Dave Bloom is the Director of Digital Marketing for Axis Local, a Digital Marketing Agency. Have you wondered if you are getting bang for your ad dollar with your agency? Do you have thoughts that things may have gotten stale and you're not sure the fee your agency is charging is justified? Below are three of the top signals that your agency had become complacent running your Google Ads.
1. You Do Not Receive Regular Reporting, On a Schedule
Typically the number one reason an agency would not provide reporting of the performance of the ad campaigns they run is because they fear what the reports will show. A client should have regularly scheduled reporting on a schedule that makes sense for their business. The reporting should include relevant key performance indicators (KPIs) such as the number of Conversions, the Cost per Conversion, Conversion Rate, Clickthrough Rate (CTR) and Cost Per Click (CPC) at a minimum. The Cost per Conversion paired with the agency fee is vital for a client to understand the profitability of their ad campaigns. We provide our clients with scheduled reporting that provides an executive summary of the KPIs, and detailed reporting of conversions because we believe that our clients need full transparency of ad performance and details of what is working so that they can keep planning the rest of their marketing mix for future successes.
2. Agency Representatives Take Several Days to Answer Questions You Raise About Your Ads Performance
Have you ever felt that your agency was responding to you at a snail's pace? This could be a sign that your agency has grown complacent in managing your Google ads. If you ask them a question about the performance of your ads, and they take several days to get back to you, that is likely a sign that they are not active in your account day-in, day-out managing the performance. This would be a good test for a Google Ads search campaign - ask your agency representative: What are some of my least expensive conversion-driving keywords and are they also the among the least expensive keywords for CPC? No one can be faulted for having to look it up, but active management will lend itself to a faster reply. If there is not active management, the question may spark some activity on the account and the reply may be held up. At Axis Local, we prefer to have regular conversations with our clients regarding their ad's performance and are always happy to hop on a call and discuss any of the details of any of the campaigns running in a client's account.
3. No Activity in the Change History of Your Ads Account
To do this, you need to have access to your Google Ads account, accessed at ads.google.com. Not having this access or ever being offered it, couId itself be a sign that your agency is growing complacent as there is no reason to not offer that transparency. To view this, you'll need to log into your Google Ads account and look on the left side of the screen to find "Change history." It looks like this:
Here all information related to the changes that have taken place on your account are stored. In almost all situations, managing an active ads account well results in several changes a week. To that point, if several months go by without any changes shown here, this is almost certainly a sign your agency has grown complacent running your ads account.
Would you like us to perform a complimentary analysis of your ads account? We will have a look at the performance of your campaigns, and offer optimization opportunities if we see them. Just contact us HERE to get started.
Axis Local is a digital marketing agency. Once of our core competencies is managing digital ads such as Google Ads. Unlike most agencies that charge their fee as a percentage of the amount you spend on ads, we charge based on the number of locations that are being targeted for a brick-and-mortar based business. If your goal is not to drive customers to physical stores, we charge based on the number of campaigns and channels ads are being run in. If you would to talk to us about Google Ads or any other platform you would like to advertise on, contact us HERE.