Eric Olson
1/5
Sometimes, after taking time to assess a situation, one feels obligated to write a detailed review to warn others. This is one of those times.
Not long ago, I was referred by a good friend to the company Marca Made to determine which Google and Facebook Ads run by my business fared better than others in the past. Specifically, this company was supposed to: 1. Review all ads and performances across the different verticals (FB, Google, Insta), 2. Look at CPM, CPL or CPC, and 3. Identify and compare best-performing months, campaigns and traffic.
Instead of completing this well-defined task, the owner of Marca Made stated that none of the ads run “worked” and refused to complete the task. Total ad spend was over $14k in the past two years alone so enough data for comparison purposes was readily available. (If enough data was not available, the business owner should have immediately stopped and said so.)
The owner instead sent something he called a “Marketing Audit” and offered 30-minute phone call. The “Audit” consisted of 10 pages, 3 of which were blank, 6 of which were cut-and-pasted from Google & Facebook with information already known, and one page of “recommendations”—most of which were also cut-and-pasted. Several of these “recommendations” were to do things that were already done like setting up a business ad manager account, linking pixels, and creating custom audiences.
Suffice to say, it was easy to determine a phone call would be of little or no benefit since the business owner demonstrated an inability or unwillingness to complete a basic, well-defined task—and instead would send a cut-and-paste document in its place with recommendations to do things that a professional would have known were already completed.
(The business owner also sent a “website report” that was auto-generated by a site such as SEMRUSH which is offered on a subscription basis. It was not his work at all but he took credit for it nonetheless by sending it.)
$500 is a lot to lose for any small business. Fortunately, this kind of situation does not happen often. Now that you have this information, hopefully it will not happen to you.
