Facebook ads for an affiliate program
Eighteen months with a large agency produced about 80 applications in its best month. The first month after switching beat that entire period.
Mike, Affiliate program. Recorded March 2023.
Mike runs an affiliate program launched about eighteen months before we spoke. Like most small businesses, the first instinct was to hire one of the bigger agencies.
What he got was a cookie-cutter approach with nothing customised to his business, and a rhythm that anyone who has worked with a large agency will recognise: problems deferred to next week, then the week after, then a month gone with no change in performance.
The numbers were the real indictment. At their best they saw about 80 applications in a month, and mostly it arrived in ones and twos. His business runs on volume and scale, so that pace was never going to work regardless of how the reporting was framed.
The first month after switching produced more applications than the entire eighteen months prior. That gap says less about clever tactics than about attention — an account that gets worked on daily behaves differently from one that gets reviewed monthly.
What he identifies as the difference is response time. If either of us spots something that needs changing, it changes almost immediately. In paid social that compounds, because a wasteful ad caught on day one costs a fraction of the same ad caught in week three.
The other thing he notes is that he learned more about advertising on these platforms in this arrangement than in eighteen months with the agency. Being able to see what is being done is not a luxury — it is how you judge whether it is worth paying for.
In Mike’s words
“Our first inclination was to try and work with one of the bigger agencies, and what we found was a very cookie cutter approach — things weren’t customized. We put a lot of money towards that and didn’t really see any type of impact.”
“Everything always seemed to get kicked down the road — we’ll talk more next week, next week — and all of a sudden a month would go by, two months, and we wouldn’t see any performance.”
“We did more in our first month working with Kirat from an application perspective than we did for an entire year and a half with our prior agency. That’s how strong the results have been.”
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