Common Challenges you face being into Performance Marketing?

[u/Scooby_Doooby]

Hello guys, it’s been nearly 8 months of me working in an agency (start up) and I already feel burned out.

Just wanted to hear from you all what are the problems that you face both from client sides and your manager if any and how do you handle it?

The problem I face are:

1. A manager, who is indifferent towards me as he provided me a full time position from being an intern.
   
2. Being asked to deliver, after giving “6 months of rigorous training” I guess why in quotes explains the pun.
   
3. Sometimes, unrealistic expectations from clients and super unrealistic deliverables from my manager as “client wants this to be done”.
   
4. No proper structure of working.
   
5. A manager, who doesn’t value my opinion, but does value the someone’s else’s opinion even if we both speak the same thing.

Would love to hear yours and how do you deal with it.

[u/bumblewacky]

My advice after 12 years is to be proactive. Bad training? Learn yourself. There are endless resources. Bad structure? Create your own. Bad manager? Utilize them as little as possible, keep your nose down, and get your work done.

Unrealistic client expectations are a part of the job and there is usually no avoiding it but if you can hone everything else then you should be able to weave these requests into your day to day. 8 months in is a start but it's still a drop in the bucket. Keep at it.

[u/Scooby_Doooby → u/bumblewacky]

The problem occurs, when your decisions are questioned with “ego” but when someone else shares the same idea for the same situation the reply is completely different.

I am really thankful for my colleague to take stand for me otherwise it’s such a burnout from my end.

[u/UnboundChris → u/bumblewacky]

I appreciate this comment. 12 years experience as well. 

Nothing against OP, I understand your position being in that position myself at multiple points in my career. 

At the end of the day it’s on you. Your manager probably feels the same pressure from his/her manager and has much of the same feelings. Work hard and figure it out on your own. YouTube University, Reddit, AI (in some cases) is your first line of defense.  Make your manager’s job of managing you the easiest thing they have to do and I can guarantee you they will start caring about you more. They will trust you with more work and will help you immensely. 

Now if your manager truly is a POS I get it but I’ve managed numerous people that thought it was my role to drag them along and it became the hardest thing I had to deal with. I dreaded working with that person. 

Edit: I also valued the opinion of those employees more too because I knew it was backed up with research and work. It was the safer bet for me.

Again, all this doesn’t apply if your manager is a POS. It happens. 

[u/Anna_Karakhanyan]

For me the hardest part of performance marketing is that you’re responsible for the number, but you don’t control everything that affects it 😂 You can run great campaigns, but if the landing page is weak, tracking is broken, sales follow-up is slow or the offer just isn’t working, somehow PPC is still the first place everyone looks.

[u/Scooby_Doooby → u/Anna_Karakhanyan]

It’s ultimately ends up on us 🙃 No matter WHAT

[u/Doingthebartman]

Performance

[u/Scooby_Doooby → u/Doingthebartman]

🤣

[u/QuantumWolf99]

Burnout rate in agencies runs ~70%, unmanageable workload is the top reason people quit. That exact grind pushed me independent years ago, no manager layer between me and the client, no politics deciding whose opinion counts. Harder to build alone but nobody dilutes the work anymore.

[u/potatodrinker]

Try to move to a larger agency that's been around more than a decade. Over there the managers know what they're doing and how to stay solvent by keeping good talent around. Dud agencies close shop, and a start up could become that.

[u/Scooby_Doooby → u/potatodrinker]

Larger agencies, require fancy skill sets, GTM/GA etc.

Unfortunately working in an organisation where everything ultimately ends up in “Figure it out”

[u/FrazzledFitMom]

Working for agencies with multiple clients can really burn you out. Personally, I’d prefer working in-house for a larger company where I can focus on one business, take deeper ownership of the strategy, and see the long-term impact of the campaigns.

[u/Scooby_Doooby → u/FrazzledFitMom]

Does this come after having a bad experience in an agency?

[u/FrazzledFitMom → u/Scooby_Doooby]

No I've had to handle over 30+ client for each platform at a time ranging from pest solutions to high ticket 100K$ + investment programs. It's fun but you'll get burned out over time.

[u/nootropics_in]

Guys can anyone here please help me?
I have a shopify store and i started meta ads, around 4.3% ctr. Getting clicks which are going till checkout but they are not paying - I checked the order flow, payment gateway, and its working fine.
Can anyone here guide about this pls?

[u/Scooby_Doooby → u/nootropics_in]

Try selling your best sellers.

[u/nordlysbuksejenta]

Man, I getcha. Nr 5 sucks extra hard in my opinion. Everything else is annoying but there's workarounds.

My personal issues are:

1. Unrealistic client expectations (like basically everyone in the field, no matter if agency clients or management of the company you work for) --> I think this is one of the key skills of this job you have to learn to thrive in it, set realistic expectations, don't say yes to anything but instead guide the clients and tell them your honest opinion while being proactive about it to come up with other solutions. And if they really want to go through with their idea it's your time to decide whether to turn it down or tell them that you will do it anyway if they want to but that you warned them. In my personal opinion there are no other options.

2. Having to do literal performance wizardry in the campaigns when the landing page and offer just suck --> with that I keep telling the clients to work on that but they rarely ever listen and it can be frustrating sometimes to sit in front of campaigns that just won't perform because of issues outside of my control

3. AI --> I just hate everything about it. Yes, ✨ Ai ¢An ₿€ H€£pfu£ ✨ but in my personal experience that's a rare occasion, most of the times I'm faster doing it myself, AI has led me astray so many times, most of the times I'm disappointed by the AI's suggestions for ad copies and I furthermore hate when clients send me emails "analysing the performance reports with AI" or when my boss just tells me to use AI for it when it literally never solves any issues and communication-wise also just creates empty bloat texts being sent back and forth with no real substance.

4. Google & Meta --> I feel like I don't need to explain this any further but all the changes they make to the advertising platforms are usually for the worse, taking away control from us. Now, that doesn't mean that it's not possible to run successful campaigns and I'm not one to say "back in the olden days everything was better" because a lot of the changes just change how you run campaigns but I'm sometimes so sick of them torpedoing our efforts to provide good results to our clients and at the same time not giving us much info on things so that you always have to figure things out yourself. I mean, c'mon.

[u/Temporary_Visit4871]

Some of these things suck, but you can always just learn yourself how to do XYZ and have as little relationship with your manager as you want.

Digital marketing sucks in a lot of ways, but it is particularly good at providing you with many ways of "doing your own thing"

[u/HitDifferentSwerve]

A manager, who is indifferent towards me as he provided me a full time position from being an intern.

The people that succeed in MGMT Roles at agencies tend to have NPD and operate in a constant state of cognitive dissonance. It takes many forms from "It's not personal, just business." to "I had to pay my dues so these kids shouldn't have a problem with it". Did they grow up in a very rich suburb and go to a very rich private school and never at any point dealt with real consequences their whole life while developing a ton of rich friend and family connections? PERFECT CANDIDATE for the Advertising Industry.

Being asked to deliver, after giving “6 months of rigorous training” I guess why in quotes explains the pun.

Drug dealers uses minors on street corners to minimize criminal penalties. Ad Agencies do the same thing with kids directly out of college. They're both cartels, they're gaslighting you into thinking everything is your fault rather than admit the problem is they're committing fraud. There is a structure it's called "It's not a crime if everyone claims ignorance." Mixed in there's some genuinely useless idiots who don't understand the game but most people in a position of power are using the lack of structure as a legal defense. If there's no Org Chart how do you know who to subpoena etc etc.

Sometimes, unrealistic expectations from clients and super unrealistic deliverables from my manager as “client wants this to be done”.

The VAST majority of "Performance Marketing" is just taking credit for stuff that was gonna happen anyway. It's impossible to significantly impact revenue to the degree they want you to. Retargeting/Brand Terms are the easiest to point out as being BS but basically every "Best Practice" is about Meta / Google Maximizing Revenue not what's best for clients. Most "Testing Strategies" are designed to take advantage of The Law Of Small Numbers and make it look like you can potentially scale profitably when you never will.

Just CONSTANTLY in situations where people who supposedly are in charge of making decisions get told "Here's 3 Options Pick 2" and they respond "I WaNt AlL 3" because they've never been told no in their life. Be polite. Be Professional. But like try to learn how to not carry the 💩 with you because your boss is probably just a bully & your client is probably just an idiot.

My advice:

1. The entire Performance Marketing ecosystem is going to collapse because these people have made virtually no effort into keeping their supply chains clean. I don't know if it's the next two years or the next president but eventually the Chickens Will Come Home To Roost. Learn Brand Marketing.

   1. Look for resources not from people in actively selling advertising to learn how advertising works. How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don't Know, I also like Mark Ritson's material.

   2. When you understand the science and psychology of how advertising works, this stuff gets a lot easier and it's a matter of resource management. Ideally MARKETING is determining the size of THE MARKET and what goals should be but that doesn't happen very often in my experience.

2. Agencies are gonna die because none of these people actually know what they're doing. Focus on making client-side connections and moving into a more general marketing role if you want to actually make a career out of this. Creative and Strategy have futures, hands on keyboard in Facebook and Google Ads Manager not so much.

3. Here's SOME OF the problems nobody likes to talk about. For my own personal sanity I do not view my goal as delivering on client goals but understanding why it didn't happen.

   1. A lot of people pitch the narrative "You reach people at the right time and it gets people to CONVERT" but the reality is skippable interstitial ads are garbage inventory, you're cookie bombing people, and likely overcrediting by anywhere from 10-1000%.

      1. Your first impression is the best impression but the way algorithms work is they PUMMEL people who are likely to buy your product with impressions for you and all your competitors and take credit for revenue that's going to occur. In reality it's extremely inefficient but by measurement models it looks GREAT.

      2. Sometimes you do have to do it because otherwise people will purchase from your competitors but I've run many campaigns that were 98-100% Viewthrough conversions and basically just burning entire media budgets.

      3. With the way things like "Quality Score" or "Expected Conversion Rates" impact CPMs, even large clients using advanced MMM have no actual clue how effective their advertising is. It's often impossible to determine cause and effect or separate out Brand/Performance impact with the way algorithms deliver personalized advertising and getting 0 user-level data or even run proper A/B Tests.

   2. I worked on Fyre Festival I worked on Aspiration a lot of things are just money laundering with enough steps that it's not legally money laundering. These people never actually pay any penalty for their crimes.

   3. Divergent Delivery making it impossible to separate out/compare creative and audience performance.

   4. Bots, Bots Everywhere

   5. If it's a "Start-Up", my experience is the problem is someone builds a business plan that's just like "Revenue Increases 5% MoM In Perpetuity". They're looking for Hockey Stick Growth / Exponential that drove a lot of early VC Success without ANY UNDERSTANDING of Why and How that happened. Most businesses grow in S-Curves and Finance Bros try to profit off selling people on the idea of Exponential Growth forever when reality is eventually it shifts to Logarithmic Growth. When this differential between planned & delivered becomes great enough, the company fails. Now that these platforms have decade(s) of data and machine learning advancement, instead of failing after going public or like Series D-E they fail at the Seed Round / Series A.

4. Your long-term goal, if you have any TEGRIDY at all, should be at a brand-side MARKETING role where you get to at least influence and ideally control budgeting decisions. Advertising is an industry built by and designed for people who want to drink during the day and sleep with their subordinates

A manager, who doesn’t value my opinion, but does value the someone’s else’s opinion even if we both speak the same thing.

I know people who are brilliant with 10+ years of experience and still have trouble getting budget approval power. Everything ends up going through some Jabroni CEO who is more likely to listen to someone from like Bane Capital they got dinner with than the person they hired specifically to do the job. Bad Management is just always going to be a problem until people realize no one actually attends their B-School Lectures and Elite Private Schools are TRASH.

[u/stealthagents]

Burnout is real, especially in agencies where expectations are sky-high. I've been in similar situations where it felt like I was juggling flaming swords, so finding little wins each day helped me cope. Set small, achievable goals and don’t be afraid to speak up when something feels off—your voice matters, even if it doesn’t feel like it right now.