We do not aim to denigrate anyone or criticize competitors. There are no ideal agencies and no ideal clients. Everyone makes mistakes, and so do we. This article is an attempt to once again draw attention to the problems of the market and make it better.
The client's problem is that he doesn't understand advertising. And, like in a bad car service, the mechanic won't look at the beauty and kind heart of the girl on the "Infinity". He will cheerfully charge her everything at full price, while the latter tries to understand what "condensate in the carburetor" means.
There is nothing shameful in the fact that the business owner does not understand advertising. That is why he hires an agency. But let us, nevertheless, in very simple and understandable language, tell you where and how you can be deceived. And what it all can cost.
No targets configured. Example 1
An audit of advertising campaigns of a large developer and our list of taiyuan cell phone numbers correspondence with the agency on the other side. The agency spends about 500,000-600,000 rubles a month on advertising.
Our comments:
Yandex.Metrica is not configured for conversion goals. There is no callback goal, price calculator, chat.
Agency response:
Setting up goals, as noted in the previous letter, is in progress.
Here the agency tells the client that the goal setting is in progress. And an inexperienced client will not ask unnecessary questions. In fact, the goals should be set before the campaigns start.
What are goals?
Goals are specific events or actions of visitors on the site that are set up in analytics systems. With their help, you can see how many important actions people who clicked on an ad performed.
Why are they needed?
These statistics provide an understanding of the effectiveness of campaigns, the overall profitability of advertising. For example, you can see that for one advertising campaign people go to the site, but then quickly leave. And for another, they go and buy. With the help of this data, advertising campaigns are evaluated and a strategy is built.
What will happen to a client's advertising campaign without set goals?
The agency ran campaigns in one of the most expensive topics - real estate. With a budget of half a million rubles, people did not even bother to set up goals and evaluate the effectiveness of advertising.
That is, the indicators were measured by clicks on the site. At the same time, out of 10 campaigns, only one could bring applications, and the other 9 would simply waste the client's budget.
Working without goals is a direct waste of money.
What do agencies hide behind?
This is one of the most common techniques of unscrupulous performers. Often, goals are not set up specifically because statistics on the number of clicks looks more impressive than a report on real requests and calls.
Managers convince the client that “traffic is growing/the cost per click is falling/everything is fine with us.”
In fact, efficiency should not be looked at in the number and cost of clicks. The main indicator here is the number and cost of target actions. But it is this indicator that is difficult to maintain at a level if you do advertising poorly.
No targets configured. Example 2
Let's look at examples of reports from an agency that advertised a major Russian sanatorium. Advertising budgets were 500,000 rubles per month. The figures and screenshots are taken from our audit.
Here is an example of a contextual advertising report that the client received.
The person who was engaged in advertising signed up as a webmaster. The context was managed by a web studio. Therefore, let's assume that this is an ordinary employee who does everything in the studio. From layout to contextual advertising management.
At the same time, we are talking about budgets of 500,000 rubles per month. That is, 6,000,000 rubles per year.
And here is the report:
Report without key indicators
What's wrong here?
If it were 2006, such a report might pass. But in 2017, sending such reports should be shameful.
The report does not contain key indicators - conversions, ROI, number of applications and calls, cost of conversions for these indicators.
And one more:
What's wrong with this report?
The situation is the same here - vague phrases, no goals, no specifics, and no real results from advertising.
Increased traffic, by itself, means little without other metrics. And these statistics need to be looked at together with the data on the configured goals.
The report does not include conversion rates or call costs.
Another report from which nothing is clear. We found out the average costs, the average number of clicks too.
In this case:
There are no conversion indicators, cost of calls, analysis of the quality of such calls, analysis of the further funnel of such calls.
The conclusions are dominated by extremely vague words and subjective opinions: “ at the moment it is obvious and clearly having a good effect . ”
How it should be
What are the main tasks your advertising and website should solve? These are the goals and objectives you should have set up, and you should see this data in the reports. From the very beginning of advertising campaigns. If you have an online store, then there should be data on the number and amounts of sales, and the cost of attracting a client. If you have a landing page for services, then in the report you should see statistics on the number of submitted applications, registrations and the cost of one application.
Below is an example of summary data from a report on one of our clients. The analytics system has an e-commerce module configured, which allows you to get data on sales, profits, and the effectiveness of advertising channels for any period of time "on the fly". The report also displays data on the "Registration" goal - the number of new registered visitors.
You can quickly evaluate the overall effectiveness of advertising and its payback, the number of sales, new registrations, how much one registration or sale costs.
This is a summary of all advertising. A good report should also have similar information for each advertising campaign separately, so that the effectiveness can be assessed in more detail.
