If you’re a business owner and you’re outsourcing your paid ads to a paid ads marketing agency, here are our top 5 non-negotiables that you should be looking out for.
Non-negotiable #1: Transparent and frequent communication
Your paid ads marketing agency needs to be available to talk to you throughout the month via email and keep you updated on any significant changes they are making in your account. In addition to this frequent communication and updates, they should be scheduling at least one call with you per month [at a minimum] to discuss your overall ad performance and strategies.
The agency should be sharing with you when things are working well and when things aren’t, and what they are doing to improve results.
A partnership works best when both teams are communicating often and effectively. You shouldn’t be the one having to always reach out with suggestions or checking in on how things are going. That’s when it starts to feel like your campaigns are on set-and-forget, and you’re just another number in their client list.
Non-negotiable #2: Education
Your paid ads marketing agency must be able to confidently analyse and explain the data in your ad accounts, and explain that to you in a way that is jargon-free so that you understand as well. While partnering with an agency gives you the ability to take a step back from managing your ad campaigns, it is still incredibly important that you understand how your budget is being invested and why.
At the end of the day, you need to understand what strategy they are implementing and the reason behind that, so that when they ask you to increase the budget, you understand why that is their suggestion.
Hot tip: This is even more important if they are charging you a commission-based fee or percentage of revenue made, rather than a flat monthly fee. [We have more opinions on this too, but we’ll save that for another time].
Non-negotiable #3: Proactive
Your paid ads marketing agency needs to be proactive. You are outsourcing your ad campaigns to their team and investing in them, because they’re the expert in their field. You are not expected to know everything, so they shouldn’t be relying on you always being the one to bring ideas to them. If you have suggestions, by all means, share them – but if they aren’t showing any initiative in developing new creative ideas, then perhaps it’s worth a conversation with them to see if that’s in their scope.
The best partnerships with a marketing agency offer a proactive approach, rather than their team only ever being reactive. They should be providing you with recommendations based on what they are seeing inside your ad accounts.
Non-negotiable #4: They shouldn’t own your accounts.
Your paid ads marketing agency should never be the owner of any of your accounts. While sometimes granting Admin access to a marketing agency is required to make the onboarding process more seamless, we only ever recommend doing this with a marketing agency you completely trust. Handing over Admin permissions may be as easy as clicking a button, but the level of access you are providing when doing so means they could essentially kick you out of the account.
The business owner should be the owner of your brand page, ad account, pixel/dataset and any other asset that you can then grant access as a Partner.
This means that if you were to ever part ways with the marketing agency for whatever reason, you still own all of that data that you have invested in during your time with them running your campaigns.
While there are many marketing agencies that create all of your accounts and own all of the data so that you have to start from scratch when you part ways, our team truly believes that it is unfair to expect you to have a clean slate should our partnership come to an end.
Non-negotiable #5: Providing creative direction.
Your paid ads marketing agency should not only be providing you with strategy and direction on the technical side of your ad campaigns. You should also be seeking to partner with an agency that can provide creative direction on your ads.
Now that the machine learning of advertising platforms are getting better at finding your ideal target customer, there is less of a need to rely heavily on targeting based on interests you can select within the platforms. Instead, many of the advertising channels encourage you to broaden your targeting as much as possible and rely more on your ad creatives and messaging coupled with your conversion data history to find the right people.
As a result, if your ad creatives aren’t stopping the scroll of your ideal customer, the platforms aren’t going to work as effectively at finding the right people to deliver your ads to. Your marketing agency should be providing you with new ideas for your ads based on the results they are seeing within your account and industry trends.
That’s exactly why we are just as hands-on and obsessed with your creative strategy as we are with data-driven marketing. Ready to spice up your marketing recipe with paid ads?
