Life at an Advertising Agency

Life at an Advertising Agency

They hate us 

Reading though Ad Agency Blogs we get some nasty uptakes in terms of what is being thought of Search Marketing and Optimization firms.   They really hate us.

It’s something that I really don’t know how to phrase or work with.   A few weeks ago we discussed this one firm that was almost ’stealing money from their client’.  Their client was spending tens of thousands each month on Ad Words, and tens of thousands more on traditional media venues to try to promote their products each month.  Their Ad Agency noted that they ‘know how Google Works’ and fed them a line of ‘trust me I can rank you for anything’.

About 6 months into the venture, and consistently ranking for nothing, the company in question hired us to fix their problem.  Their problem was rather simple from an SEO perspective.   Their entire site was one massive 302 redirect. Even the most newish SEO knows that nothing good comes from 302 redirects, yet this ad agency was bilking the client thousands in SEO fees and then since ‘Google doesn’t rank you due to no fault of the ad agency’ the Agency forced the client to pay their billable hours for Ad Words.  In essance the client was facing massive advertising costs for something that should of never been done in the first place.

Think about it this way and let’s slim down the figures to make it easier for people to understand.  They in fact were spending FAR more than mentioned below, but for simplicity sake let’s keep the figures small.

They were spending 100 dollars a month for Ad Words
They were spending 100 dollars a month for the Ad Agency SEO campaign
They were spending 500 dollars a month on traditional Advertising
They were spending 75 dollars a month at the Ad Agency to manage the Ad Words Campaign
They were spending 100 dollars on Banners and other Online Media Ads
They were spending 300 dollars a month at the Ad Agency to manage the Traditional Advertising Campaign
They were spending 50 dollars to the Ad Agency to manage the Banners and other online media
They spent a 1 time fee of 1000 dollars to build the website (this fee went to the ad agency)

total spent per month: ~$1225
total spent for one time fees: ~$1000
total spent over 6 months until problem was identitifed and corrected: $8350
Total Waste in Campaign out of total budget – $3550 or about %43 of the budget was waste.

What was was effective?

The traditional Ad Agency’s offline ads were somewhat effective.  It was a mixture of print media ads, billboards and a few other ads that did get some buzz.  Not bad.  I would say that the $800  spent (500 on Media, 300 to manage) was not that bad of an investment and went about average on what would be considered a successful campaign.   In our professional view,  it was worth the effort.

Now let’s look at their online ads.

The banners faced a horrific click though rate, and as most people know, no one clicks on those things, and for branding purposes they were not targeted correctly in our personal opinion.   This lead to pretty much a waste of money.

-150 dollars wasted (100 for media purchase and 50 to the ad agency to manage)

Looking at the ad Agency SEO campaign.  It was a joke since the site was literally one big 302 redirect (I must add to the fact that the ad agency designed the site..   so the Ad agency billed them to build this horrific site and then billed the client again to fix the problem they created).  Total Spent over the course of 6 months : $1600 (the website cost is included in this since it was the ‘big selling point’ the Ad agency had in building this site.  (I want to stress something in this regards, you can add two zeros to the figure to get an idea of the magnitude of this ripoff)

By the time all is said and done,  the Ad Agency bilked them nearly 1/2 the Ad Budget allocated to a total waste of effort that’s sole mission was to keep the dollars rolling in to the ad agency.

The website eventually ranked well without the 302 redirects, the ad words campaign was able to be reduced as the client started to rank for terms they should of in the first place, and last but not least the money saved with the banner campaign was removed and part of it allocated to a more robust Ad Words campaign.  Meaning that the client went from losing nearly 50% in waste to about 8% in waste.   It was a dramatic increase in ROI, and this took place over the course of 3 weeks.   The lasting 8% is much more difficult as their is always some waste in ROI Ad Campaigns (IE: click fraud, bad copy on Ad Words Sets,  newspaper ads that should of never been bought, etc etc).

The message — Ad Agencies don’t belong on the Internet.

Tribble Agency is a digital marketing company that specializes in backlink services services to help increase authority with link building methods that have a direct impact on directing potential visitors.