Digital advertising can be one of the trickiest marketing channels to master. In this episode, Angela shares her strategy for analyzing and improving paid ads performance and remedying agency relationships.

Specifically, Angela shares how to:

• Actually know if your ads can perform better.
• Effortlessly uncover the cause of low ROI.
• Easily improve your agency's performance.

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About Angela

Angela Frank is a fractional CMO with a decade-long track record of generating multimillion-dollar marketing revenue for clients. She is the founder of The Growth Directive, a marketing consultancy helping brands create sustainable marketing programs.

Her new book Your Marketing Ecosystem: How Brands Can Market Less and Sell More helps business owners, founders, and corporate leaders create straightforward and profitable marketing strategies.

Angela is the host of The Growth Pod podcast, where she shares actionable tips to help you build a profitable brand you love.

Welcome to The Growth Pod. Today we're checking in one on one to learn why you haven't been getting the results that you want from your paid ads. And I'll give you a hint.

It's probably your agency. I'm your host, Angela Frank. I'm a fractional CMO and founder with a track record of generating multimillion dollar revenue for clients.

So if you're like me and love learning about how to grow your business more efficiently, you've come to the right place. One of the biggest issues for all businesses that run ads is feeling like they could be doing better than they are.

And I'm here to tell you that you're right. And it's likely your agency's fault that they're not performing as well as they could be.

So today I'll be sharing how to actually know if your ads can perform better, how to know whose fault it is exactly, and how to use your agency to finally get the result results you're looking for. So let's take a look in your ad account to determine if your ads can actually be performing better or not.

And the first thing we're going to consider is your budget. There's a lot of difference between spending $1,000 per month, 10,000 100,000 and a million dollars or more per month.

And the biggest difference between those budgets is how aggressive you need to be with your testing strategy. Because paid social ads, like the ones you run on Facebook and Instagram, have a few more moving parts than paid search.

I'll be focusing most on those types of ads this episode. But everything we're reviewing today is also applicable to your paid search ads.

You just won't be testing the creative or the images, since search ads are primarily text based. Okay, so let's chat about the first things that I look at when analyzing an account. And that is the monthly budget for the entire account.

But the next thing is the number of campaigns that you're running. If you have a small budget, you should only have one or two campaigns. But if you have more budget, you can have more than that.

The next thing that I look at is how many audiences are we testing within each campaign? I always recommend testing two audiences at a minimum. And just like with campaigns, the more budget you have, the more audiences you can test.

Next, we'll look at the most important thing in your account, which is the ads themselves. How many ads are you currently running for each audience?

If you've got a small budget, for example, $1,000 per campaign, you need to be running at least four new creatives per month, turning off the ones that aren't performing and keeping the winners. And the more budget you have, the more aggressive that you need to be with that testing strategy.

Depending on your budget, you may need to be testing multiple new pieces of creative each day to have a high performing account. So that's all fine, but how do we know if an ad is a high performer or not? It's really simple.

All you'll do is look at the click through rate or the CTR for that ad. And this measures of all the people who see this ad. What percent of people actually click through to see what we have to offer?

Now, if you're working with an agency, they might be reporting other metrics to you like impressions, accounts reached or thumbstop ratio. And while these metrics certainly have their place, they are not what you should be looking at as a driving measure of success. And here's why.

The purpose of an ad is to drive traffic to your website. If a million people are seeing your ad, but only one person out of that million clicks through, that's not valuable for your business.

And similarly, if your ad is so crazy that 100% of people who see your video ad watch it at least three seconds, but then no one clicks on that ad, you're not getting the results you're looking for. Of course, if you have a huge ad budget, there might be value in people just seeing your ad to raise brand awareness. But that's not most of us.

So let's take a look at your click through rate. You can get a measure of if yours is good or bad by googling what the average CTR is for ads in your industry.

For example, I'm a consultant and the average click through rate for consultants is between 1.7 and 1.9%. But this average is where your ads should be performing at a minimum. Ideally, your ads will perform much better than this.

For example, I recently managed the strategy for a client campaign that promotes wellness retreats, and the industry benchmark for those types of ads is about 3%. But that campaign regularly has a click through rate of between 9 and 12%.

So if your agency is telling you that your ads are performing on par with industry standards, just keep in mind that most people are content with wasting money on ads and they're not motivated to improve their performance. So industry standard is really the lowest performance that you should be getting out of your ads.

What we're looking for when we run ads is how we can maximize our roi. So let's talk about how we can do that and whose fault it is exactly. When our ROI is low, is it your fault, your agency, or is it something else?

I teased at the start of this episode that your poor ad performance is likely not your fault, and in most cases this is true.

But I do want to share a key detail here, which is the experience that a prospect has on your landing page or website after they click on an ad, because this is just as important as the ads themselves.

And while click through rate is how you measure the success of an ad, you can determine how much of your ROI issues are your agency's fault versus how much are your own by taking a look at your conversion rates. Unlike with click through rate, conversion rates are pretty solid when you look at the industry benchmarks.

And there are two ways that you can measure a conversion rate from your ads. You can measure a conversion rate into a lead or conversion rate into a purchase.

If you have a higher priced product that requires a sales call, if you're selling a service or you have an offer that requires some level of planning and consideration, then you should look at your conversion rate into a lead.

If you're an E commerce business offering products that aren't considered high ticket in your market, then you can look at conversion rate into a purchase.

And when you compare these conversion rate averages to your performance, you'll get a better understanding of if any ROI issues are coming from your ads, or if they're coming from an internal lack of ability to convert visitors or leads into a purchase.

Of course there's always more that we can do to get conversion rates up, but most of the time the issues that I see come from the ad ad account itself.

With low click through rates, poor targeting and testing strategies, and really just overworked account managers who don't have the time to put in extra attention that an ad account needs. So with that, poor ad performance is probably your agency's fault. But before you go and have a word with them, someone's still got to run your ads.

And at least at some point that's probably going to be an agency. So I want to share with you my strategy for managing agency relationships in a way that gets the most out of your ad spend.

First, let's take a quick look at the typical life cycle of agency relationships. You Hire an agency, they get you a quick win or two in the first months and you're happy.

But then your agency starts to take a reactive approach to your account instead of one that's proactive. And with that your account growth slows or stops or even reverses.

You bring this up with your agency and they come back with pretty much just excuses, which makes you unhappy. And your contract with your agency is now coming up for renewal.

So you start looking for a new one and you hire a new agency and the cycle begins again. But it doesn't need to be this way.

You can easily correct agency performance by using this three step process, asking the right questions, Understanding the real limitations, and having an advertising strategy.

I do want to note quickly that this three part strategy maximizes agency performance in most cases, but sometimes you'll get an agency who will straight up refuse to work with you on these things. And if that's the case, that means it's time to move on to a new agency who will work with you.

So let's start with asking the right questions and this step really comes down to knowing what metrics are meaningful to your business and how everything works together.

For example, if your agency is currently reporting impressions in your reports and leaving click through Rate and the number of clicks that you receive off of your reports, ask them to add that in and report on it. From now on. Share what you need to see on those reports in order for you to make the best decisions for your business.

In addition, if you notice that their reports are showing things in a way that are intentionally misleading, for example, highlighting all improved metrics in green, but not doing the same with negative metrics, ask them to change that. You're the client and these changes help you make better business decisions, and they're just as important for your success as it is theirs.

The second step is to really understand the limitations of the type of ads that you're running.

For example, your agency might say that your ads are currently in learning and so therefore your performance might be a little bit lower or different than they normally would be. And this is a real thing that can take up to a few weeks to get out of, depending on your budget.

Another real limitation is that new campaigns or advertising initiatives can take a while before they're fully dialed in and getting the results you're looking for. Other limitations can vary by platform and maybe even the time of year that you're advertising.

So if you're not sure if your agency is sharing a real limitation with you, or if you think they might just be making up an excuse. It can be really helpful to ask someone who understands the platform and get that third opinion.

Finally, we get to the most important part of maximizing your relationship with your agency, which is having a strategy. And unfortunately, this is where your agency is going to fall short.

You or someone on your team has to be the driving force for your ads, advocating for that improved performance, outlining clear expectations, and staying on top of the management of your agency. Your strategy can be really simple.

For example, we're going to test one new audience per month, we're going to launch four new creatives per week, and our goal is to improve our Click through rate from 1% to 3% by next quarter. Once you have your strategy, you'll need to share it with your agency.

And because the amount of work that it takes to get an ad account right takes a lot more than what most agencies plan for, there will likely be some pushback during this phase. And with that, some things might legitimately be out of scope, like increasing creative output from 4 ads to 12 ads per month.

But this is the time for you to work with your agency and find that middle ground.

For example, maybe if you're trying to increase the number of ads that you're testing each month, you can get a contractor to bridge that gap with your agency and get those additional creatives made. Hand them off to your agency and they will go ahead and launch them.

There's really no one size fits all solution during the strategy phase, so just make sure that you are working with your agency to find something that works for your business and theirs. So now you know all of my secrets for maximizing agency performance. As a fractional cmo.

My hope is that you'll be able to take these tips and improve your roi. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of The Growth Pod. I look forward to seeing you in the next one.