The Cost of Advertising – If I’m Paying Google Why Am I Paying You?

What is your true cost of advertising? A common question we’re often asked in the agency world is “If I’m paying Google, why am I paying you?”. The same applies to any advertising platform including Facebook & Instagram. I understand how off-putting it can be to see an invoice from the agency you are partnering with only to see the bill from Google to follow. First and foremost, always seek transparency from companies you are working with. An agency is your partner at the end of the day. And in that spirit, setting those expectations and providing all the details before anything is launched is critical.

Trust The Experts

Now, why are you getting two bills for seemingly one service? While it’s true that anyone can set up a Google AdWords pay-per-click campaign, display ad campaigns, video ads, and even ads on Facebook and other social platforms, the level of technical and strategic knowledge held by the person executing the campaigns will ultimately affect the end result. As most entrepreneurs know, you’re not supposed to know everything. You hire those that know more than you in any specific function. You set the overarching goals from a branding and messaging and ultimately, bottom line perspective. Subsequently all marketing strategies will seek to address exactly what you’ve defined.

Set Your Goals

If your business is set up to generate leads and you need to interact with prospective clients, you should identify how many prospects you need to speak with before your sales team can convert one into a customer. This is your sales conversion. Knowing this, you can determine how many sales you realistically need to break even and then how many over and above you need to set as your targets. With that data you know how many leads you need to be generating a month to achieve your goals.

Do you know what the opportunities in the market look like? Is keyword targeting going to give you the volume you need or should you look at audience targeting? Which ad platform will yield your desired results or is it a combination of several? How much traffic is your site getting now and what opportunities are there to remarket to them? To be honest, the questions could go on and feel somewhat endless. A professional can help you with asking the right questions to set up for your specific conversion goals and reduce the cost of advertising overall.

Setting Up For Success

If you know what you want (which would be your goals) then you’ve done your part. At this point you should look to the experts to devise campaigns that target your specific goals. However, it doesn’t stop there.

Think of your marketing campaigns as a scientific experiment. You set a hypothesis based on your findings and research. Then you test and either conclude your original hypothesis is correct or needs to be amended. That amendment is what we as marketers call optimization. It’s what we do day in and day out to ensure every ad spend dollar is being used in the most efficient manner. The most important personal justification for hiring someone else to run your digital paid advertising lies in answering this question: are you saving money if you run campaigns that don’t convert into leads or sales?