Back Up Your Ads and Beware!

I had high hopes for this app and after some previous bad experiences with other agencies, made sure I was proactive about working with the Brainity team in order to get the best results. The sign up process for the 14 day trial was nice and easy. Jose was my main point of contact and in all fairness, he was responsive throughout responding via in-app chat facility within a few hours.

However, although Brainity advertises as ‘Perfect for people new to ads’, I still had to draw on copywriting experience to write my own ads, design my own images etc. There is an ad library but it was not very helpful for my niche. When I kindly asked if my campaign could be checked before launch, I was basically told ‘sorry, we don’t do checks as everything is automatic and we are proactive’.

Okay then, 12 days into the trial, I had spent about $150 and gotten only 4 web content views. I was not advised that they would be using web content views pixels rather than landing page views objective for instance. Facebook was then taking ages searching for people when, had I received proper guidance about how their process works, I would simply have used a product url rather than a general store homepage url as I had been prompted to use.

I feel they could also have monitored my campaign and proactively made suggestions rather than sitting back waiting for everything to happen for the customer ‘automatically via the app’.

Before the trial had ended properly, my campaign was switched off without warning which seemed a bit pushy. I said so and was given a day’s extension. I manually changed the url from homepage to product page url which started to move the needle. Barely 24 hours later, the campaign was switched off automatically again and I was invited to upgrade. Very pushy! What I expected was ‘how was your experience so far?’ considering the various hiccups.

I put the campaign back on via facebook to give it a chance to pick up. $165 spent with hardly much to show for it, I was still willing to upgrade and see what the app could do but sent an honest review of my experience so far.

Rather than some empathy and accountability prior to earning my business, this company did not respond but rather deleted my ads on facebook without giving the customer an opportunity to even back up their own creatives. Of course they can turn off their app after a trial if wished, but it felt totally mean-spirited to delete a customer’s ads directly on facebook!

Fortunately I had backed up my work and have now found a much better app to work with. A disappointing experience in all. Just goes to show that AI is no substitute for using the brain.