| > Lesson #1: Test and trim keywords sets before hiring an agency to scale things This isn't how agencies work. You did the keyword research and testing yourself and then paid some one else to do it again. Unless I misunderstand you, you misunderstood them. They are saying that they didn't test and trim first and paid a lot of money to the agency that they didn't need to. They should have started with a smaller set. > Lesson #4: Don’t assume organic conversion rate will hold true for paid Different ads target customers at different stages of the buying journey, ads don't dump to the top of your funnel they dump to landing pages designed to convert that demographic. So do organic searches. The initial Google hypothesis was that if someone was searching they would be interested in buying, and showing them an ad right then would be optimal because they are interested in buying (or else they wouldn't click it). The idea that conversion is better with organic than ad does indeed seem to falsify that hypothesis. But maybe not. There could be click-fraud involved, too, which can dramatically drop the conversion rate. |
The agency will add 20% on the spend because they can get better results than the client doing keyword research, writing ads and testing them.
The client did the hard work for the agency basically made the campaign themselves and then paid the agency 20% to set it live.
They should have done it the other way around get the agency to setup the campaign and then "scale" it themselves and they would have been able to an extra 20% ad spend for nothing.
The second point you are right again. I mean more that the funnel should start at the point of contact with the end user (the ad) and the landing page should be built for that ad, they seem to have tried to do it the other way around.
They obviously know what they are doing as far as tactics, it looks like they learned it from SEO, but I think they have tried to apply an SEO strategy of content first to their ad campaign and it didn't work.
You can't change advertising channels so you need to change your content to fit the channel not the other way around.