#meta-ads
Thread
What are everyone's thoughts on in-house vs. agency for meta?
We've tried two different agencies, the current one is doing a good job but I'm still finding we're not as much into the details as I'd like to be. We have an account manager who we deal with on a weekly basis, but we don't really talk directly to the team who is running the ads and making the creatives, we go through them which I find adds an unnecessary level of complexity?
Their fees are also about to increase, and when we take that into consideration it's basically the salary of a full time person, so I'm starting to wonder if we would be better off to hire a more generalist digital marketer who can look after that as well as emails, a bit of support for the website etc
we tried an agency from Jan-Mar and had to cancel and run away. It was so much worse than when we had a freelancer working in close tandem with my inhouse growth manager.
I think we are just too small an account to get the kind of attention I feel like we need in order to perform well.
what I also hated is that the partners from the agency gave us the white glove treatment before signing and in month 1, but it was clear that juniors did all the work and responded to the slack messages. And this made the ping pong useless to me.
@Kasper - LABFRESH I'm having the same feeling! Initial audit and onboarding was great, but it's not as granular as time goes by. But if you're too small then we don't even stand a chance as we're still in our infancy compared to Labfresh đ
for sure I would recommend finding an awesome freelancer then! đ
Can't count the amount of times Founders have told me how positive a shift it was bringing this back in house... Very rarely do I hear the opposite!
@Patrick Crowley yeah I thought we were too small to afford it, but tbh agencies are becoming so expensive that it's literally a full time salary, and not even too junior
Tbh for small businesses like ours for sure content is a fulltime role, but media buying is not. So what I see others (and myself) having done poorly in the past is hiring 1 media buyer, who is really strong at Meta, and then telling her to do every type of media buying.
But that is just so hard to pull off for a real Meta specialist. So thatâs why I always ended up firing the specialist and shifting to a freelancer.
Interesting! And is it different freelancers for each platform then?
yes 1 for meta and 1 for google
Weâve mostly had bad experiences with agencies. I believe they can add value in some cases, especially when thereâs a big budget, multiple markets, loads of products, etc. but for most brands, managing in-house is way better.
Every time we worked with one, CAC went up, sales went down, progress was slow, and the âdirect Meta/Google connectionsâ they sold us on were nowhere to be found when we actually needed them. When youâre facing account restrictions or policy issues, you need someone who really cares and no one will care as much as you/your own team.
I think it's best to figure out what works for your brand yourself first. Then if you're spending loads, maxed out on resource, and need scale across multiple regions, maybe bring in a top agency.
We just started with Advance Media from Groningen 2 weeks ago. They are down to earth and fast, will see how results develop. The freelancers we had were already 2 years working for us and became kind of slow/not accurate enough.