Engage121 vs. Meta Business Suite

If you are in the franchising or multiple location industry, Engage121 could be very valuable and save a lot of time.

Incentivized

Meta Business Suite is great if you are a business that is heavily reliant on paid media performance. It is also a great platform if we are looking to scale paid performance and look to send partnership ads live with existent creators and influencers we are working with.

Incentivized

• Software updates quickly
• Customer service with Engage121 is very quick

Incentivized

• Allows you to upload current email lists and drive ads to them more passively than email.
• Audience segmentation tools make it easy to target prospects based on actions taken on specific pages.
• Lookalike tools allow you to build new prospect lists based on common interests of your current clients.
• The ability to test multiple variations of ads against each other and report on them directly from the dashboard simplifies the decision-making process to optimize advertising efforts.

Incentivized

• The platform was rather slow, and sometimes glitchy to use.
• Would like more detailed analytics that breaks down each social page attached to the platform rather than general, over-arching analytics.
• Pricing is high for the functionality.

Incentivized

• Reporting, especially as you drill down. For example, it won't show you purchases by region or hour of the day.
• Consistency has been an issue. Top-performing campaigns/ad sets/ads will hit a wall overnight for no apparent reason.
• Cloning ads doesn't work between certain campaign types. It seems like they could make it so that even a partial copy can be made, with other required fields left empty.

Incentivized

We are choosing a new platform to go with. It is not my choice to leave Engage121, but it has the majority of the capabilities that we need to get things done. That said, if needed, I would choose to use it.

Incentivized

We have to continue using this tool in order to be effective on this marketing platform. Though there are several changes I wish we could see, the fact is that we will still need to use this product to provide customers with the information they need.

Incentivized

The main barriers is that Facebook has stitched together so many legacy systems and verifications and whatnot that it's sometimes hard to onboard new people or get all of the accounts to work together. Once it does, it does work very well.

Incentivized

I've only dealt with the API having issues a couple times, but as you can imagine an outage is not something an advertiser would find acceptable, especially during any ecommerce-heavy time of year. The overall platform could use some help with availability when it comes to authentication, as it struggles with consistency in authentication.

Incentivized

There are a lot of shortcomings when it comes to performance. There are pages that I do not expect to have much information to load on the page, yet it takes an incredibly long time (10+ secondes). I have not had experience with the integration slowing other platforms down too much.

Incentivized

I've found the Facebook for Business support to be hit or miss. For billing questions they're timely and helpful. For complex questions about specific services I've often received a longer wait and a less helpful experience. I'm often redirected to their docs, which are often not particularly helpful.

If you don't want to display your feed to your boss before going over scheduled posts for the week, use the Business site and it will be less awkward instantly. Having someone lean over your shoulder is always a bit awkward, you think about how you smell, maybe consider offering them gum because they have bad breath

Incentivized

I did not have a role in choosing Engage121

Incentivized

Meta Business Suite is a good paid media option that offers several features for building ad campaigns, which other paid media channels lack. The usability is generally good, but it probably isn't quite as intuitive as Google, as a comparison. LinkedIn is behind all of these platforms, as its ad features are not as advanced. Overall, Meta is highly ranked.

Incentivized

This product is definitely able to run at scale, but it would be wise to have enough eyeballs to oversee it and the tools for keeping the campaigns, adsets, and ads organized could use some improvement. I can also see the UI interfering with usability at greater amounts of scale.

Incentivized

• Scheduling posts ahead

Incentivized

• Definitely has a positive ROI with increasing sales, but beware because it's not easy to measure on every stage of the funnel (how much does an ad in the very top of the funnel should be accounted for on a sale?). Attribution is hard sometimes.
• Managing is expensive and time-consuming. So far we haven't been able to find any solution to automate this. We are using automatic rules but you still need to be on top of things (considering how much budget we are spending on this).
• Beware on Facebook suspending your account. As I said before, the suspension was completely unjustified (they ended up activating it again) but don't over-rely on this platform because they just don't care if you spend your money there or elsewhere. They just don't give a damn about the customer (you).

Incentivized