these products are. Linkedin and Facebook are definitely ahead of Google from that aspect. All the copy / pasting IDs and codes around, it’s really shocking that this is what the biggest, baddest software company in the world could come up with.
Small and medium sized businesses simply don’t have the time or energy to figure out how to use these products. So whether it’s an agency or a freelancer or an employee, any business that wants to use these tools is going to spend a lot of money on people and technology to get value from it. Otherwise they end up with things like “smart” campaigns that scraped our site and created links to an image in the sitelink but cannot be removed at all.
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I think one of the advantages an agency/freelancer can bring is perspective and experience that comes from running multiple accounts. You can’t get this when you’re flying solo.
I’m a Google Ads guy so I can’t comment on FB specific stuff but I know that in Google Ads there are patterns/tactics that work well across most accounts. I can apply these while setting up a new account and often get leads for my client within a few hours of enabling the campaign. Starting from scratch, on your own means you have to learn this yourself. It can take a lot longer and cost much more – if you ever do.
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Some agencies don’t just bring value in terms of directly managing a single ad platform for a client, but can help strategize and provide insights that could shift ad strategy all together. A great agency should be able to you help optimize your FB ads quickly, but if the ROI isn’t taking shape or spend isn’t efficient after consistent optimization, they should be able to talk through that with you and possibly take a different ad approach based on your target audience. Maybe Snapchat Ads is a better platform if you’re targeting 18 – 26 year olds, or LinkedIn if you’re going after professionals.
So that’s a core benefit to using agencies: they may/should know more than one platform and can help you make good strategy decisions that are best for your business.
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A piano is just a piano.
It’s going to sound very differently if you are playing it versus Elton John.
Why would anyone ever want to pay Elton John to play when you can sit down and “play music”
Suffice it to say, Facebook, despite being self serve and fairly easy to use for real budget and real performance there’s a big difference between experts and amateurs.
It’s also a support/service level.
My agency practically has a Google rep in their office.
Me trying to contact Facebook or Google directly? Automated emails with people over seas who don’t even understand the problem
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