The standard arrangement in this industry is a percentage of spend, and it contains an obvious conflict: the agency's income rises when your costs rise. It also tends to come with the agency owning the ad accounts, so the campaign history, the audience data and the learning algorithms' accumulated knowledge leave when the relationship does. Businesses discover this at the worst possible moment, which is the month they decide to change agency.
What the work involves
- Campaigns built in your ad accounts, under your billing, which you keep
- Conversion tracking wired to real outcomes rather than form submissions
- Audience and creative testing with sample sizes decided in advance
- Budget pacing and bid strategy reviewed against actual return, not platform-reported return
- Landing page alignment, because most paid media underperforms for reasons that are not the ads
- Reporting that separates what the platform claims from what your own data shows
Why we are credible at this
We charge management only and never mark up spend. That is the same principle already published across this site for telephony and email costs, and it is the whole argument of our article on resold software fees applied to media buying.
What moves the price
We quote after discovery and the number is fixed before anything starts. These are the things that move it, so you can see roughly where your project sits before you talk to us.
- Number of platforms and campaign types
- Whether creative production is included
- Account complexity — a well-structured existing account is much cheaper to take on
- Reporting requirements, especially where several stakeholders need different views
Questions we get asked
Other Web Marketing work
Tell us what you are trying to do
A short conversation is usually enough to tell whether we are the right people. If we are not, we will say so and point you somewhere better.