The pitch is
always good. This is the problem.
Listen to
enough agency pitches, and the slides become repetitive: a wall of logos
belonging to your clients, a case study in the shape of a hockey stick graph, a
guaranteed ROAS delivered with utmost confidence. You sign. Campaigns are
launched. After six months, you continue receiving reports on the first day of
the month with tons of metrics like impressions and reach, yet there is no way
for you to tell your CA the cost per lead.
Most agencies
aren’t out there to deceive anyone. The truth is, most of the time, things are
far simpler. No one asked awkward questions, no one received any awkward
answers.
Whose
account is it?
This is a
management question, yet the one business owners always regret not asking. Some
agencies manage your campaigns in their Google Ads or Meta Business Manager
account. Easy, right, until you decide to part ways and realize that all your
campaigns, audience data and three years of conversion history leave with them.
Your campaigns
need to be managed in your account. The agency needs to act as a guest.
Ahmedabad-based SmartFish Designs, which has provided branding and digital
marketing services since 2007, is very straightforward about that – no matter
what, the client always keeps the account, the data and the history. An agency
hesitating on this question said plenty about itself.
Who is
actually going to log in?
While pitches
are conducted by those with the biggest title, the weekly routine often belongs
to the employee who just joined in March.
Ask for the
name of the manager. Ask to meet him or her before signing the contract and ask
how often he or she will open your account. Paid campaigns rarely fail
spectacularly. Instead, they become ineffective due to the inactivity of the
team. No one filters keywords, two adsets are bidding for the same audience,
the daily budget is spent at three pm every day and no one realizes it because
no one is checking it.
What’s
wrong with my tracking?
If you can
only ask one question, this is the one you need to ask.
All
optimizations an agency conducts are based on the conversion data. If every
landing on the page is counted as a lead, the algorithm is being trained on
garbage, and the agency will happily inform you how effective it is. Duplicate
events and offline sales that are not being pushed back to the account damage
the optimization process in the same quiet way.
SmartFish
estimates that around 70% of accounts that it takes over have some tracking
issues or duplicate conversion events. Your mileage might differ. However, an
agency that doesn’t want to check GA4, tag manager and conversion events is
counting on assumptions.
What would
you cut?
This question
is slightly unfair to the agency. And that is why it is so useful.
Lazy proposals
suggest all channels: Google, Meta, LinkedIn, Amazon, retargeting, maybe a test
with YouTube for good measure. More channels – more retainer. The smart agency
will inform you that the machinery manufacturer does not need Instagram or your
café does not need LinkedIn with ₹200 cost per click. Search captures those who
are already looking. Meta makes them want something. These are different tasks,
and not all companies need them both.
Who fixes
the landing page?
Many great
campaigns fail at the very last stage. Landing page loads in seven seconds on
the mobile internet, or the enquiry form asks for eleven fields.
Find out
whether the agency can fix the landing page or needs to email your web
developer and wait. This gap is one week or even a month. The companies that
provide design, development and media in one place close it faster. This is
also the reason why SmartFish
performance marketing team considers the offer, the creative and the
landing page as parts of the campaign rather than other company's problem.
When will
it work?
Search
campaigns can capture the leads in the first week. Meta campaigns take more
time – two or three weeks while the algorithm calculates the audience of your
buyers, and the numbers during that period look poor compared to the rest of
the campaigns' lifetime. The good agency informs you about that in advance, not
after you called them in panic. Beware of the agencies promising the scale in
one week.
And the
budget?
Some agencies
ask for a high minimum budget in order to preserve their fee. Other agencies
accept any budget and let it die. Campaigns can run on a few hundred rupees a
day, but a salon that targets one suburb and an exporter that seeks buyers in
Germany are different problems. The right number comes after the goals, the
geography and the CPC in your niche are calculated, not before.
One more,
just in case
Buying
decisions are starting to take place inside AI assistants. ChatGPT Ads became
available for Indian advertisers. As no one has years of experience on a
channel that exists for several months, beware of the agencies claiming that.
SmartFish is running it as a pilot and openly states that. This is the right
approach towards something this new.
These
questions won't get you a better pitch. But they will get you better answers.
When choosing a performance
marketing agency in Ahmedabad or any other city, pay attention to the
vagueness of the reply.