What do you dislike about Disruptive Advertising?
1️⃣ Poor ad platform competency
I believe the team I was assigned was probably pretty low experience, spread too thin, or both. I've run my own Facebook ads for over a year now, on an account averaging 3.6 ROAS making a bit over a mil in revenue.
The first month, my FB account was touched 4 times. Roughly once a week, 6 times on month two.
Very few, experiments. Some very basic headscratchers... testing performance between 1%, 5%, 10% lookalike audiences, for instance.
As a practice, they were stuck in the stone age using Adset level campaign budgets. Had never heard of Reach & Frequency campaigns.
Frustratingly, there was little to no attempt to understand, learn from, or use the audiences and creatives I had spent hundreds of thousands to prove. Even after prodding.
Google Ads was equally paltry in experiments. Only the most obvious of search terms and keywords were ever looked at.
Disruptive managed to average 1.67 ROAS on FB with their campaigns, dropping to 1.47 ROAS in the final week I allowed them to access my account.
Google, the average was 1.39 ROAS, trending toward 1.5 in the final weeks.
The first round of motion ads... low in execution. Visual inconsistencies. Spelling errors, worst of all, unappealing.
The second round of motion ads, some looked pretty decent! But were never added to campaign.
2️⃣ the Weekly reports
Each week, I'd hop on a call with the account manager. There was typically good news to be had.
25% increase in conversion rate on this ad set. Exciting momentum to be scaled. Increase in revenue by 24% in a week.
I'd give some tips about how best to reach our customers.
Promises of new ad creatives, to use my existing creatives.
Sounds great, but it's not. This is my least favorite thing about this experience.
but.... 😡 The reports were misleading.
- I had to prod them to include their agency fees into the advertising budget reports. They were content to tell me my budget was fine while ignore their own rates.
- Weekly Reporting of Ad account ALWAYS includes our own legacy campaigns, which were still performing nicely.
- That 24% increase in revenue? Was a result of scaling of < 2 ROAS ad sets up to drive more revenue.
- Those promises? Never materialized. New creatives I paid for were never run. Nods to use my existing winning creatives not followed.
Each week, despite the positive news, my bank account was dwindling. Fast.
3️⃣ Negligent account management 💩
Eventually, when my business could take no more I started poking into the account.
As I mentioned before, here's where I discovered that increased revenue was due to scaling of unprofitable ad sets. Each dollar of revenue was causing me 15-20% loss 😭
Leaving failing ad experiments running.
Sunsetting my high performing ads.
4️⃣ On my team?
Who can say for sure, but my understanding is this.
Disruptive truly believes given enough time they could have turned things around. But at what cost?
They were willing to obfuscate the truth from their client to look good.
They were choosing to not use my creatives and existing campaigns in an effort to find their own winners to justify their continued existence.
👍 They were kind enough to "release" me from a 6 month commitment. I believe given the chance they would have milked this for the full 6 months at my expense.
Oh yeah, they are more than happy to then collect an additional month's management fees. Even though they are no longer working with my account.
Zero skin in the game. Smart.
💃 The story book ending is that a single day after banning DA from the account, shutting down their adsets and spinning up a creatives myself, I'm riding 4+ ROAS and scaling up. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
