What Should You Expect From Your Agency?
We’re going to switch it up a little bit this week and talk about what your agencies should be going over with you on a monthly basis and what they should be providing you. Today’s blog is visual, if you’re reading this you’ll probably want to hop over to our website or YouTube and watch the video, because I’m going to show you the reports that we sent our clients and talk about the various elements of it and what you should be looking for when it comes to red flags.
We use a third party tool called agency analytics, but the tool doesn’t matter. All it is, is a reporting tool that helps us compile all of our marketing efforts into one location so that we can provide that big picture. With our clients, we look at two things when it comes to the data. One is month over month, and then the other one is year over year. Year over year takes higher precedence because of seasonal changes. Even if your business in this case, Garibaldi Eyecare, doesn’t necessarily have seasonality, our culture does. You can’t deny summer break and what that does to the consumer behavior, you can’t deny what Christmas break does to consumer behavior. And that always has an impact on any business.
Now with this particular client, they haven’t even been open for a year, their one year anniversary is coming up mid August. I am comparing as much data as I can from September to now. For context, with this client we are doing Google ads, social ads, SEO, and we monitor their website. So things that I look for in here, I want to see if there’s any changes to the negative.
If you see an agency who’s always sunshine and butterflies, and they’re on top of everything, be skeptical, because Google will change things to their algorithm really, really quickly, and no one knows. It’s the agencies responsibility to monitor it and then respond appropriately. So seeing things dipping down is a normal part of the process. It’s how the agency responds, that’s important.
So looking at this, I’m comparing the last 30 days to September 2021, which is the full month of data that we have. I’m looking for how keywords are ranking, the business’ Google rankings overall, etc. Then I check the Google My Business Report. On this particular website, we track as best as we can, people booking online. The challenge is that the system that they use optasense, doesn’t actually provide an open API back to Google Analytics so we track just people clicking to it. It’s an arbitrary, it’s precise, but not accurate. So when people click, book an appointment, that will take them to the booking page and this is the action that we’re tracking. So there are some variables, but it’s just something I keep an eye on.
Now, this is something, that as the agency we’re responsible for looking for. So there’s some issues with the website health. I see an issue and I send out to the developer and say, look at this and deal with it. The number one error for sites include broken links, duplicate meta descriptions, duplicate titles, etc.
Okay, so like a disclaimer page, I’m not worried about a cookie page I’m not worried about so, you know, I’ll send that over to our SEO team, and they can start to dig into it, right. We always give a summary of what we did.
So we’re running Google ads and we want to tell the client how are things going with the Google ads. Now, Google has increased their CPMs, across the board recently, so we found that our cost per conversion has gone up. Now, that’s something that’s out of our control so we’ve been telling the client, hey, just as a heads up, our cost per conversion has been going up. But it’s not necessarily how the campaigns being managed, per se, it’s because Google has increased their CPMs. We’re working on it to try to minimize it.
It’s always a balancing and that we do on our end. Google’s algorithm goes out and tries to find the best clicks for your conversion optimization, it’s using the algorithm using their AI and so one no longer equals the other. We’ll go over that with the client. And then the majority of their conversions are coming in for people looking for an eye doctor. That’s just how people think they just want an eye doctor, they’re not actually searching for a solution to their problem, whether it be new glasses or something, they know that the solution to their problem is an eye doctor. And understanding that human behavior is what makes Google Ads work or not.
Just as a reminder, as a Google and or Facebook partner, your agency is required by policy to be upfront about management fees.
BrightLocal is what we use for our citations citations and I did a video about that last week. So I’m not going to go over it but you can go and this is just the report that we provide based on that.
So overall, these are the things that your agency should be sending you. We send it automatically as a PDF and then we have a meeting. If we’re not able to get on a meeting I’ll do a video and go over things. It depends on the client. Some clients are very busy, and they just want the video. But those are the kind of reporting elements that your agency should be providing on on a regular basis and being honest and transparent that sometimes things will go down and sometimes they hit the red.
