The pitch is always good. This is the problem.
Listen to enough agency pitches, and the slides become repetitive: a wall of logos belonging to your clients, a case study in the shape of a hockey stick graph, a guaranteed ROAS delivered with utmost confidence. You sign. Campaigns are launched. After six months, you continue receiving reports on the first day of the month with tons of metrics like impressions and reach, yet there is no way for you to tell your CA the cost per lead.
Most agencies aren’t out there to deceive anyone. The truth is, most of the time, things are far simpler. No one asked awkward questions, no one received any awkward answers.
Whose account is it?
This is a management question, yet the one business owners always regret not asking. Some agencies manage your campaigns in their Google Ads or Meta Business Manager account. Easy, right, until you decide to part ways and realize that all your campaigns, audience data and three years of conversion history leave with them.
Your campaigns need to be managed in your account. The agency needs to act as a guest. Ahmedabad-based SmartFish Designs, which has provided branding and digital marketing services since 2007, is very straightforward about that – no matter what, the client always keeps the account, the data and the history. An agency hesitating on this question said plenty about itself.
Who is actually going to log in?
While pitches are conducted by those with the biggest title, the weekly routine often belongs to the employee who just joined in March.
Ask for the name of the manager. Ask to meet him or her before signing the contract and ask how often he or she will open your account. Paid campaigns rarely fail spectacularly. Instead, they become ineffective due to the inactivity of the team. No one filters keywords, two adsets are bidding for the same audience, the daily budget is spent at three pm every day and no one realizes it because no one is checking it.
What’s wrong with my tracking?
If you can only ask one question, this is the one you need to ask.
All optimizations an agency conducts are based on the conversion data. If every landing on the page is counted as a lead, the algorithm is being trained on garbage, and the agency will happily inform you how effective it is. Duplicate events and offline sales that are not being pushed back to the account damage the optimization process in the same quiet way.
SmartFish estimates that around 70% of accounts that it takes over have some tracking issues or duplicate conversion events. Your mileage might differ. However, an agency that doesn’t want to check GA4, tag manager and conversion events is counting on assumptions.
What would you cut?
This question is slightly unfair to the agency. And that is why it is so useful.
Lazy proposals suggest all channels: Google, Meta, LinkedIn, Amazon, retargeting, maybe a test with YouTube for good measure. More channels – more retainer. The smart agency will inform you that the machinery manufacturer does not need Instagram or your café does not need LinkedIn with ₹200 cost per click. Search captures those who are already looking. Meta makes them want something. These are different tasks, and not all companies need them both.
Who fixes the landing page?
Many great campaigns fail at the very last stage. Landing page loads in seven seconds on the mobile internet, or the enquiry form asks for eleven fields.
Find out whether the agency can fix the landing page or needs to email your web developer and wait. This gap is one week or even a month. The companies that provide design, development and media in one place close it faster. This is also the reason why SmartFish performance marketing team considers the offer, the creative and the landing page as parts of the campaign rather than other company’s problem.
When will it work?
Search campaigns can capture the leads in the first week. Meta campaigns take more time – two or three weeks while the algorithm calculates the audience of your buyers, and the numbers during that period look poor compared to the rest of the campaigns’ lifetime. The good agency informs you about that in advance, not after you called them in panic. Beware of the agencies promising the scale in one week.
And the budget?
Some agencies ask for a high minimum budget in order to preserve their fee. Other agencies accept any budget and let it die. Campaigns can run on a few hundred rupees a day, but a salon that targets one suburb and an exporter that seeks buyers in Germany are different problems. The right number comes after the goals, the geography and the CPC in your niche are calculated, not before.
One more, just in case
Buying decisions are starting to take place inside AI assistants. ChatGPT Ads became available for Indian advertisers. As no one has years of experience on a channel that exists for several months, beware of the agencies claiming that. SmartFish is running it as a pilot and openly states that. This is the right approach towards something this new.
These questions won’t get you a better pitch. But they will get you better answers. When choosing a performance marketing agency in Ahmedabad or any other city, pay attention to the vagueness of the reply.