Thinking about outsourcing your Facebook ads to an agency?
Whether you’re spending £50 or £500,000 a day, deciding to outsource your Facebook ads can feel like a pretty big deal.
With the right partner, you’ll create more space in your schedule, supercharge your ad results and scale your business.
However, finding the right partner agency isn’t always easy; even the dodgiest agency can paint a pretty good picture of themselves – especially if you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for.
To make life a bit easier for you, I’ve taken my years of experience as the owner of a Facebook advertising agency and narrowed down the 5 essential questions you should ask any prospective agency before you outsource your ads and let them get their hands on your ad accounts.
1. Can you showcase consistent results?
One of the questions people tend to ask before they outsource Facebook ads is, ‘Can you show us proof that you’ve worked with our specific industry before?’ While it sounds reasonable to ask, it doesn’t make it onto my list. And I’ll tell you why.
Whatever industry you’re working in, whatever niche, the principles of the funnel are the same.
What you really need to know is has the agency worked with your type of campaign before — with consistent results.
Take a lead generation campaign for a local business. Imagine you’re a real estate agent and you’re trying to get people in your local area to sign up for a free consultation…can the agency prove that they’ve been able to generate leads, customers, and appointments for local businesses? And more importantly, have they done it consistently?
Because anyone can have a one-off great campaign. Swing a club and hit a hole-in-one. And there are lots of bad agencies using one good result to claim expertise in Facebook ads. But to do it time and again takes real skill and effort.
So ask the consistency question and check that your chosen agency isn’t just a one-hit-wonder before you outsource Facebook ads.
2. Do you have a methodology or philosophy you can share with us?
When you’re building lots of campaigns, and working with lots of different businesses, you can’t help but see patterns — you learn what works and what doesn’t, and you start to develop your own unique methodology or system. So you can tell new clients exactly how you work, what kind of system you use, and that you do so precisely because you know from experience that it brings in great results.
More than that, you can start to build a philosophy around your system that underlines exactly why your methodology works.
When you’re interviewing agencies, it’s important to ask about their system and philosophy because they aren’t all created equal. Some agencies employ a black hat methodology, using unethical tactics and doing all sorts of dodgy stuff, which isn’t something you want to be involved with. But if their philosophy is based around building and improving customer relationships then chances are they’re going to be a really good agency to work with.
For example, we have a methodology called the Yatter Wheel, which is a four-step process that takes us from creating content all the way down to getting testimonials from customers. And the philosophy behind it is all about building trust and providing value to the customer wherever they are in the customer journey. So when clients ask about our methods, we can tell them exactly how we work, explain the reasoning behind it, and show a bunch of success stories to back it all up. You want to make sure that any agency or consultant you work with can do the same.
3. Are you running your own Facebook ads?
I think this is my favourite question, mostly because you wouldn’t believe how many agencies and consultants bill themselves as Facebook ad experts, but don’t know how to run their own ads.
This should set off your alarm bells.
Is it because they’re not that great at Facebook ads and couldn’t figure out how to make it all work for them? Do they not believe in the product, or are they just out to make money, rather than focusing on getting results?
Either way, if the agency you’re looking at doesn’t practice what they preach, it might be better to keep searching.
4. How much do you charge and what are the terms?
Okay, this is a biggie. Not only do you need to know how much the agency is going to charge when you’re outsourcing your ads, but you need to be aware of what you’re signing up for. Are they going to tie you into a long-term contract? Are they going to do monthly rolling? How easy will it be to break with them if it doesn’t work out?
At Yatter, we ask our clients to sign up for an initial 3-month period before moving to monthly rolling.
The reason we start with a 3-month period is that it can take a bit of time to get Facebook ads working for you, especially if you’re starting from scratch. Be wary of anyone that tries to tie you into a 12-month contract straight off the bat; if they turn out to be rubbish you’re stuck paying out for very little ROI.
5. Are you going to share the data with me, or are you going to keep it in your own ad account?
This is such an important question because lots of people get caught out on this one when they outsource Facebook ads. You see, in the Facebook ad space, there are lots of agencies and consultants that create ads using their own ad accounts. This means that they own it and you, the customer, don’t have access, and can’t see what they’re doing or what’s going on with your ads.
This might not be a huge problem until you decide it’s time to move on from that agency. There’s nothing to stop them from deleting your ad account and all of your data along with it.
Now, when you spend money advertising on Facebook, you acquire lots of data on which images, which ads, and which audiences are working for you. It’s invaluable. But if your agency decides to delete everything when you leave, whenever you decide to start advertising on Facebook again, you’re going to be back to square one. You’ll have no data, Facebook will have no idea who you are, and you can’t even re-target people that have visited your website because the agency will own the Facebook pixel as well.
So before you sign on the dotted line, I’d advise checking that the agency or consultant is happy to be given access to your own ad account, rather than creating an account themselves. Then, if you decide to leave, you can remove their access and keep all of the data that you can then use in-house or take with you to a new agency.
Data is power in this relationship, so make sure you’re not giving it all away!
After hundreds of conversations with the businesses we work with at Yatter, I can confirm these 5 questions are the key to helping you avoid the unethical, ineffective, and downright bad agencies that seem to be cropping up everywhere.
If you’re thinking of outsourcing your Facebook ads, memorise these questions, use them, and act on the answers you’re given. And if you know anyone else who’s thinking of outsourcing, pass this along to them too. Together we’ll weed out the black hatters so that everyone can enjoy better results from their Facebook ads.
If you’re ready to outsource your Facebook ads, get in touch with us today. (Feel free to ask us these 5 questions!)
