You know that Facebook ads are worth the hype, but you don’t know who should be in charge of them: you, a freelancer, or another agency. In this article, we’ll explain whether it’s worth it to manage your Facebook ads alone or hire someone to do that for you.
Manage Facebook ads yourself
Technically, beginners can manage their Facebook ads. Still, whether it’s a good idea or not depends on your experience and willingness to learn. If you’re clueless about targeting, content creation, and planning an ad budget, there’s definitely a learning curve!
Benefits of running your Facebook ads yourself:
- No extra costs (or small costs)
- You’ll have total control over creation and budget. When you work with your own materials and have a clear vision, it’s easier to make it happen.
Unfortunately, the cons are that:
- You might allocate the budget inappropriately and accidentally waste resources.
- Campaigns are less easy to optimize when you don’t have a reference point to compare your ads to. Basically, you might not get the results you were hoping for.
- There’s a risk of overspending because you don’t know much about budget optimization and how to set ad spend on Facebook.
- Your ad analytics could confuse you and you won’t know if you actually met your OKRs.
How to manage your ad campaigns wisely?
If you lack the expertise and time to develop necessary skills in advertising, you can choose an advanced analytics tool like Sotrender Ads which gives you access to comprehensive, well-visualized data. The web app comes handy in both Instagram and Facebook ad analytics.
Thanks to Sotrender Ads you can:
- track key campaign indicators (KPIs) presented on readable, interactive charts,
- check useful data which is not accessible in Facebook Ads Manager,
- analyze your past and existing campaigns and plan your budget more accurately,
- compare campaigns between each other to make conclusions, improve ad creations and optimize expenses,
- generate detailed reports within a minute and easily summarize your advertising activity.
Analyzing reach in Sotrender Ads
Hiring a freelancer to manage Facebook ads
The biggest difference between freelancers and marketers that work in an agency is that marketers in an agency have more resources and support. You can find freelancers on sites like LinkedIn or UpWork, in case you wanted to know. ?
Pros:
- Their services are more affordable so overspending isn’t much of a concern.
- They can devote more time to your ad campaign and answering your questions.
- More experienced and knowledgeable about how ads work and how to manage bigger activities.
Cons:
- If the freelancer gets sick or something comes up in their life, there’s nobody else to take over for them. You’re literally relying on this one person.
- Invoices can be tricky or they might take time to acquire since they’re responsible for their own finances.
- It’s hard to find a trustworthy freelancer who matches all of your criteria and will quickly understand your brand.
- In the end, it’s still more expensive (initially) than managing your own Facebook ads.
Hiring a freelancer makes sense with medium-sized campaigns. You could “test out” the freelancer by paying them to perform a few tasks to see if they’re worth hiring for a bigger project.
Hiring an agency to manage Facebook ads
Agencies are known for successfully planning and setting social media ads. It’s easier to be confident in an agency because they are a collective of people with different skills and ready to take over for each other.
Still, you’ll have to research different agencies to see which one fits you best. You could initially email them and ask if they have experience in creating ads for your type of company. It’s also good to know what their prices are and whether you can afford them. Since this is the most expensive option, you really need to make sure they’re worth it.
Why it’s worth it:
- It’s easy to check their reputation. They’re actually pretty easy to find on review sites.
- Because they’re using tools that they have a lot of experience with, your ads will end up fitting the budget better and target the right users.
- Cooperation is streamlined because they have multiple departments in one building.
- They can offer up more services like prepare professional shoots and actors for your ad.
- They’re ready to validate their results with reports or summaries.
- Agencies will usually have one main person who’s in charge of managing your account
Lots of good reasons to hire an agency to get all of this done for you, right? Well, get ready for a pretty big invoice. It’s hard to estimate how much money it will take to fully prepare and analyze your Facebook ad. You’ll all have to talk and determine how much effort and resources they’ll need to meet your expectations.
Who should definitely hire an agency? A bigger company, for sure. Even when you visit an agency’s website, you’ll notice some pretty big names that are easy enough to recognize. Trust us, their budgets don’t suffer when they hire an agency to create perfect ad campaigns for them.
We hope our summary of the three options helped out, and if you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave a comment using Disqus below!
This post was originally published in 2016 but has since been updated.
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