the importance of transparency from your digital partner
We’re big believers in transparency from digital media providers. With such a wealth of potential data to learn and grow from, it’s paramount for clients to understand what’s happening behind the scenes. That information can impact short term and long term marketing strategies, as well as the bottom line.
With that said, we give you our top 5 areas to look for transparency when partnering with digital media providers.
1 How often do they manage and optimize your campaigns?
“Set it and forget it” digital campaigns might be the bane of our existence. (Digitally speaking.) When we use the expression set it and forget it, we’re referring to setting up either short term or ongoing campaigns utilizing the platform’s automated tools to let it run on its own. There’s some real benefit to using the tools built into most platforms to enhance optimizations. However, to this day we’ve yet to see an automated campaign out-perform a human-optimized campaign, especially across multiple digital media platforms. The simple reason being, machines don’t know what’s going on in your business and lack the context and budget awareness to make decisions that are truly in your campaign’s best interest. Your campaigns should adjust as your product lines and inventory changes. When shopping for a digital partner, ask how often they manually manage and optimize and what role automation plays in that.
2 What do their reports look like?
We’ve seen everything from shops providing 20+ page automated reports with no context, to providing no reports at all. Our recommendation is to seek out partners that allow access to client reports in as close to real time as possible. (We say as close to, because there may be some lag getting data from platforms to the reporting dashboard.) This process also shouldn’t stop with providing the report and nothing more. A quality digital partner should provide insights about what the data means, call out gains or setbacks that are relevant to campaign goals, and make recommendations for the future. You should understand each month and quarter what your wins are to help you produce more of them, or where to pull back on what isn’t working.
3 How do they communicate?
The digital landscape is chock-full of acronyms and industry lingo. (If you’re looking for a(n incomplete) lexicon to get an idea of what we mean, check out our past post on what some of the more common terms mean.) In order to determine what’s relevant to your given campaign or situation, a solid digital partner will take the time to ask questions about you, your company, your target audience, and your digital goals. Without that information, it can be nearly impossible to suggest successful campaign targets and understand the results. The importance of clear, jargon-free communication shouldn’t stop there. If you notice reports or conversations mysteriously veiled in unfamiliar acronyms without further explanation, there may be some purposeful over-complication of the data to hide sub-par results.
4 Are their CPCs and CPMs competitive?
Admittedly, this one is a bit of a sticky-wicket. Since the advent of the advertising agency, marketing professionals have charged some sort of service fee or media commission to earn their living. Digital campaigns require time and discussion to determine the best strategic approach, to set up the campaign architecture and bidding strategy, to optimize and make changes for campaign health, for correspondence and updates to creative as needed, and to provide clear reporting and insights. It’s reasonable for media firms to be compensated for this time and expertise, whether their structure covers that time through service fees, commission, or some combination of the two. Our suggestion is to shop around for competitive results in Cost Per Click (CPC) or Cost per Thousand (CPM). On the surface it can be easy to draw the conclusion that a service fee or earned commission is too high when proportionally taken against your total ad spend. In some cases, this is absolutely true. In others, we’d urge you to look at the difference in results. A savvy digital agency may be able to save you money overall. Your service fees may be a higher percentage of your budget than you expect, but the expertise you’re paying for is almost certain to deliver better campaign results. (Here’s a case study that illustrates what we mean.)
5 Are there hidden or minimum contract periods?
We’re believers in doing good work that makes a difference and tracks toward your goal. If we can accomplish that, clients will likely want to continue working with us. If campaigns aren’t working, they may not and likely shouldn’t continue making that investment. For these reasons, we don’t lock clients into contract periods where they’re required to work with us or place a certain amount of media. We will be clear about the service time required to set up a campaign, and sometimes recommend a minimum campaign length of 90 days to give it room to learn and grow. Beyond that, we know there are a lot of factors at play in the decision to hire an outside vendor and to run ongoing campaigns. Ask about any minimums or contract periods if they aren’t clearly articulated in early conversations to save long term heart ache!
Transparency is foundational to a good working relationship. If you need help evaluating data or have questions about a potential partnership, hit us up!
Go Forth. Go Digital.
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