An insurance company was spending over $100,000 a month on Facebook engagement ads. They were boosting posts, and nobody was doing anything with the media afterward. I encountered the company as a prospect. They never hired me, so I never ran the account.
The budget surprised me. This was enterprise spending attached to a basic advertising decision: what action were they paying Facebook to pursue? The account was running on engagement. The amount going into it gave me no reason to assume somebody had checked whether that objective served the business.
My impression was that a manager with no advertising experience had been handed a budget and told to do something on Facebook. The account's settings and use of boosted posts were the concrete problem I could point to.
The boosted posts ran on engagement
They would take the latest posts and put money behind them. Facebook at the time defaulted those boosts to engagement optimization, as I remember it. Repeating that action kept money going toward the same objective. I'm describing the account I encountered, not the options someone will see in Facebook's interface today.
An objective tells the platform what kind of response to pursue. Engagement gives you a response to the content. A person reacting to a post has done something different from a person requesting an insurance quote. Treating those actions as interchangeable skips the question of how the advertising is supposed to produce business.
Buying reactions requires a purpose and a way to assess whether they helped. In this account, the problem continued after the engagement. Nobody was doing anything with the media they were paying to promote.
Nobody was using the audience after the boosts
The boosts ran on engagement, and I couldn't see any later campaign using the people who reacted. The money went into getting a response, with no follow-through that I could identify in the account.
An engagement audience needs a purpose if you're buying it as part of a longer sales process. A later campaign might give interested people a reason to take another step. That's an illustration of how engagement could fit into a plan, not a campaign I built for this insurer. The question for this account was what anyone intended to do after the boosted post got its response.
I remember struggling with how to explain the scale of the spending to them. The diagnosis was simple enough to state. Explaining it to the people responsible for that budget was a different problem, and seeing the problem gave me no authority to change their account.
The finding concerned objectives and audiences
I didn't install tracking, create a new campaign or take over media buying for this prospect.
The insurer never became a client
The account I saw had an enterprise budget running on an engagement setting. I didn't get to test a different approach, measure a change in lead quality or compare sales before and after an intervention. They never hired me.
My account of the encounter ends at that diagnosis. I can't tell you what they changed afterward or what their advertising eventually produced. There's no recovery figure to attach to the spend, and I can't claim I saved them the money.
The over-$100,000 figure describes monthly advertising expenditure. It doesn't describe revenue I generated, a budget I managed or a saving I delivered.
The budget gave me no assurance of expertise
I use this account as a reference point when I think about how little the size of an advertising budget can tell you about the decisions behind it. The company could spend at an enterprise level while still using boosted posts without a plan for what came afterward.
That makes evaluating the person responsible for the account part of evaluating the spending. A job title doesn't explain why someone chose engagement, what they intended to do with it or how they'd judge whether the plan worked. Those are questions a buyer can ask, and the answers give you something more useful to assess than the size of the budget alone.
I qualify advertisers through the problems they've solved
Digital advertising is technical, and it isn't technical enough to keep anybody out. Anyone can call themselves a media buyer, and it's hard to prove they're wrong. My response is to ask about decisions they've made under actual operating conditions.
I ask advertisers about the work behind their results:
- How much money have you managed, and how much have you made for customers?
- What mistakes have you made, and which problems did you solve?
- What limits did you push with split tests and media?
- How fast did you scale an account, and what happened as you increased spending?
- How many split tests can you manage at once?
- How did you handle creative work, copy and coordination across a distributed team?
The spending question asks how much budget someone has handled. The questions after it ask what that experience consisted of. Someone should be able to explain a decision, the problem it addressed and what happened when they tried it. My own limit in this insurance example belongs in that explanation too: I identified a problem and never got to run the account.
A course or a title gives me less to work with than a concrete account of a problem. I'd apply the same questions to someone presenting a much more impressive result.
Check what your account is paying the platform to pursue
This is relevant to anyone who inherited an advertising budget and hasn't checked the objective. Start with an active campaign. Read the selected objective, then write down the business result the campaign is meant to support. Those two descriptions should have an explanation connecting them.
An engagement campaign needs an answer about the engagement itself. What will the company do with the response? If the plan includes another campaign, identify it. If the purpose is awareness, identify how the company intends to evaluate that purpose. These are checks to make on your own account, not changes I made for the insurer.
A team that already understands its objectives, follow-through and evidence has moved past the basic problem described here. Reading a campaign setting won't settle whether the whole advertising program is profitable. It will let you ask why that setting was chosen before authorizing more spending on it.