It’s 2022, and today, business owners know they need a strong digital presence. Assuming your website is doing its job, digital advertising often becomes the focus, helping prospective customers find your company’s website.
As a business owner, how do you find a top digital ad agency, one that will maximize your ad spend and not put more of your monthly digital budget in their pocket than toward your online ads? Here are 4 points to help business owners find a digital agency that’s a partner, not a vendor.
- Ad Spend and Management Costs. Know what the agency charges versus what goes to your ad spend. An invoice should have the ad spend separated from the agency fees. At Ad House Advertising, we believe transparency is key; you should know what portion of your funds go to online ads. We’ve seen some digital ad invoices where 50% is going to the marketing company. We’re usually in the 15 to 25% range, depending on the complexity of the campaign.
- Reporting and Communication. You should see detailed reporting on your digital campaigns, not just a summary of how many ad impressions and clicks to the site occurred. A live dashboard that shows you data is nice, but we believe the marketing experts running any digital campaign are obligated to give detailed communication, at least monthly, of how those ad dollars are producing leads or other vital metrics.
- Keywords and Search Terms. If your prospective digital agency says you can have 10 (or 20) keywords, walk away. Keywords must be continually updated and monitored, adding, and omitting them based on how those users convert into leads. Ask your agency for a recent Search Terms report; here, you’ll see the terms that prospective customers searched for that triggered an ad that they clicked on. If there are many that are off target to your company, the account’s not being monitored and optimized well.
- Negative Keywords. Those off-target search terms should be added to negative keyword lists so that Google Ads doesn’t continue to show ads for irrelevant searches. Our Ad House Advertising account managers spend hours on this task each week; recently, the ad platform allows increasing numbers of irrelevant searches. Ask a digital agency to show you examples of their work in negative keywording. Without this ongoing digital management, ad dollars are eaten up by off-target ad clicks.
At Ad House Advertising, we’re a leading digital agency, the first company to reach Google Partner status in our state. We work with home improvement, medical, financial, automotive, and health and fitness clients across the United States. If we can help answer questions about digital marketing or if you’d like to see case studies of our clients’ growth, please contact us.