For you as a client, campaign performance is always key; naturally, you always want to achieve the highest possible number of conversions at the lowest possible cost. When making your choice, never base your decision solely on price; a cheap but poor-quality supplier will ultimately cost you much more. So what should you base your decision on? We have a few tips for you on how to compare offers from different agencies and choose a supplier.
Certified agency
Google, in particular, strives to ensure that only experienced agencies offer advertising on the AdWords system. It then grants them certification. You can check whether an agency is certified or not here.
Transparent communication
Nobody likes secrets. If an agency is keeping things from you, don’t deal with them. Be careful, though – many clients confuse a lack of transparency with a request for a face-to-face meeting. On the contrary, a good agency will always request a face-to-face meeting. Every website or e-shop is unique; for the agency to fully understand your brief, it will be much easier to meet in person than to play email ping-pong only to discover after 14 days that there has been a misunderstanding.
What should I ask?
- Will I have unlimited access to my advertising account? What if I want to end the collaboration – will I still have my advertising accounts? The only correct answer to these questions from the agency is “yes”.
Professionalism
A professional agency will offer you a suitable solution straight away. They won’t ask you to choose advertising platforms and keywords. After all, that’s why you’re hiring them.
What to ask?
- Which advertising platforms do you recommend? Advertising platforms include Google AdWords, Seznam Sklik, Facebook Ads and others. There is also the eTarget platform, but many agencies do not use it. In Slovakia, however, it is very significant. The agency should recommend a suitable combination and suggest how much to invest in each platform and why.
- How often do you change and adjust campaigns? PPC works like an auction – the higher your bid, the more likely your advert will appear. So, adverts need to be checked frequently. Management necessarily involves optimising and fine-tuning campaigns, or testing.
- And what about keywords? No one can tell you in advance how many keywords your ads should target. This requires keyword analysis. If an agency offers you a PPC campaign covering hundreds of keywords without any analysis, they are not professional and their services are unlikely to be of high quality.
- How much will a click cost me? Again, it’s impossible to say exactly in advance. An agency can only give you a very rough and indicative price upfront. PPC ads operate as an auction against competitors. You can agree on a monthly budget in advance.
- Can you measure conversions from the ad? It takes a bit of setting up, but of course it’s possible. Without measuring conversions, you cannot assess whether your PPC campaign is paying off or not.
- Do you guarantee results? A reputable agency will stand by its work. There are also agencies that base their management fee on the campaign’s results.
Price
Every agency sets its prices differently. Most commonly, you pay a monthly management fee and top up your credit in the advertising system. The management fee varies depending on the number of keywords and the complexity of the work. A retailer such as Alza will have a very high fee. A specialised e-shop such as levnemapy.cz will have lower costs.
Additional services
PPC management does not necessarily have to offer additional services such as website development or SEO, but it should offer complementary services related to PPC. At AITOM, for example, we offer clients a PPC audit. Thanks to this, we are able to identify errors and the potential of any campaign. A PPC audit is not conditional on PPC management – you can have it carried out purely for information purposes as an additional perspective.
PPC from AITOM (or how we do it)
Jakub and Martin handle PPC for us. First, we assess the current situation. We check whether the client already has a PPC campaign, or at least accounts on Sklik and AdWords; we no longer use eTarget as it wasn’t sufficiently effective. We strive to create the best possible PPC ads, so we need to believe in the product. We’re not afraid of small e-shops or unconventional things, but we don’t like to promote anything we consider unethical (such as non-bank loans).
We’ll carry out a thorough keyword analysis. If the client already has an analysis, we’ll take it over and adapt it, but we won’t charge the client for it. Why should you pay twice for the same thing?!
Before we launch the PPC campaign itself, we’ll show you the keyword analysis, including an indicative hypothetical price. Based on the analysis, we’ll recommend the most suitable solution. We’ll agree on the advertising budget and monthly management costs, and only then will we start creating the adverts. As a client, you have unlimited access rights, which remain yours even if you change suppliers.
We regularly monitor the adverts; if a problem arises, we know about it immediately and work to resolve it. We also continuously test new ad copy, targeting and click-through rates to achieve the best possible results. We also ensure we add negative keywords and expand the adverts.
Setting up and launching adverts takes between 1 and 3 weeks, depending on the scope and the client’s requirements. We report the first results after just one month. A perfectly optimised campaign is achieved after 3 months; during this time, we set optimal prices, fine-tune ad copy and many other campaign parameters.