Question

Hey agency owners / agency clients, I've just hired my first fb ad agency recently, and have a question. We've launched ads about 1. 5 weeks in, current ROAS is 2 & I've a target of 2. 5 ROAS. How do you set reasonable goals and track if an agency (or your agency, if you're an agency owner) is scaling as profitably and quickly as possible? Obviously, I would like to scale as fast as possible without ruining ROAS and to get that as high as possible. It's taking them like almost 2 weeks to get the tracking done, and we're at $250/day rn. What would be a reasonable timeframe to expect the ads to scale up? How do we determine this? What does a good agency typically do? After all, "good performance & speed of scaling" is subjective. As a client, what can I do to encourage higher performance & to communicate / track reasonable goals?  

Answer 1

How are you attributing conversions if tracking is not set up? I second @dramshop's statement. If you're 2 weeks in and tracking still isn't set up, that's generally a red flag. It shouldn't take much time at all to implement a Pixel, custom conversions and everything else you need to track your ads. Generally it takes us less than 30 minutes to set up full funnel tracking with custom events.  

Answer 2

They didn't set up tracking for 2 weeks and are spending $250 a day of your money? Or is it $250 a day in management fees? Regardless, you need a different agency. The agency I work with squared that away 1 day after receiving access to everything required to set up. I can refer you if you need. Jesus

Comments

For the rest, a good agency should honestly express expectations and pacing to you. They should know what they're doing enough to have timelines and forecasts that they will keep themselves beholden to. I WILL say that most agencies expect about 1 month of full setup and transition time, but tracking is always first and foremost. Anyone who doesn't respect that isn't respecting your business.  

Answer 3

Personally with our agency we don’t start running ads until we are happy that all of the tracking and our spreadsheets are fully set up! We also have a great google sheet KPI spreadsheet full of calculations surrounding break evens, account wide ROAS targets & the baselines for each funnel stage for better optimisation and scaling. We always ensure we factor in our fee into the equation when deciding one a ROAS target WITH our client. Take peoples suggestions with a pinch of salt  I’d say the best thing to go off of is your gut feeling and performance on the account. It’s only been 1. 5 weeks, yes the tracking should be set up correctly before but perhaps they jumped the gun as they were excited to get started and perform for you ‍♂️ Happy to privately show you some of our spreadsheets we use so you can compare if they have something similar or if they are going into that level of detail. Hope it works out for you guys!  

Comments

Are these spreadsheets something you'd be willing to share w/ others? Definitely curious to see how you're breaking it down/what you're working with :)

Answer 4

I'm not an agency owner but i do work with several of them at a high level. my role is typically to fix client performance issues. here's my insight. reasonable goals will often depend on your available ad budget. you can only get so much data if you spend only a little. $250/day, though, should be sufficient to know where you stand within a month. them not having tracking implemented in 2 weeks is appalling, to be honest, unless they've run into a serious technical issue. they should have tracking in within days. you can't run ads without proper tracking. a good agency has someone who is technically savvy enough to set up tracking parameters as robust as you need them. (most companies don't need super robust tracking though, just basic UTM tracking, GA, pixels, etc) when you say 'scale up', you have to be specific about how much you want to be spending. an agency should not be making this decision for you (even if their role is to suggest or manage budget increases day to day). as an example, if you're spending $1000/day and you want to spend $10, 000/day, no agency is going to be able to tell you when they can expect this to happen. but if you want to go from $1000/day to $2000/day, the agency should be able to do this within a month unless there's serious issues. that assumes things work at $1000/day! it also depends on where you're starting from. if you've never run your offer to FB/IG traffic before, an agency needs to do a fair bit of testing to figure out some baseline numbers and figure out what changes need to be made. but if you're already doing some damage spending money and you need an agency specifically for scale, a good agency will run various tests at progressively higher scales in order to see what kind of response they can expect at different scales. i can't speak for the agency, but it looks like your ads are low on the priority list and they're treating you as such. some agencies won't get out of bed for $250/day and are satisfied giving you the runaround because of your low scale. i'm not saying that's what's happening here, though, but i've seen it happen in several agencies.