&Allies Reviews 46

Reply from &Allies

Oct 6, 2021

Thanks so much for your review Georgia! We love working with you and your fantastic business and so glad you enjoy working with Sophie and Katarina - dream team!

Reply from &Allies

Sep 30, 2021

Thanks so much for your review, Mike! We massively appreciate this feedback and it's our pleasure working with you.

Reply from &Allies

Sep 24, 2021

Thank you for your review Katie! It's our pleasure to be working with you and such a wonderful brand. Here's to an exciting future together!

Reply from &Allies

Sep 23, 2021

Thank you Helen for the feedback and wonderful review. We love working with you and messages like this really do make our day!

Reply from &Allies

Sep 13, 2021

Thanks for your review and kind words, Marc! We love working with you and we're super excited for what this Q4 brings!

Reply from &Allies

Updated Sep 13, 2021

Hi Matt,

Thank you for taking the time to write a review of our service and it is with great regret to read it. As a team, we have deliberated on your review and would like to address each of your points.

The title of your review 'Very disappointed with the results'. 

When we launched your ads you gave us 5 days to deliver results before switching off the account. We didn't have any correspondence from you about this but as we monitor our client accounts daily, we identified quickly that we could no longer access the account and therefore we were unable to work on it. 5 days is frankly nowhere near enough time to deliver meaningful value and good results. Any expert marketeer, agency or anyone highly regarded in the field of digital marketing will agree with this. We had a clear strategy for your account for the first month and beyond but we were unable to execute it because you chose to remove us from the account. 

I can not stress enough that quality results take time to deliver. Facebook/Instagram advertising is a fantastic vehicle for growing a business and driving sales but we must give the platform and the algorithm enough time and data to start performing well. This was highlighted to you in the process of coming on board with us - that we require a minimum of 3 months to really start to see great performance to then scale and grow. 

'Sucked in by our ad'. 

Our ads are a fantastic source of leads for Pink Leopard giving us the opportunity to engage with businesses and form partnerships. We practice what we preach by running our own ads to build our business. I'm glad that the ad worked and you decided to book a call because that highlights we know what we are doing. There is absolutely no obligation to work with us when booking a call.

'I was left in the dark for around 10 days'. 

We have a process for onboarding new clients which is as follows and what happened with you:

* You were introduced to your dedicated Account Manager who discussed the next steps via email, provided you with your onboarding document and sent your Welcome Pack. 
* You were called by your Account Manager to ensure you had received the email and to see if you needed any help with the onboarding document. 
* You received brownies in the post as a welcome gift from us. 
* Once the onboarding document was completed, your dedicated Account Manager arranged a call with the team working on your account to discuss the onboarding document, your business, goals, expectations etc. 
* From here, the team got to work on creating a strategy document that you received and approved.
* We then got to work on your launch document which includes the ads, copy, audiences, etc that we are going to launch with. Again, this was approved after the amends you requested were addressed. 
* We then went live with 13 ads across the top, middle and bottom of the funnel as you were happy for us to do so. 

We sometimes go a little quiet during this time because we are working on your account in readiness for launch. From our CRM system, I can see that there were touchpoints and emails in place throughout this period from our team. So this point of 'Nobody contacted me, as if I didn't exist.' we simply can not agree with and we are happy to share the correspondence throughout this period. 

'I supplied all the images, marketing material, and even videos I made myself. Furthermore, I was hoping for that money, they'd create some exciting content, videos, image effects etc. But instead, they just used the videos I'd worked hard in making, and no new content was added at all.' 

Of course you supplied us with the images, marketing material and videos as all of our clients do. We are not a creative agency (although we are now offering a creative solution in-house), we are media buyers so our role is to put your ads in front of the right audiences at the right time for them to engage with and purchase your products. We request access to all new clients' assets because we can't make the ads any other way. You have access to your products, photography, videos etc which we then use to create the ads. This is the same for any media buying agency unless they offer a creative solution as an additional fee. 

'The logs on my Dropbox account didn't have ANY activity at all, until a few hours before my campaign was planned to be "launched" As well as this, my Facebook ads were not made until a few hours before the launch either.'

We certainly didn't throw your ads together last minute. There is a lot of time spent carrying out research, strategising, writing copy and working on the account behind the scenes which is not visible. We do most of our planning and copywriting of ads on excel documents which the team collaborate on and they go through a quality control process before we start adding in the creatives and actually building the ads. The ad build is the easy part once it’s all planned out and the very last stage before going live. We also build the Facebook campaigns in draft mode and do not publish them until just before going live which is when you have visibility so this point is incorrect.

We charge our clients for the value we bring, not time. We have never adopted 'time spent' as our business model. We had a strategy for your business that we were not able to execute because you locked us out of the account after such a short time. We also tried to contact you to discuss and understand what was going on but couldn't get a response. 

'The ads themselves weren't to the standard I was expecting for nearly £2,000. They were pretty much the same ads I'd made over the years, and the ads I'd paid for people to do on Fiverr - which performed better. So paying someone £60, the results were better than paying £1,800.'

We're unsure what you mean by the “standard” you were expecting. Our team of media buyers are extremely experienced and the ads we created for you to start with are based on millions of pounds spent on FB ads - we know what works. Also, as mentioned above, the ads were signed off by you and you didn’t discuss any concerns with us then. We would have happily explained our reasoning for the ads we created and discussed this with you or made further changes at your request if you were unhappy.

You did not pay nearly £2,000 for just some ads. It’s an investment in your business by building and managing a marketing funnel to generate a consistent flow of sales and eventually scale up to help you achieve your goals. We have clients who’ve paid us this for consultancy alone and helping them form a strategy to scale their business whereas, for you, all of this was included plus us physically building and managing your account. 

The ads being the same as the ones you or someone off Fiverr made and the results being better - this is simply not a fair comparison, we had our ads running for 5 days so there was not enough time to even get started on optimising the account and increasing the results which, as we explained and we’re very open and honest with, can take a few weeks. We are spending a lot of money testing at this stage as we have to test lots of different audiences, hooks/angles, creatives, copy until we find what really works at which point we spend less and less on testing and start to pump budget into what works. Then we can really start to increase ROAS and scale. We had a clear strategy for your account and we know it works as it’s what helps us achieve incredible results for our clients and generate them hundreds of thousands of pounds. 

We’ve had clients where we’ve launched and in the first week achieved a negative ROAS but by the end of the 3 months testing, completely turned the account round and started to achieve a 4-5x ROAS. We cannot stress enough that we need time to get strong results. If you had said before we started working together that you were giving us 5 days to achieve a positive ROAS then we would have politely declined to work with you because we are a very open, honest and transparent agency and we would have told you then that we simply could not promise that, nor would any other media buying agency. 

'I know nobody can guarantee sales - I understand this, But when they send you a pack, with the results they expect to get, they are wayyyyy off what actually happened. I think I made around 14 sales and spent over £400. This compared to my ads and Fiverr ads, which sold 5x more than their ads 0 it was all very disappointing.' 

We generated 17 conversions/sales within the time we were live. We didn't have the ads running for long enough to properly start the testing process. We needed the data to analyse performance but the account was switched off after 5 days so we didn't have the chance to implement our strategy. This short time being live with ads is absolutely nowhere near enough time to drive meaningful value for any account which is why we only offer a minimum of 3-month terms. This is in place for good reason - so that we have a fair opportunity to drive results, something we are doing for our client base who have been willing to invest the time with us. 

'They probably work well with other brands, and I don't doubt that after some time they could help my business slowly grow. But the initial output, and constant losses, were just not worth the risk for my business.' 

We do indeed! And we are more than happy to share case studies and testimonials from our client portfolio. 

'I asked for a part refund, but this was just ignored.' 

You were not ignored, you were told that we wouldn't be providing a refund because we had already allocated the resources and time required from our team to work on your account. Because of this, we turned away other businesses to give your account the attention it deserves. 

'I don't doubt their knowledge - I never like bringing people's work down at all, and like I said, they probably work wonders for other businesses. But for me, it just didn't work at all, and everything seemed rushed, and I was left in the dark for almost 2 weeks, with nothing to show for.' 

Yes, we do work wonders for other businesses and we were confident that we could do the same for you if we were allowed more than 5 days to work on the account. As mentioned above, we drove 17 conversions/sales in the 5 days which was a good start and we could have positively capitalised on the immediate results you were getting but we weren't given the chance. 

Engaging with an agency is always a daunting prospect and we appreciate that this is your business/livelihood so your investment needs to see a return. We are confident that this would have been the outcome for you (as it is for our other clients) had we been allowed more time on the account. We will be more than happy to discuss any of the above with you so please feel free to get in touch.

We wish you every success in the future.