How to Find the Right Agency for You

Outsourcing your digital advertising gives you plenty of benefits, ranging from consistent efforts to expert insight. The key to leveraging the relationship for maximum results is choosing the right digital advertising agency. These five questions can help you evaluate whether an agency is a good fit for your business.

What Level of Transparency and Accountability Can You Expect?

Your agency should be an extension of your own marketing team, working alongside you with a mutual goal to increase campaign performance and expand your brand’s reach. Agencies have experience with a broad range of industries and work continuously to navigate constant shifts in the marketing landscape to find the best advertising practices for their clients.

Finding an agency that fits the needs of your business requires a measure of trust, enabling you to share existing performance metrics and future goals with a new team. Evaluate whether you can trust your agency by asking about topics such as:

Contractual terms, including how rebates and discounts are handled

• How media rates are determined and available pricing strategies

• Methods for checking for bot and other fraudulent activity

What is the Omnichannel Strategy Approach?

A well-executed omnichannel strategy harnesses the full power of social platforms and devices, nurturing customers along the consumer journey with every interaction and working in harmony with one another to more effectively reach the right audience at the right time in the right way.

The key difference between omnichannel marketing and simply advertising across different channels with independent strategies is the heightened level of personalization the user experiences when your ad techniques work together to create one unified brand experience. A quality ad agency will utilize omnichannel marketing to avoid bombarding potential customers with less-relevant ads and instead guide customers steadily through the sales funnel with ads that are both timely and beneficial.

This approach also tailors your digital efforts for each unique customer. A recent survey estimates that brands stand to lose 38% of their customers due to poor personalization practices. Quality personalization is the product of quality data, which is more easily applied when marketing channels “talk” to each other — thus, the significance of an omnichannel game plan.

What Are Your Attribution, Performance, and Reporting Processes?

Successful marketing campaigns within your company may vary in purpose and complexity, but key performance indicators (KPIs) are the driving force behind them all. KPIs are the measurement system in place for determining the success of your marketing efforts, which means it’s critical to understand how they work — and how proper attribution and reporting can more accurately gauge campaign performance.

Click-through rates track the percentage of clicks an ad receives and the impact it has on your prospects, while post-impression metrics like post-click and post-view activity measure when conversions occur — either after a consumer clicks on an ad, or after consumers are exposed to an ad but don’t click on it, choosing instead to visit the site later. Conversion rates describe the number of prospects ultimately turning into customers.

A good agency understands that not all clicks are created equal. Going beyond clicks and analyzing other meaningful engagement metrics provides a more complete window into customer activity. Cheap clicks can be the sign of an efficient campaign or an audience that’s too broad and largely uninterested in your product — going deeper than surface-level CPC numbers often reveals additional insight to better

What Kind of Post-Launch Campaign Support Does the Agency Offer?

You wouldn’t want to work with an agency that neglects making adjustments as needed throughout a campaign. The best agencies provide ongoing optimization that assesses performance and adjusts campaigns according to key performance indicators and metrics to maximize return on investment (ROI). This includes hands-on optimizing as campaigns that evolve according to new digital trends.

Ad partners who understand your marketing goals can improve campaign performance at each stage of the sales funnel through individually tailored approaches that get the best results while reaching the widest possible audience.

Collaboration is the key to developing winning strategies for digital advertising. From pinpointing a desired audience to optimizing campaigns based on the best available data, the right agency will elevate all of your marketing efforts and prove an invaluable part of your team moving forward.