If you're a DTC owner who's currently IN the trough of sorrow, this post is for you.
🆕 You've been sold this story many times. A new agency or a freelancer audits your ad account, finds faults in the current approach, points to some obvious mistakes, shows authority and builds credibility by showing screenshots from other client accounts, makes promises on how they're going to fix everything and gets hired.
📉 Three months later , and you're running out of patience (and money). You get stuck in the loop of failing over and over on experiments. In between, Meta had a downtime or a bug which even though lasted for 1 hour, somehow impacted your ROAS for 3 weeks.
🚨 And then a day comes when your ROAS tanks by 90% - there's panic everywhere. Because you're a hardcore operator - you think it's your responsibility to be thorough and go deep. You start asking tough questions to your marketer.
🕵️♂️ And if you don't get convincing, confident answers from your marketer, deep inside you start blaming them for being incompetent. If it's an agency you give them an ultimatum and start looking for alternatives. After listening to the same false promises multiple times, you even consider hiring a senior marketer in-house as you fool yourself that 20% ROAS uplift will pay back the fixed costs.
🚫At the end of it - after some good months and some bad months, burning a few bridges with a few agencies and marketers you finally give up on Meta ads and write off the channel.
If this is you, I take no responsibility for tearing you up.
I won't pass you a tissue as well. Instead, let me offer you some comfort.
In 90% of cases, your marketer isn't at fault. Their answers aren't convincing because that's just how marketing works!
If YOU can't explain why did you buy a coffee machine that you DIDN'T NEED, but scrolled past four ads from fitness apps that you DO NEED, how can a digital marketer explain why a certain ad didn't work?
📈 Digital ads are NOT a closed system - and like other open systems (e.g., the stock market) - first principles don't apply.
🔍 Your job as a DTC owner doesn't end at asking the right questions, in fact, that's where it starts - you will have to go on a journey along with your marketing team to go deep into data and find the answers.
That's where there is good news. Meta is a tech company in a competitive environment - it pushes them to be transparent and share data.
There's a lot of data available inside your ads manager to sift through and analyse. And there are a lot of opportunities to discover.
🚀🛠️ This is where we come in - We're soon launching a free Meta Ads Grader tool, that connects to your ad account and give you opportunities to improve your ads. This is not a reporting tool, but a powerful tool to find insights from your ad account that you didn't know you could act upon.
DM me for early access, or share this post with DTC brands you know who could benefit from such a free tool!
✌️
