I thought doing social media ads in-house was fine until we hired a small agency for one campaign

For the longest time, I figured our team could handle our Facebook and Instagram ads ourselves (you know, how hard could it be?). We'd set a budget of about $1,500 a month and just sort of wing it with boosted posts. Then, for a big summer push, we decided to try a local agency here in Austin for a three-month project. The difference was crazy. They didn't just run ads, they set up a whole funnel with specific landing pages for each ad group and tracked every single click. Our cost per lead went from around $45 to under $20 by the second month because they kept tweaking the audience targets daily. I finally saw what 'real' ad management looks like compared to our old spray-and-pray method. Has anyone else made a switch like this and found one specific tactic the agency used that you never would have tried on your own?

4 comments

4 Comments

william8644mo ago

Hold up, you're just taking their word for it? How do you know they didn't just get lucky with that one campaign? Maybe your own team could have learned to do all that funnel stuff if you gave them the same budget and time. Aren't agencies just good at making simple things sound complicated so you keep paying them?

wilson.joseph4mo ago

Yeah but luck doesn't scale like that.

wyatt_mitchell261mo ago

Man, I've been there. What worked for me was having them walk me through their process live on a screenshare (recorded it too). That way I could actually see if the daily tweaks were real adjustments or just them cherrypicking good days.

valellis4mo ago

But how did you check their work? Did they show you the actual data behind those daily tweaks, or just the final report?