Working with an Ethical Agency

Digital marketing agencies, now more than ever, are being called upon by advertisers from a wide range of industries to help promote a product, service or cause. The trust in digital marketing to deliver the goods has developed with evolving techniques to reach the right user, in the right place, and at the right time.

With that in mind, those in the digital marketing industry need to ensure that this trust is not misplaced and that social responsibility is a significant part of any advertising strategy. The recent news of Cambridge Analytica’s misuse of data has gone against what paid media advertising should be doing – aiming to provide the user with a meaningful experience to deliver a product or service which is of genuine interest. This won’t happen every time, but the best agencies and companies will always have this intent. At Search Seven, there are processes that we go through (as well as some quick wins) to deliver a meaningful strategy, and in turn, provide better paid media campaigns:

Extensive Research Phase

Before we undergo any paid media campaign, we perform an extensive research phase to inform our strategy. We look into search behaviour, peak search times throughout the year, potential reach on social media platforms and making sure that all this information is transparent with our clients to explain and educate. Throughout the strategy, we can then be agile to maximise the platforms and techniques that are performing best.

Refinement of Remarketing

Users can often be confused as to why they keep seeing ads follow them around the web from a site they only visited once for a few seconds. When we use remarketing, we make sure that only those users who have shown genuine interest are retargeted. This can be through filtering users who have spent a certain amount of time on the site, or maybe a user who has viewed a certain amount of a page in a particular category of products. It’s this audience who have shown intent to potentially extend their journey to conversion.

Frequency Caps

So as not to annoy users who keep seeing these remarketing ads, a quick win is to limit how many times the ad is shown in a day. If someone sees an ad three times in a day but doesn’t do anything about it, we don’t want to prompt them further. It is up to the agency to create a design (along with having the correct targeting) that compels the user to perform an action.

Ad Quality

Ads, whether they are on Google Search, the Display Network or a social platform, need to be designed well, created to fundamental best practice and compelling. The user can’t be expected to click on an ad which does nothing for them and makes them resent advertising further. All ads we create are reviewed extensively to provide a reason to click.

If you would like to learn more about our work and the approach that we take to deliver an ethical strategy please get in contact with us today.