Kate B.
1/5
When I first approached Adtrain in April 2023, they sounded great. Very authoritative. They audited my Google Ads account and sent me a video explaining all the things my previous agency had done wrong. Adtrain talked at length about the missed opportunities on my ads account and were confident they could reduce the cost per lead. I was clear with them, in several phone conversations, that my priority was to acquire UK leads at £1.50 each and USA leads at £5 each. This was a very achievable goal and had been achieved on my account for long periods in 2022.
I paid my previous ad agency £1491 per quarter. Adtrain charged me £7690 - five times as much. I was told this was because I had a big ads budget and my account would need a lot of management. I decided to take the risk as they seemed to know what they were doing and promised big improvements.
Warning bells sounded immediately when Adtrain started delivering lead costs at £10 each. I contacted my account manager immediately and asked what was going on. He assured me the lead cost would fall and to be fair, it did, over time. But it never once reached the goals I was looking for (in order to be profitable) and had been told were achievable. On average, the UK leads came in at over double what I needed them to be - around £3.50 each. Leads from the USA were slightly closer to target at £6.50 each. In addition, despite charging me a huge management fee (because of my supposed large ads budget) Adtrain spent only half the budget.
I raised concerns with my ads manager throughout my contract, but was always told things were in hand. They weren't. At the end of the contract, I took my complaint to the top - to Michael Elliot, who owns Adtrain - but he couldn’t have been less interested.
There was no apology, no offer of a refund, no goodwill gesture to make amends. (In fact, a sign of Adtrain's incompetence is that they accidentally billed me for another month instead. I did manage to get this refunded, after chasing them). I get the impression that Mr Elliot is young and inexperienced in customer service. His tone was dismissive, responding with patronising smiley faces to some of my comments. Mr Elliot handed the entire complaint to my account manager to deal with, despite the fact that this was the very person whose performance I was complaining about.
I held off writing this review on the off chance that Adtrain had somehow magically acquired high quality leads for me that would perform well. They did not. I've just run a sales launch which mirrors the one I ran this time last year, and the results couldn't be more different.
In 2022, the leads acquired via Google ads throughout Q2 generated a profit of £9k during a launch in July 2022. In the 12 months since then, those leads have generated a further £14k during subsequent launches, so that's an overall profit of £23k. This year, the small number of leads that Adtrain acquired throughout Q2 of 2023 have performed poorly. After paying Adtrain and the cost of the ads themselves, I am currently out of pocket by more than £10k.
Adtrain were critical of my old agency, but Adtrain have actually performed WORSE than them! My old ad agency was cheap if nothing else. With AdTrain, you pay full whack for what *sounds* like a high quality service, but actually isn't.
I hope my review will be of use to others. My top tip is: try to avoid having any conversations with Adtrain on the phone. This is where many promises were made with me that later couldn't be proved and I wish I'd got it in writing. In summary, I feel this company has nailed its sales pitch, but hasn’t yet mastered Google ads or good customer service. I'm not normally one for writing reviews, but when a company treats you badly AND doesn't seem to care... you don't have many other choices.
