Hydroviv review for Springbot

Feb. 25, 2019

Hydroviv signed up for Springbot in October 2018 with the goal of simplifying our company’s marketing efforts. We signed up for all offerings (Email, Audience Expander, Onsite Abandonment, Ad management) so our monthly cost was $1300 plus ad spend. We left Springbot on Feb 18, 2019, so this review is for our four-month experience. Facebook Ad Management: Per terms of agreement, Springbot was to build two Facebook campaigns per month. Simply put, this did not happen. In entirety, two campaigns were built over the 4 month period, and one campaign was never actually turned on. The campaign that was turned on was never touched after it was set up. Long story short, Springbot’s Facebook ad campaigns generated zero revenue on $1500 ad spend, and we were charged $800 for ad management over the duration of our relationship. Audience Expander, Onsite Abandonment Prospecting Tools: These tools have their own dashboards that display attributed revenue, so you can see ROI at a glance for prospecting done on their platform (a major selling point). The problem was, the dashboard was showing a revenue that didn’t align with data from our other analytics tools. When I asked my account manager for a list of customers/orders that served as the basis for the number, I found that a bug was causing Springbot to mistakenly take credit for sales that occurred months before I signed up for the platform, which artificially inflated the revenue that Springbot attributed to its platform. Once Springbot’s bug (that my team discovered) was fixed, there were zero dollars of attributed revenue from that point forward for any of the prospecting services. AdRoll Ad Management: When Springbot manages your Adroll accounts, you get locked out of the account, so the only data you can see is what they show you in the dashboard (which was wrong in the case of Audience Expander/Onsite Abandonment). Using the data from their dashboard, there was was about $1100 in click through revenue, on about $8000 in authorized Ad spend, but we have no way of verifying any of the numbers. Experience With Company: Because Springbot didn’t uphold their end of contract (Facebook Ad Campaign building), and because overall performance was poor, I submitted a written request to put in our 30 day cancellation request on December 28, 2018. I was informed that despite the fact that Springbot didn’t uphold their end of the contract the service wouldn’t actually be terminated until Feb 18, because the 30 day termination notice is really a 30 day plus billing cycle notice. While annoying, it wasn’t worth the money to make a big deal out of it and pursue breach of contract as a justification to terminate immediately. However, I was very surprised to see that Springbot processed another charge for $2996 on January 19 to purchase ads for the remainder of the cycle. It is absolutely inconceivable to me that an ad management service would continue to pull ad spend from a client more than 20 days after the client submitted a 30 day termination notice because they weren’t actually building campaigns or managing ads. In summary, I feel fortunate that Hydroviv was in a financial position to eat the $13,000 cost of trying Springbot ($5200 for 4 months of the platform & management fees plus over $8k in additional ad spend), while continuing to keep our other email/analytics systems in place. I would encourage early stage companies who sign up for Springbot to have a person from their team actively managing and monitoring all aspects of onboarding, campaign management, campaign performance, and double-checking dashboard metrics against other analytics for attribution for at least the first 6 months. In our experience, the fundamental problems were discovered only because our team proactively dug and cross-referenced the data from Springbot’s dashboard with our other reporting platforms. Eric Roy, Ph.D. Founder, CEO