There are two types of digital marketing companies – those
that have developed a highly efficient assembly-line approach to manage their
client’s campaigns with as little effort or thought as possible and those who
manage each campaign based on data and campaign performance.
Companies using the assembly-line approach may still build
campaigns based on vertical-specific best practices, but they tend to give each
client of a specific type the same campaign and then take a set-it and
forget-it approach or make haphazard adjustments without digging into the
details or applying data-informed critical thinking. Companies utilizing the
set-it-and-forget-it approach may optimize campaigns on a set schedule or wait
until a client complains about campaign performance before taking action.
If one of their thousands of clients leaves due to
inattentiveness or lackluster performance, so what? It’s just one small-time
HVAC contractor in Podunk central Texas – there are hundreds more where they
came from.
Digital marketing agencies that use a performance-based
digital marketing campaign management approach will build ad groups and write
ad copy by hand, proactively optimize campaigns and will have no problem maintaining
transparency in their dealings with clients. This type of campaign management
leads to better campaigns, less wasted ad spend and higher ROI.
When you get on the phone with your digital marketing
service provider, are you speaking to the person who built your campaign? Ask
them how often they touch it. Ask them what the latest optimization was, or the
last budget or targeting adjustment. If you’re talking to an “account manager”
in a call center setting who doesn’t know your name and has never opened the
AdWords dashboard in their life, you may be with the wrong digital marketing
agency. Setting SMART Goals and Understanding Performance Data
Digital marketing is not great just because it allows
businesses to reach consumers in many new, exciting ways. The trackability
afforded by digital marketing is simply unparalleled and may be even cooler
than having virtually unlimited and round-the-clock access to potential
customers.
However, in order to get the most value out of tracking you
must understand the metrics and performance data involved.
We think data is really cool and believe it is truly
empowering for SMBs, which is why we make it a priority to share that knowledge
with our clients. Sure, this information helps them succeed, but it also gives
them a clearer view of just how awesome our team of paid media professionals are
when it comes to driving leads to their business.
During our onboarding process and while we’re developing
campaigns for our clients, we help them understand how to calculate ROI and
explain concepts like close rates and expected cost per lead. A digital
marketing company that takes a performance-driven approach to campaign
management should absolutely explain these concepts to new clients, because
they should want their clients to understand all the great things they’re doing
on the client’s behalf. Signs Your Digital Marketing Provider May Be Failing to
Provide Performance-Based Campaign Management
- You never discussed campaign goals at the start
of your campaign
- They don’t address poor performance until you
bring it up to them
- They “fix” underspending campaigns by increasing
budgets across the board
- When something like tracking numbers, lead forms
or a pixel breaks or ads are disapproved you lose out on weeks or months of
campaign performance because no one noticed it
- All campaign decisions are based on recent
performance
Signs Your Digital Marketing Provider Offers
Performance-Based Campaign Management
- You discussed and set SMART goals before they
started building out your campaign
- You get on a reporting call and they explain your
campaign was underperforming, why they think it was underperforming and what
they did to address it – before you noticed or asked
- They address underspending campaigns by
targeting budget increases on the best performing pieces of the campaign, not
just arbitrarily raising bids or budgets
- You get a call or email from them telling you
the pixel on your site isn’t firing and needs to be fixed, or that your ads are
disapproved and what they’re doing about it – not weeks or months later but
within hours or days
- They base their reporting, analysis and
optimization suggestions on month-over-month, year-over-year, three-month
trends, mobile vs desktop and demographic performance instead of relying solely
on the latest performance data
Seasonal businesses frequently fall into the short-term
reporting trap. If you’re a retailer running a ski shop you likely don’t have a
ton of business during the summer, but people may start shopping for the
upcoming season starting in September or October. A lackluster digital
marketing company may brag about what an impressive increase in leads they
drove your way in October compared with August. What they should really be
measuring your October 2019 performance against is your campaign’s October 2018
and October 2017 performance.
Examples of What NOT to Do
Example One
- Let’s say you have a campaign with a $200
monthly budget and the average cost per click is $4. In this example, you will
only get 50 clicks a month. It’s two weeks into the campaign and the 25 clicks
you’ve received so far are split between desktop and mobile. Should your
digital marketing provider implement negative bid adjustments on desktop?
The answer is no
– there
simply isn’t enough performance data to decide a negative bid adjustment for
desktop is an appropriate course of action for the campaign yet.
A performance-based digital
marketing agency will urge you to wait until enough data has been gathered to
make an informed decision. An agency with a short-term mentality may make a
knee-jerk reaction based on short-term performance rather than wait to make a
data-driven informed decision.
Example Two
-You’re running a conversion-oriented low funnel
campaign (targeting people in the evaluation phase of their customer journey).
The campaign has a $4,500 monthly budget. Roughly $85 of the spend has gone
towards “cost” search queries. Should your digital marketing agency add cost as
a negative keyword?
No, they shouldn’t.
They may
think that cost is more of a top of the funnel research-phase type query, but
the bottom line is you’ve only spent 1.8 percent of your budget on
cost
queries. Depending on the cost of other keywords, $14 clicks may or may not be
an efficient use of your funds. In this scenario more information is required;
did those clicks result in a conversion action? Were those qualified leads?
It’s important you trust your
digital marketing partner to make the decisions that is in the best interest of
your campaign – your performance will not only reflect on them, but it will
also dictate whether or not you continue to remain a client. Cost should only
be eliminated if:
- It’s clear those clicks are irrelevant to
reaching your goal
- Bottom-funnel searchers aren’t interested in
cost (which is dubious logic) making those clicks unlikely to result in conversions
or leads
- Those clicks are far more expensive than queries
with equal or greater value/relevance to the campaign
Get Goal-Driven and Data-Driven Digital Marketing
Services
REV77 doesn’t take a cookie-cutter, assembly line approach
to digital marketing. We start every client relationship with a conversation
about goals to ensure there’s no confusion about what you want to accomplish
with your marketing dollars.
Our entire campaign approach will be designed to meet those
goals and ensure your precious ad spend is precisely targeted at the people you
want to reach.
We put an emphasis on transparency and client communication
and perform daily checks and ongoing optimization to ensure no client,
regardless of their spend, ever falls through the cracks.
Request a
free
digital marketing audit
and find out how you or your clients can get the
most out of your marketing dollars.