This is part three of a four-part series of questions to ask digital marketing agencies. If you missed it, check out part one here, and part two here.
Make Sure You Get The Results You’re Paying For
You could have the most creative ad in the world, a multi-million dollar budget, and the best targeting. Still, if a digital marketing agency isn’t reviewing results and optimizing your marketing performance, you could be wasting money or missing opportunities! Use these three questions to show the agencies you’re interviewing that you are results-focused.
Questions about Results and Reporting
How often do you check and optimize performance?
When running ads, it is vital to check their performance frequently. Between competition vying for the same audience’s attention and changes in audience behavior, reviewing the performance of your ads and optimizing all factors based on what you learn from those reviews is key to your success. The best digital marketing agencies check performance frequently.
At DSM, we check performance on PPC campaigns daily to ensure we’re getting the optimal results for our clients. When there’s a consistent trend in the performance, we optimize the campaigns to capitalize on successes and adapt when things aren’t working.
How often will we discuss results?
While it’s critical that the agency you choose monitors results frequently, you don’t need to discuss results daily. Day to day results can fluctuate. What is essential are trends in the results and overall campaign performance. For most businesses, discussing results once a week or every other week is sufficient.
When discussing results, another thing to keep in mind is that it should not be the first time the agency sees them! A quality digital marketing agency will have reviewed the results before discussing them with you and will have insights and recommendations for the next steps as necessary.
Can we see a sample of what reports will look like?
While not necessarily an indication of how well your campaigns will perform, seeing an example report will help you understand how the agency views the data and how they present that data for their clients. Is the report too dense to understand what you’re looking at? That could be a method to overwhelm you with information, so you don’t question what the agency is saying. Does the report seem scant? Perhaps the agency only shows the successes and not what is not working well.
At DSM, we create easy-to-access Google Data Studio dashboards that allow clients to check their results, with KPIs that are important to them, at any time. There are no hiding results when everyone has access to see them at all times!
Continuing the Conversation
Pop quiz! What is the most important part of digital marketing? If you said “results”, you’d be right! How your potential agency goes over those results with you is vital. It’s important to make sure they do it often; once a week or every other week is generally enough for most businesses. At DSM, we take transparency a step further by giving you a custom Google Data Studio dashboard that allows clients to check their results at any time, letting the data speak for itself.
Our final installment in our four-part, 12 Questions to Ask a Digital Marketing Agency series will have a few trick questions you can use to really press agencies, so be sure to stay tuned! In the meantime, if you’re searching for a digital marketing agency that checks results more than Gen Z checks social media, give us a call or shoot us a message!
