I paid Sam Piliero’s Moonlighters almost $12k to manage my Facebook ads for 4 months. Here's the results

Not an ad for them. This is "warts and all" unvarnished experience. Others may find this hard-won wisdom useful.

After years of struggling with Facebook ads I saw Sam Piliero’s great looking YouTube videos on Facebook ads. I took the plunge and approached Sam's agency The Moonlighters.

They charged $1500 flat fee plus 7% "performance fee", which was a % of the ad spend. The idea is if they perform well I scale ad spend.

After 4 months and $85k spent a scalable ad was never found.

The ROAS I achieved before them was 1.4 (I know terrible). The ROAS they achieved was 1.6...but once their fees are included that brought the ROAS back down to 1.4

So was not commercially beneficial for us, so we ended the contract after 4 months.

They made lots of ads with 20% discount, which reduced the AOV and LTV.

In the end I changed the discount to requiring minimum order quantity of 2 actually benefited. This increased AOV and also made "repeat" customers front-load: instead of them buying today and then again in 2 months they buy both now. This made the revenue stream instant so did not need to lose money on first sale to make profit on the second.