Does Your Facebook Agency Suck? Are you confident your current ad agency or in-house marketing team is maximizing the efficiency of your ad dollars on Facebook, Twitter, and Google? Are you like most companies we speak with? Can you do better? Challenge your current agency or in-house team to a bakeoff with at least one other organization. As a result, you’ll almost always walk away with a more efficient ad campaign. At the very least, you’ll validate the effectiveness of your performance and walk away with a sanity check.
Does Your Facebook Agency Suck?
What is a bakeoff?
A bakeoff is a competition between two or more agencies and/or your in-house marketing team. The competition can be a “winner takes all” scenario, where the winner of the bakeoff secures the advertiser’s business. Or, you can allocate a percentage of your budget to the winning agency to keep the competition and learnings for your internal team.
Declaring a winner
Prior to the competition, the advertiser will provide a set of guidelines (generally cost, quality, and volume targets at a minimum) and a time period for the bakeoff (generally 60-90 days). At the end of the bakeoff, declare the organization with the highest return on ad spend as the winner.
Measuring the efficiency of competitors in the bakeoff
Most Facebook advertisers will look at multiple metrics when declaring a bakeoff winner. For instance, costs generally increase with scale for performance marketers, so it’s possible for an agency to show a low cost-per-action on low volume. But this low-cost-per-action may not hold at scale. Make sure the advertiser considers scale in the efficiency equation. Many advertisers will also give more weight to recent data. For example, if an agency has a big win on day 50 of a 60-day bakeoff, it is possible the agency will win the last 10 days of the bakeoff after losing the first 50. In addition to advertising metrics, consider the agency fees when declaring a winner.
Create a level playing field
A Facebook agency will generally win with a combination of better ad creative and better bidding techniques. It’s important to create a level playing field for the agencies while also shielding them from one another’s creative processes. For instance, if you have an ad that performs well (prior to starting the bakeoff), provide the same ad to both agencies and let them each iterate from there without sharing subsequent ads. Do not share any additional progress or wins between agencies (ad creative, bid techniques, etc.) once the bakeoff begins.
What happens after declaring the winner?
After declaring a winner, the advertiser should put the winning agency in the best position to succeed. Create a level playing field by sharing learnings from the other organization(s) that participated in the bakeoff. Also, stop withholding any additional information.
The Facebook Advertiser almost always wins at the end of a bakeoff
The Facebook advertiser will almost always walk away from a winner in the bakeoff. If a new agency comes in and beats the performance of your existing agency or in-house marketing team, then an advertiser’s performance will immediately improve. The advertiser will gain peace of mind and will know their agency is providing effective results after an existing agency wins. And it’s likely they will fight to retain your business, inspired to work harder and think differently. As a result, this causes them to gain efficiencies during the bakeoff period.
Take the ConsumerAcquisition Bakeoff Challenge!
- We’re challenging your existing agency or in-house team to a 60-day bakeoff (Facebook, Google, and/or Twitter traffic).
- We charge a flat fee of $15K for a 60-day bakeoff ($7,500 per month) in addition to media fees.
- For the bakeoff period, we use our own ad accounts (Facebook, Google, etc) to protect intellectual property. You prepay media fees.
- If we win the bakeoff and enter a contract extension, we expose our advertising methods with full transparency (including all intellectual property).
- We will pre-negotiate an exclusive 180-day extension that’s triggered upon winning the bakeoff (on day 60 or sooner if declared winner early).
- What do you have to lose? Does your Facebook agency suck?
You can download our free white paper “100K Facebook Ads Tested: Here’s What Works!” and review our recent Client Testimonials.
