Threw $800 at a Facebook ad agency before I figured out my own mistake

Six months ago I hired a local agency in Austin to run Facebook ads for my HVAC business. They charged me $800 a month plus ad spend, and after three months I had exactly two leads that didn't convert. I was about to double down and blame the algorithm until I looked at my own website. It was slow, had no pricing info, and the contact form was buried on page three. The ads were sending people to a dead end and that was on me, not them. I canceled the agency, spent two weekends fixing my site, and now I run my own simple ads for way less money. Has anyone else found that the real problem was usually something boring you control instead of the shiny tool you paid for?

3 comments

3 Comments

craig.mila1mo ago

Fix the site before you blame the ads, that’s not exactly rocket science.

olivia3981mo ago

Man, it's rough when people blame the wrong thing first. Fixing the site should be step one, not pointing fingers at ads right after.

emery_white1mo ago

Read somewhere that the site's backend is held together with tape and good intentions. Craig.mila, you're right that fixing the core problem would help a lot. Ads that load before the page itself is just bad planning. But even a perfect site can get bogged down by too many trackers and video ads. I remember a tech blog breaking down how ad scripts can double load times on older servers. So it's probably both things needing work.