Over the years as an agency, we always get asked the question can we compete with other teams both internal and external in hopes of getting better ad results.
In theory, two heads are better than one, right?
Well, that’s not always the case, especially when it comes to managing Facebook Ads. Having two or more marketing managers handling your Facebook ads is very much like having too many chefs in the kitchen as it goes against almost all the rules of Facebook’s ad algorithm.
In this article I’ll go over why its not a good idea to have multiple teams managing paid social ads from one ad account.
To be clear, having two teams one for paid and one for organic is something I always recommend.
What Business Owners Think Happens With Two Heads In the Driving Seat
Business owners and startup founders sometimes will try an have agency come in and manage ads with hopes of aiming for better results that they’re internal marketing team manage their Facebook ad campaigns independently.
They consider it a kind of ‘bake-off’ to see who will perform the best: the in-house marketing team or the external agency.
By leveraging two sets of brains they assume that they will reach twice as many prospect and gain twice as many customers.
Both Managers Are Targeting The Same People
The idea of reaching twice as many through two Facebook managers is just not true, in fact, it’s quite the opposite.
Both teams will be using custom audiences, lookalike audiences and pixels from the same datasets (email lists and website cookies), which means both Facebook managers are actually targeting the exact same people.
What’s more, because both managers are not in communication with each other, different ad messages will be sent to the same audience. For example, if your goal is to brand your business in a certain light (cool, modern, contemporary etc), the targeted audience may receive two widely different message from each set of Facebook managers because they are not discussing how they will achieve your business’s goal. Both teams are strictly focused on lowering CPA to “win” in front of the boss’s.
This leads to confusing your prospects with mixed messages, and confused prospects don’t convert.
The cost of marketing goes up
Both managers are targeting the same user base resulting in an auction war. Both managers will artificially inflate the cost per action or conversion because they both have the same users in their audiences coming from the Facebook ad pixel.
The Facebook ad algorithm considers each campaign being run as individual entities, putting them up against each other during the auction process.
The idea that you’ll receive more customers and sales by leveraging two Facebook ad Managers is a fallacy. The reality is you’ll most likely reach less and pay for more for doing so.
Lack of data to make intelligent decisions
Your Facebook marketing budget will be allocated in some sort of split between both Facebook managers. Since both teams are effectively fighting against each other, they will be very reluctant to share their data and findings, after all, one doesn’t want the other to be more successful than them.
To give you a scenario, one manager may have found through testing that a certain message does not work and continuing to use that message or product will always result in a negative ROI campaign. The other Facebook manager doesn’t know this and carries on implementing it, resulting in your ad dollars going down the drain.
The more capital a Facebook manager invests in a business’s Facebook ad campaign the more data they have to optimize campaigns and make correct decisions. By installing two Facebook managers to run your campaigns, data is fractured and neither team is able to work to the best of their ability.
Ad fatigue
Showing users too many ads in a short space of time can result in ad fatigue. Ad fatigue occurs when a user has viewed your media too many times and no longer reacts to it.
Each Facebook ad manager looking at their campaign data may think they are serving ads to users 1.5 times per day looking at reach and frequency. But what they don’t know is the other manager is also serving ad content for your business to the same target group doubling the actual rate of consumption.
This will cause target prospects to select the ‘hide all posts by this Page’ option lowering relevance score, losing customers forever on Facebook while simultaneously increasing ad costs.
For once, Two Heads Are Not Better Than One
Having one manager run your Facebook account and another for Google AdWords and Bing is fine, but having two or more managers running a single Facebook Ad account is almost never returns the results you hoped for.
If you currently have an in-house Facebook ad team , both should work closely together on a simplistic strategy with one side usually owning organic and the other side usually owning paid.
You should only have one entity managing your Facebook ads account to receive the best results at the lowest price.