How do we carry out work at Web-Sci? Steps, strategies, and cost of work.

Are you planning to order services from Digital Marketing Agency Web-Sci and want to know more about working with us? Then this article is for you. We’ll tell you in detail about how we work, why we chose a given strategy and how we calculate the cost of our services.

Stages of cooperation and working methods

1️⃣ Step 1. Getting to know the project. At this stage, we make contact the potential customer and discuss the project and goals.

2️⃣ Step 2. The Brief. The starting point for further work is informed by the client brief. From this, we learn what goals a client sets and why they need advertising. We come to understand what advertising systems we’ll use and what tasks, KPIs, and budgets need to be set.

3️⃣ Step 3. Strategy. Based on the brief, we create a media plan and advertising strategy. We write out in detail in the commercial proposal what we’ll set up, how long it will take, and what kind of advertising budget is needed for each advertising channel. We provide a commercial offer and a media plan to the client. The media plan shows the projected number of conversions, the average cost per click, and the minimum and recommended budget.

We provide the client with a detailed calculation of time and money. In our work, we only use the hourly payment method, which we explain below.

4️⃣ Step 4. Agreement. After agreeing on the actions and the budgets, we sign a contract with the client, where our guarantees and working conditions are written out. The contract takes at least 3 months to conclude. According to the agreement, the client receives a free advertising account setup, but all accounts belong to us. The customer has access to view it at all times.

What’s included in PPC and Targeted advertising:

• Account analysis and adding non-target search queries and keywords to exclusions
• Checking accounts for keyword and audience conflicts
• Checking ads and ad extensions
• Checking and analyzing the effectiveness of advertising campaigns, groups, ads, keywords, audiences
• Checking the performance of conversions and advertising account goals
• Analysis of conversions, goals, and traffic to detect anomalies
• Analysis and exclusion of ineffective sites and platforms for displaying ads
• Communication with technical support for advertising systems
• Checking automatic recommendations from advertising systems
• Checking advertising budgets for overspending or underspending within a calendar month.
• Checking the bids and smart strategies of advertising accounts
• Analysis and application of adjustments to retain or increase the number of conversions on the client’s side, as well as to possibly of reducing their cost

Payment for Web-Sci services: Percentage of the advertising budget

Throughout our agency’s experience, we’ve tried different strategies for partnerships and payments. The strategy that uses a percentage of the advertising budget has shown to bring the greatest benefit to both us and the client.

Key features of the strategy:

• Free customized Set Up – This is an advantage for the client, because at the start-up stage we share the financial risks with the client in half
• We don’t have minimum advertising budget
• Maximum percentage of 14% of the budget + flat fee

We do free set up for every client. At the same time, all accounts (Google Ads, Bing Ads, Facebook/Instagram Ads, Twitter Ads, etc.) belong to us. The client has access to advertising accounts with viewing. Administrator rights during the period of provision of services and after their completion are not granted to the Client. The Client has the opportunity to buy advertising accounts by agreement with the Marketing Agency after 12 months of work.

How a strategy with a percentage of the budget works

The attractiveness of the strategy for the client lies in its simplicity and efficiency: the client does not need to pay for setup or delve into its subtleties and check users’ actions. This is an advantage for the client, because at the start-up stage we share the financial risks with the client in half. Our clients see the advertising budget, the result, and understand what they pay for. Even before the work begins, the client wants to see what they’ll get for their money. To do this, we prepare a media plan calculated in the advertising system. This is close to the actual data that shows the possibilities of an advertising campaign.

In the advertising services market, you can find a wide range of percentages (from 4% to 50%). The exact value set may depend on the experience of the agency, the set up and the project budget.

We set the maximum percentage of 14% + Flat Fee. At higher advertising budget, the percentage decreases. The percentage increases as the complexity of the work increases. For example, the introduction of end-to-end analytics and KPIs may require more time to monitor, set goals, and achieve indicators. The more difficult the job, the higher the percentage of the budget.

Once we started working with this scheme, we realized and our clients confirmed that it’s one of the best options for cooperation in Internet marketing.

Why a percentage of the budget? Because it’s a Win-Win Strategy

1. By raising advertising costs, both parties benefit. The customer can start with any ads budget. At the same time, the decision to increase the budget is something only the client can make as they see and understand that the work brings results.
2. As part of the project, we can enter KPIs. That is, a certain result are additionally paid, which, on the one hand, motivates the performer, and on the other hand, increases the effectiveness of advertising. The fulfillment of KPI brings us an additional percentage, the client – conversions, and shows the customer our interest in efficiency.
3. We can connect end-to-end analytics to track the quality of leads in the client’s CRM. This gives you a clearer understanding of which keywords are actually driving good leads and helps us improve your ad campaign settings.

Practice has proved to us that paying a percentage of the budget means paying for efficiency. It’s important to understand that each project requires an individual approach. The first 1-3 months of advertising is the basis for further improving the settings. Advertising performance can be influenced by a lot of factors from budget and account complexity, website to sales geography and seasonality. After receiving conversions for the first 1-3 months, you can start working with leads, KPIs, end-to-end analytics.

3 other strategies in the PPC market

When looking for a company to set up PPC advertising, you might see different methods of cooperation and payment. At the same time, we’ve also encountered them and are ready to share with you the features, pros and cons of each method.

Paying per hour of work

For a long time we worked according to this scheme, and we liked it due to its logic and transparency.

The client’s expenses increase if the work on the project increases and decrease if the work on the project decreases. At the same time, all data remains open, and the client sees what they pay for and the results they get.

How the pay-per-hour strategy works in practice:

• We calculate how many hours the setup will take.
• We coordinate with the client about goal and time they’ll take.
• Having a fixed cost of an hour, we translate time into a real monetary figure.
• We conclude a contract, indicating in it the hours and their cost.
• We get to work.

Features of by the hour payment

The number of working hours required to set up advertising campaigns is always individual and is calculated for each client based on the task data provided.

The amount of time to maintain one account in any advertising system depends on several factors:

• Ad Campaign budget. As a rule, the larger the advertising campaign budget, the more traffic we receive and the more traffic we need to analyze. The more analysis, the more time it takes. However, this isn’t always the case. We managed projects with a very large budget, but at the same time with 1 advertising campaign and very similar search phrases. Of course, maintaining such an account costs much less, as it takes less working time.
• The complexity of setting up and the number of advertising campaigns. Even with small budgets, the client can have a rather complicated setup that requires increased attention and time, and there can also be a lot of advertising campaigns. These kinds of accounts may require increased management time.
• The frequency of changing ad promotions or any additional charges in the account. If promotions change once a month, it takes 4 times less time than if the client’s promotions change every week, or every few days. All of which directly affects the spent working time.

Why did we leave the hourly strategy behind?

Working according to this method, it’s important to show the client a transparent and most accurate time tracking (how many hours and minutes spent and how much is left). For accurate and honest timekeeping, we were using special tracking applications. But even with the use of trackers and the preparation of detailed reports, checking these remained the weak point of this strategy.

In the contract, we always wrote out the minimum number of hours with the established budget.

The minimum time to effectively manage an advertising account was 6 hours for PPC advertising (Google Ads, Bing Ads) and 4 hours for targeted advertising (Facebook/Instagram Ads, VK Ads, MyTarget, Twitter Ads). However, this figure is very specific to a project and was calculated for each client separately. The larger the budget, the more work and more hours you need to work with your account per month.

The amount prescribed in the contract for the client essentially turned into a fixed price. And they either agreed to the final amount or didn’t.

This strategy has proven to be ineffective in Internet marketing, where flexibility and an individual approach are essential.

Why complicate the work calculating hours and checking logs, if you can work immediately according to the Fix Price system? The question is quite logical, but this system also has its drawbacks.

Fixed Price

On the one hand, this is a very simple and convenient solution. The client pays a certain amount, and the agency gets the job done and keeps the client’s account efficient. This way there’s no need to calculate percentages or do any complex accounting.

The main disadvantage of this strategy is that the service is presented in a very generalized way, without clearly defined actions. Often it includes basic configuration and editing, without additional analysis. The work to improve the effectiveness of an advertising account ends up being carried out extremely badly.

It’s difficult to write out what is included in the service, and clients often don’t understand what they’re paying for. And when there is a need for additional settings, it may turn out that the agency doesn’t do them, or only does so for an additional fee.

Fixed Price is a scheme that is relevant for beginner freelancers and minimal budgets with low expectations for advertising. The amount for such services can be completely different. And they are formed completely subjectively.

We also tried out this scheme but we were convinced of its inefficiency and inconvenience, so we switched to the current hourly model, and then to a percentage of the budget.

CPA, CPL: Cost per Lead Strategy

We’ll go over one more strategy we tried.

The main feature here is that the client pays for the result obtained – leads or sales. In this case, the client and the agency agree on KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).

An example of a partnership according to this scheme would be the client and the agency agreeing that advertising will bring at least 100 applications, for each of which the agency will receive 14 dollars. If the KPI is not met, the cost of the lead decreases, which means that the agency receives less.

While the strategy seems logical, it remains the most controversial. Here, almost 10 out of 10 times it leads to disagreements between the client and the contractor.

• The main disadvantage for the agency is that they don’t have access to the sales department and everything that associated with it (promotions, calls, prices, etc.). And even if there is such access to statistics, then the agency is simply not in the right to influence the sales script, prices, discount promotions, etc.
• The main disadvantage for the client is the agency’s interest in quantity leads, but not in their quality. For example, if a customer saw Google Ads , went to the site and left a request – such a lead can be considered better quality than if the client saw an advertisement on Facebook Ads or Instagram as a lead form and left their phone number.

Since we’re committed to long-term win-win partnerships with clients and the quality of leads is important to us no less than clients, we also discontinued this strategy.

Do you want to start a partnership with internet marketing agency Web-Sci or do you have any questions? Request a callback or contact us in our easy-to-use messenger.