7 minutes read
So you’re running your own digital ads in-house, and all is going great. Why would you ever hire a digital performance agency? And furthermore – if you were to outsource your paid media at all – why wouldn’t you just hire a standard ad agency?
It may seem like a small distinction, but the difference can be astronomical – and in most cases, you’re more likely to save money by hiring a performance agency rather than using in-house talent.
The most obvious benefit to using an external paid media company is expertise and industry know-how. While ad platforms are generally pretty intuitive and it’s relatively easy to learn how to set up an ad, it isn’t easy to learn how to make ads work well, and at scale. Proper test-and-learn requires some background in analytics. Otherwise, it’s next to impossible to move the needle on results.
Digital performance ads agencies are typically staffed with certified professionals who have not only gone through certification training with various platforms, but keep in touch with personal representatives on a weekly or monthly basis. This type of relationship usually isn’t common with brands using in-house ads teams, since platform representatives are given based on spend volume – and ad agencies have the advantage of boasting accumulated spend across many clients each month.
These reps keep certified ad buyers updated on the nuances of the ad platform, help them stay up-to-date with industry trends, and learn about algorithmic changes. These things all enable your paid social experts to craft and execute effective advertising strategies that can hugely boost your efficiencies and bump your return on ad spend.
Speaking of relationships, there’s a wide range of access that’s opened upon working with paid media advertising agencies. For B2B or other use cases requiring 3rd party data, many agencies will have pre-existing relationships with vendors, and even bulk-buy across their clients to get a much cheaper price than if you purchased on your own. Many agencies also have access to technology partners and tools that their clients can use, such as reporting, automation, and even ad customization tech that isn’t possible in native ad platforms.
But why use a performance ads agency – why not just outsource your ads to any old media agency? Performance marketing agencies are unique in that their top priority – not just once, but always for the duration of your contract – is performance.
If you’re looking for one high-production value video ad that’s super fun and engaging, a standard media agency may make the cut. But if you’re looking to make that video work its hardest for you – if you’re looking to bring your CPA from $50 to $25 by making small adjustments to the same video and finding statistically valid learnings to bring down costs in a replicable way, a performance agency is your best bet. If you’re happy to spend a huge budget to hit an impression and reach goals, a standard agency can get that done. But if you’re looking to generate the highest possible ROI, generate statistical significant learnings, and grow your spend and revenue a performance marketing agency could be your new best friend.
The marketers at a performance marketing agency have a wealth of industry experience, and typically this experience will spread across media channels and disciplines. Instead of having a dedicated media planner whose only job is planning media spend, when using a performance marketing agency you work with multi-channel, experienced marketers.
These performance marketing experts have expertise across multiple industries, clients, sales funnels and ad buying platforms. With a performance marketing agency, you will work with closer knit teams whose focus is performance from day 1. The same team will be responsible for ensuring your media plan is accurate, ensuring your campaigns are set up to best practice and optimized regularly towards your business goal.
With the performance team aligned with your top line goal – you can trust performance marketers to only make decisions with your best interests in mind (i.e. driving performance and ROI from your ad spend) rather than making decisions to hit arbitrary spend & impression goals.
With this in mind, working with a performance marketing agency will ensure that your strategy from start to finish is seamlessly managed by the same team of experts, focused on delivering results.
Performance digital agencies are masters of data-driven decision making, and not in the buzz-word sense. Through rigorous tracking, analysis, optimization and reporting, these agencies can garner learnings for you that are statistically sound. That is – they have enough points of data behind them to prove that it was your strategy that led to your results – not random marketplace costs, seasonality, competitor activity, a fluke, etc. This makes your results replicable, and means you have solid, concrete approaches you can use next time around that you know will work. This type of informed decision-making ultimately maximizes your return on investment and saves you a ton of money on avoiding the need to retest items where learnings didn’t have enough data.
Digital performance agencies are incredibly focussed on the data from ad campaigns and the results they can generate. As a result they often also have a more attentive eye on campaign monitoring, including nights and weekends (see this example where one of our analysts saw an unexpected spike in our client’s results during after-hours, and jumped into action to decrease costs by 10% all while scaling spend by 3X for the evening). Whether it’s adjusting bidding strategies, refining ad creatives, or fine-tuning targeting parameters, these agencies ensure that your campaigns are always (always) optimized for success – but hey, that’s what you’re paying them to do!
Lastly, you may find that performance agencies offer a greater level of flexibility than standard paid media agencies. On the whole, digital performance agencies tend to have a closer client-to-AM relationship. This usually means you’ve got a team on your side who is willing to operate in a number of different ways that feel more organic to your business. This could mean customizing reporting so it’s more relevant to your stakeholders, offering a wider range of communication types (personal phone numbers, etc.), or coming in-office to meet with your team more often if desired.
This also means that no ask is too much for a performance marketing team. If you’re interested in trying a new channel, new marketing strategy or new approach – you can always talk it through with your account team. More often than not, the performance marketing team will want to research and present back to you their ideas and surface ways that they can help your business succeed, rather than getting tied up in long procurement processes & contracts. This flexibility means you can move fast, take advantage of time-limited opportunities and feel like a performance marketing agency is more akin to an in-house team than to an outsourced agency.
If you’re thinking about switching to agency-run media, we highly recommend testing out a performance agency before committing to a standard media agency (although we may be biased…). With the amount of time and money it can save you, we can almost guarantee you’ll never go back.
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