One of our company's major plan this year is to leverage paid ads to grow our sales on Shopify. We sold $5m last year through other online channels, so it's market proven products. But we don't have much history on Shopify sales, facebook ads or google ads. We carefully researched, screened and interewed 7 or 8 agencies, all of which are highly reputable, top agencies, and finally landed on Disruptive Advertising to manage our google ads and facebook ads. I came from a research background so I've always been pretty confident in my research and results. At the time of signing, it was a big relief to me and I thought I found a good partner that will - not to say take me to the moon, but at least grow the ad sales gradually.
Instead of to the moon, it went straight the other way. And at the end of the first 30 days, and on the exact date of my 39th birthday, I had to terminate the engagment and their reactions shows no remorse for their poor performance. Here's the rundown of everything:
After signing, there're only weekly sync up meetings. The first week is onboarding meeting, and meeting with the team. Week 2 is strategy meeting that's filled mostly with high level template slides, and Week 3 is streagy review with only 2 slides for the facebook ads (1 slide for really simple creative demos, and the other slide for campaign structure as their strategy). Their facebook ad strategy is so amatuer that they are proposing the same set of creatives for each funnel. After week 3, the facebook ad manager had some family urgent matter then just disappeared in communications. Personally, family comes first to me as well, and you have my understanding, my best wishes, my whatever. But professionally, isn't it the reason why I want to work with a big agency that your agency can absorb this kind of individual incidence, and not letting it affect your clients?
At the end of the engagement, facebook ad strategy was never revised, hence never aproved. None of the facebook ads were run. And they rejected my request of refund.
On the google ad side, that's where their 150-people-agency's business originally built on. My google ad manager said she had 9 years experience managing google ads. They should be good. So after waited for 3 weeks, although I still had concerns about their google ads settings, I was ready to give it a try - after all i naively thought we gonna start running ads and making big money from day 1, and by then it was already 3 weeks gone with nothing. We ran ads in week 4, and over the course of 8 days, it was $2k ad spend, with zero sales. To give you a benchmark, before signing with them, I experimented with google ads myself for three weeks, and I got $2.6k ad sales with $2.4k ad spend. They get ZERO. Then I got confused, is it the lack of expertise, or the lack of commitment?
(there's nothing wrong with the website settings, they tested conversion trackings, and I had couple of organic sales during the same period).
It's a quite remarkable result isn't it. I don't think any other agency that I interviewed before would be remotely close to achieve the same result with a $2k google ad spend. Disruptive Advertising is truly one of a kind, and I'm even prouder of my research skills now.
The rest aren't much interesting anyways. I expressed my frustration and their senior team responded quickly and nicely, and offered to no longer have me bond to the 6 months contract, but rejected my refund request. They charged me $3,500 for the first month of facebook ad management, where they spent the first three weeks to develop the amatuer plan, and disappeared in the forth week. And charged me the same $3,500 for the first month of google ads management, which burned another $2k ad spend with zero, again ZERO ad sales.
For those deliverables and performance, they gave me ZERO refund.
I hope these experience and the price I paid would be educational to whoever's looking for the paid ads agency now.
