This is the OP here. Let me say first that this is all great advice. I used to work at an advertising agency, and I don't necessarily agree with your statement of a "profound misalignment of incentives" considering that my colleagues at the agency and others under the parent company umbrella did look for performance in their campaigns so it did have a positive result on what they were looking for.
Some more color into our situation:
- we've successfully put in place the core metrics for PPC and set up conversion tracking
- we're utilizing the Analytics API to track custom goals, in our case, things like email signups or purchases
- we've tested different landing pages, choosing one that had 300x better conversion rate but I feel there's still more room to improve
- we've run Facebook Ads, AdWords and Display on Google's Content Network and search has been the most effective at getting what we need (emails)
From my POV: I've done it myself and can continue to teach myself, but there are too many moving parts (from what I can see) for me to successfully lower our CPA and manage on a day to day basis while running the company effectively and efficiently
Some more color into our situation:
- we've successfully put in place the core metrics for PPC and set up conversion tracking
- we're utilizing the Analytics API to track custom goals, in our case, things like email signups or purchases
- we've tested different landing pages, choosing one that had 300x better conversion rate but I feel there's still more room to improve
- we've run Facebook Ads, AdWords and Display on Google's Content Network and search has been the most effective at getting what we need (emails)
From my POV: I've done it myself and can continue to teach myself, but there are too many moving parts (from what I can see) for me to successfully lower our CPA and manage on a day to day basis while running the company effectively and efficiently