A Good Digital Marketing Agency Will Never Say You These Things

With the digital world growing rapidly in terms of increasing online customers and in turn increasing the online presence of businesses, it is quite overwhelming to see new agencies appear every morning. We at Suvrin have compiled a list of  things to watch out for when talking to your digital marketing agency. If they say any of the following, you can confidently search for the next...

Cost per conversion (or cost per acquisition or CPA) increased this week likely due to the industry trend and increased for all competitors that are targeting the same audience

This is as wrong as possible. The industry trend or seasonality surely affect the cost, but it will always directly affect the CPCs (cost per click) that you can see in your Auction Statistics Report in the Google Adwords interface, relating them to the CPA you may or may not have the same effect. We've seen a few weeks where CPCs increased but CPAs decreased and vice versa as well. An excuse like this only demonstrates the team's lack of understanding of the search engine algorithm.

Implementation takes time 

With the plethora of bulk upload and bulk edit tools from both online ad platforms like Google/Facebook and third party tools, there is no way any volume will take time to roll out. A good digital marketing agency will know how to save time on such unproductive things and will rather spend the hours that are billed, performing valuable optimizations and follow-up tasks.

A/B testing doesn't work in fast-moving, dynamic online space

A/B testing doesn't work in fast-moving, dynamic online space There is no such thing. A/B testing is just as valuable in the dynamic online space as it is in the relatively static offline space. A/B testing strategies, the number of times they are performed, and the warranties or characteristics or environments they will be performed with are never decided during the scope of work discussion because they cannot be quantified until there is some performance. But that does not mean that this should not be done. A good digital marketing agency will proactively and continuously suggest A/B testing methods for different campaigns and will perform and incorporate the results in the next phase of optimizations.

 Put money on Facebook rather than Google, without any data supporting the same

This has been seen across multiple online ad management agencies in India, when it is very very different for both channels, depending on the industry that they fall in, the seasonality, the targeting types used, the devices working more for a channel than the other and many other metrics. Our best guess is, this is happening primarily because the facebook ad interface is a lot less complex in terms of auction and optimization than that of Google, which makes it easier for agencies to manage and hence the suggestion. Do not lose out on relevant leads who are searching for you or your competitors online because of lack of talent.

There is a fixed conversion cost (or cost per acquisition or CPA) of roughly Rs. xyz for your competitors/products/services in the industry

Online ads are the result of a very dynamic real-time auction that changes every time a search query is entered in Google. But more than that, fixed CPA is the least likely to happen, as CPA will depend on the entire experience a potential customer goes through between clicking your ad, landing on your page, followed by the number of clicks and the path to follow before I actually convert the website. Now this may be different for different website designs and therefore CPAs cannot be constant for 2 competitors bidding for the same client.

Reporting or over-monitoring on a weekly basis is just time consuming, we prefer to use team time on optimizations

ALL REPORTS ON GOOGLE AND FACEBOOK CAN BE MODIFIED. Period. And it goes without saying that we can't optimize unless we have some data to back up the changes and ideas to extract.

We do not work Saturday / Sunday

Let's go to the real world. If a campaign needs to be stopped, changed, or sped up because a sales goal is being met or missed, it just needs to be done. Business doesn't wait for the weekend to end.

I'm giving you a better average position in Google Search or maybe even first position most of the time, that's the best that can happen.

Getting a good position or even getting great traction in terms of conversions is still not okay if CPAs are not online. With the hundreds of billions of dollars of monthly budget that businesses spend online, a small change in CPA can greatly affect your monthly totals. Therefore, any metric that works well is not a good indicator of campaign performance.

For more information contact : suvrin