Inside the Account: Roman Rise on What Agency Audits Reveal and When Paid Media Actually Pays Off
When a business switches agencies, the problems that surface inside the ad account are rarely the ones described in the pitch deck. Saad Al Falil, co-founder of Roman Rise, a young US-based creative and performance marketing agency, has taken over enough accounts to see the same failures repeat. In this interview, he walks through what those audits reveal, why the agency-versus-in-house comparison is usually framed wrong, and what founders should verify before treating paid media as the next line of spend.
What shows up once you're inside the account
Asked what earlier agencies got wrong that only became visible after access was granted, Al Falil pointed to a pattern rather than a single mistake. He said "the campaigns are optimizing for the wrong result" — a problem that is especially visible in cash-on-delivery markets like Morocco and Tunisia, where a purchase event on Meta only records an order being placed, not one that is confirmed or delivered. The report shows a healthy cost per purchase while the business absorbs returned parcels.
He also flagged incomplete tracking — a pixel installed but not properly configured, with no server-side events — which leaves the platform learning from bad data. Creative goes stale: "the same few ads run for months, frequency keeps rising, and results drop slowly enough that nobody notices." And ownership is often misplaced: "the ad account or pixel sits in the agency's Business Manager, so leaving means losing the account history and audiences."
None of this appears in a monthly report, he noted. It surfaces only when ad data is compared against the business's real numbers — confirmed orders, delivered orders and actual revenue. For readers weighing a switch, the practical takeaway is to audit tracking configuration and asset ownership before signing, not after.
The agency-versus-in-house question most articles skip
On the perennial debate between hiring an agency and keeping paid media in-house, Al Falil argued that most commentary compares cost — one salary against one retainer — and stops there. "Paid media is not one job," he said. "It is strategy, media buying, creative production, tracking and reporting." A single in-house hire is rarely strong across all of them, and creative is usually the first thing to break, since ads need fresh assets at a pace one person cannot sustain.
The second omission, in his view, is ownership inside the business. An agency does not replace having someone close to the real numbers — margins, confirmation rates, lead quality, and what happens after the click. Without that person, he said, "both an agency and an in-house hire end up optimizing for platform metrics instead of profit." His practical advice applies either way: keep ad accounts, pixel and data in your own name.
Before you spend: what founders decide too quickly
For founders unsure whether paid media is the right next investment, Al Falil said the rushed decision is almost always "the budget and the channel" — picking a number and a platform before checking whether the business can turn traffic into revenue.
He listed five things to examine first:
- Offer and margin: how much can you pay to acquire one customer and still make money?
- Conversion: are you converting the traffic and messages you already receive? If the site or follow-up is weak, ads only enlarge the leak.
- Follow-up speed: for lead-based businesses, how quickly is a lead called back? Slow follow-up kills otherwise good campaigns.
- Tracking: can you see which sale came from which ad?
- Creative capacity: can you produce new videos and visuals on a regular cadence?
If those foundations are in place, he said, paid media is usually the fastest route to growth. If not, fixing them first is the better use of the budget — a conclusion that echoes long-standing guidance on measuring marketing performance against business outcomes rather than platform metrics alone.
The through-line
Across all three questions, Al Falil's answers return to the same principle: the numbers inside the ad platform are not the business's numbers. Confirmed orders, delivered revenue, follow-up speed and asset ownership determine whether paid media compounds or quietly leaks. For businesses evaluating an agency, an in-house hire, or a first campaign, the audit starts before the spend does.
Roman Rise was recently included in Peekwire's list of creative performance marketing agencies worth knowing in the US.