No plan, no optimization, and a "media buyer" who didn't know basic terms.
I'm an author with a warm audience of 400k+ followers, and I hired Novel Publicity's Managed Ads Monthly ($1,250) to run a smaller, focused campaign for my books.
I want to be clear about what I was after: I run my own ads — I've personally run my own account at $40k in spend monthly — so I wasn't hiring someone to teach me Meta.
I have a massive, warm, ready-to-buy audience, and I wanted someone to take that piece off my plate and run it well now that I was only selling books.
With an audience like mine, this should have been one of the easier accounts they'd ever touch. It wasn't.
Here's what two weeks actually looked like. I handed over a full sheet of ad copy. She used the exact same copy — and the exact same images — for every single "variation." So the three "different" ads were the same ad three times. No real test of anything.
The two images themselves were never shown to me for approval; I found them by logging into my own account, and they weren't even sized correctly, so the text was cut off on mobile, where most people actually see ads. On top of that, the text use was unreadable thin old world cursive which in no way shape or form is suggested for ads.
I got one two-sentence check-in the entire time. And there was zero optimization — the campaigns just sat in "Learning Limited," and nothing was ever adjusted, restructured, or scaled.
(Meta flagged it as low results campaign and they barley cracked 2.0 ROAS on a single ad, the rest were 1.2-1.5, so losing me money...)
The results speak for themselves: 9 sales in 11 days. They couldn't break more than 2 sales even when targeting my warm audience — people who already follow me and already buy from me. That is the layup of all layups, and they missed it.
I ran my own campaign alongside theirs as a direct comparison and matched their entire 11-day total in a single morning. Around the same time, one of my own ads hit an 8 ROAS and pulled in hundreds of sales.
When I suggested shifting their underperforming campaign to a bottom-of-funnel (BOF) approach, the media buyer didn't know what BOF meant. Separately, the person I worked with told me she'd been hired on "vibes" some time ago by the owner and was learning as she went.
That explained a lot.
And when I raised all of this, the owner's response was that I didn't understand how the algorithm works and hadn't given it enough time. I understand it fine.
None of what went wrong was a "needs more time" issue — it was a "the work wasn't done and the person doing it didn't know how" issue. A warm audience that size converting at 2 sales isn't a learning-curve problem.
My honest read: this isn't serious media buying. It reads like a setup that works only with clients who don't know enough about Meta to notice what isn't happening.
If you actually understand ads — or you simply expect optimization, scaling, and quality creative built for the platform — look elsewhere.
Authors hiring out your ads: insist on a written plan, creative approval before anything goes live, and some proof the person actually on your account knows what they're doing. I got none of those.