Agency burning cash on awareness - am I wrong?

jamesaso

i work for a mobile app company and we've had this agency running Meta campaigns for years - mostly awareness stuff like CTV, display, YouTube. No one ever bothered to look under the hood until I did. their awareness campaigns drive a ton of page views (or app store visits), but from the users who actually click those ads, the conversion rate is basically zero. Directionally, it's just cash going up in smoke.

Meanwhile, our internal UA team runs different creative and gets way more leads at half the cost. The agency's conversion-focused lead gen campaigns come in at $200 per lead, internal gets them for $80. that's a clear discrepancy, but someone in the thread rightly pointed out I'm comparing apples to oranges - awareness versus bottom-of-funnel conversion. Fair enough. but even looking at just the lead gen campaigns, the agency is still twice as expensive.

I've done the basic analysis - page views, time on site, conversion rates - but my manager isn't convinced. They keep saying awareness has incremental lift. maybe, but from the data I see, that lift is imaginary. Any other metrics I should pull to prove this? Or should I just accept that agencies are good at making things look busy while internal teams actually deliver?

bouncekiller

Oh, I love a good agency roast as much as the next marketer, but you're comparing a soggy biscuit to a chocolate hobnob here.

"Internal Meta ads team runs different creative directionally" - yeah, and they're running a lead gen campaign while your agency is running awareness. Of course one's going to pull in more leads. That's not a failure, that's basic campaign strategy.

Focus your energy on the £200 vs £80 lead cost, because that's where the real heat is. and for crying out loud, dig into lead quality. It's entirely possible the internal team is generating a pile of junk that never converts, while the agency's awareness campaigns are actually warming up decent prospects.

track it back to real revenue, or you're just comparing numbers that don't mean a thing. good luck convincing your boss without that data - you'll need it

sophiasaas

hold up - before you take that argument to your boss, I'd tread carefully. awareness campaigns live in a different measurement universe than lead gen. judging them solely on direct conversions is like comparing apples to tractors. you need to look at assisted conversions, branded search lift, retargeting impact, and incrementality testing - not just last-click data. without that, you're not proving waste, you're just showing a flawed attribution comparison. i've seen this exact scenario blow up when leadership only saw the surface numbers.

funnelhacker

So let me get this straight - the agency delivered exactly what they were briefed on (awareness), and now the boss is pissed because those same channels aren't magically driving last-click conversions? That's a site-side problem, not a media problem.

Do you have any form of MTA running? Fractional attribution modelling would show the real value those upper-funnel touchpoints bring to the bottom of the funnel. Without it, you're just comparing apples to aircraft carriers.

Expecting awareness channels to match conversion channel efficiency is pure fantasy. That's not how the funnel works. Time to show your boss the data that proves the agency isn't the bottleneck - the landing page and CX are.

datanerd

first, if this isn't your direct responsibility, keep your head down - don't burn political capital. second, having an internal team and an agency both running the same campaigns is a structural mess. You're paying twice for overlapping reach. Set up strict UTM parameters, pull cost-per-lead and pipeline influence for each. If the agency's CPL is 30%+ higher with no incremental pipeline, that's your ammunition. Run a simple script to compare spend and attribution side by side - numbers don't lie.

analyticsjunkie

"Frame it as 'the agency is terrible' and you'll just sound like you're blaming them for everything. But if they're running awareness campaigns and no one can even tell you what business outcome those are supposed to drive? That's an actual red flag."

"Half the time, enterprise clients end up reporting impressions and video views because nobody agreed on what 'success' looks like before the money went out the door. So don't waste your breath on their shitty CTR. You want to make a real case? Show the gap between what they spent and what the business actually got back. Cost per qualified lead. Assisted conversions. Brand search lift. Downstream revenue. Whatever actually moves the needle for your business."

"If your internal campaigns are consistently pulling in better leads at a lower CPA, that conversation writes itself."

pixelperfect

I've seen this exact scenario play out before. A colleague once asked me to look under the hood of their campaign data, and we found the agency was routing traffic through the Google Display Network and Search Partners. That combination alone can generate a flood of leads that look real on the surface but are completely worthless - high volume, low intent, zero conversion downstream. The boss sees a lead count and thinks "great results," while the actual cost per real customer is shocking.

If you can get access to your ad platform's placement reports, filter out display and search partner networks. You'll probably see the majority of clicks coming from irrelevant apps and sketchy sites. That's where the "fake leads" pipeline starts. A proper audit (even a quick internal one) will expose it. No need to buy anything - just the truth.

trafficcop

You don't. You present a boss with analysis for how they can improve the performance by shifting more spending internally and show him the uplift and increased performance you project. You don't use the words terrible job, awful performance anywhere. The agency is the baseline, don't push it down, show how you can drive incremental performance vs what your company is getting today. The base case should show the total spend stays the same, but is allocated more efficiently. If they absolutely suck, it should be very easy for you to make a concrete, conservative plan that will drive materially more value. Ideally, you can propose incrementally getting there through a progressive reallocation of the funding.

Source: I did something similar to what you want to do when I was junior. It didn't go how I thought it would.

datanerd

directionally, very bad is exactly right, but your boss needs more than vibes.

Pull the raw ad platform data alongside the CRM pipeline. Run a simple attribution query (if they're even tracking it) to see cost per MQL vs cost per SQL against the benchmarks they promised at onboarding. a quick look at wasted spend: export the campaign-level cost and split by matched vs unmatched leads. if more than 30% of spend goes to unqualified or uncontactable leads, that's your first number.

Here's a lightweight proof I've used before - run a Python script to cross-reference the agency's LinkedIn campaign IDs against your HubSpot lifecycle stages.

import pandas as pd
# assume you've exported LinkedIn cost data and HubSpot lead stages
linkedin = pd.read_csv('linkedin_ads.csv')
hubspot = pd.read_csv('hubspot_leads.csv')
merged = linkedin.merge(hubspot, left_on='lead_id', right_on='contact_id')
waste = merged[merged['lifecycle_stage'].isin(['lead','unknown'])] # not even MQL
waste_percent = len(waste) / len(merged) * 100
print(f"Spend on unqualified leads: {waste_percent:.1f}%")

If that number tops 40%, the agency is either ignoring your ICP or running vanity campaigns. present that to your boss as a single slide - the metric, the script, and a comparison to the agency's own reported ROI.

also cross-check frequency and click-through rates on retargeting. High frequency + low CTR means they're burning budget on people who already ignored them. that's not "full-funnel," that's laziness.

one more thing: ask for the ad copy variants they've tested in the last quarter. If the answer is less than 10 per account, they're not even trying to optimize. Show your boss the difference between "we're running ads" and "we're running experiments."

dusting

Traffic without conversions is just burning money. Your internal team's £80 CPL vs the agency's £200 tells the whole story. That ratio doesn't lie.

metricsmuse

Honestly, I'd be careful jumping straight to "awareness is a waste" just from direct conversions. Those campaigns often look terrible in-platform but still lift branded search and retargeting downstream - I've seen it time and again.

That said, a $200 CPL versus $80 internally is a massive red flag. Before making the case, I'd look at assisted conversions, engaged session quality, branded search lift, and post-view behaviour. a lot of agencies optimise for what looks good in their reporting dashboard instead of actual business outcomes.

datanerd

That 'they drove awareness but no one converted' comparison is apples to oranges unless you're using the same objective and attribution model. I'd ask for a controlled test with identical conversion goals.

pixelpusher

Honestly, the attribution mess is a convenient scapegoat. The real problem goes deeper - most brand briefs get signed off by people who've never run a demand gen campaign. If your boss defined 'awareness' as a goal without mapping it to pipeline timeframes or conversion lag, then they bought a pig in a poke.

The agency should have flagged that at the briefing stage. If they didn't, they're either incompetent or happy to cash cheques for vanity metrics. Either way, the contract never had a failure condition because nobody in the room knew what a decent outcome looked like.

Blame the agency for delivering exactly what was asked, sure. but the harder question is: was anyone in that room remotely qualified to write the brief in the first place?