got to half the price of typical leads in their industry.
This is one of the main problems with modern marketing agencies - optimizing for cost per lead. It's achieved by buying bot traffic either intentionally or unintentionally. As you know, bots are programmed to submit real-looking fake leads, and their leads are cheap.
You need to optimize for revenue and sales qualified leads.
cut the initial budget for ads
didn’t want to have any additional money put into Meta ads
Probably because they were unhappy with lead quality.
Edit, let me explain where this opinion is coming from.
A large part of my job is auditing marketing agencies. I've audited at least 1,000 agencies. 99% have the following problems:
- Wasting around 25% of their clients' budgets on bot traffic.
- Throwing their clients' ads onto display and search partners to generate large numbers of cheap, fake leads.
- Covering up the fraud.
Rarely, the agencies are doing this:
- Stealing their clients' money using fake reports, and/or
- Stealing their clients' money via bot clicks on the agencies' own display websites.
I really wish it wasn't like this. It's depressing how so many people are comfortable with fraud, I have to deal with upset clients, and there are sometimes legal issues for the agencies.
The solution is proper KPIs: revenue and sales qualified leads. No more "number of leads" and "low cost per lead".
I understand some people may be reading this and thinking they don't scam their clients. I know there are some good agencies out there. Off the top of my head I can think of four. But overall the industry is completely rotten and relies of naive clients, bad KPIs, and fraud.
