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Hiring a marketing agency can be a daunting task. As a business owner, the day to day managing of your business is priority #1 and keeping up with your SEO or PPC can become a chore. But how do you know the marketing company you are about to sign on with will actually do the work they say they will? Marketing and SEO can be really ambiguous concepts to someone who doesn’t understand the space. If you are deciding between a large marketing firm with a lot of resources or a smaller, more cost competitive agency, read this blog.
If you don’t fully grasp certain marketing concepts like search engine optimization, you should be requesting a timesheet from your marketing team so you can ask questions and hold them accountable for the work you are paying for.
Getting a timesheet from a marketing agency is a rare sight but asking for one upfront will establish trust and reliability because they know they’re being monitored.
Here at Mad Mango Marketing we provide you with a live link to track the hours we work on your behalf and exactly what we did.
The following outlines what you should expect to see on an hour sheet from a marketing agency for SEO, PPC, and Website Builds.
An SEO timesheet should have some of the following areas listed on it. Some agencies may do more manual work and others may outsource but the major tenants on any SEO hourly report should include:
Some things like onsite work or directory management are tasks that usually get completed and systematized by a good SEO firm in the first 1-3 months so if you have been with an agency for years there is little for them to optimize on your site every month if they have been keeping up with Google Algorithm Updates.
No matter how long you’ve worked with an agency, every month should include some sort of backlink/guest outreach and content creation as these are the main drivers of this service.
A PPC timesheet can be a little more tricky as it very much depends on how many ads you are running and your budget. Because of this we will briefly discuss the absolute minimum which you should be receiving a timesheet for. Luckily, PPC is much easier to track results with so determining value is an easier task for you as a business owner.
No matter how much you are spending in PPC ads the marketing agency you hire should at a minimum be providing you with monthly keyword analysis with the purpose of discovering new areas you can get an advantage in, monitoring the terms that trigger your ad and making useless terms negative, and updating you of any copy or link changes.
If you do not audit your PPC team it can often become that they simply turn a button on every month and let you become complacent with the results you’ve always received.
Did your agency custom code your site or build it off of a template? This will be the biggest factor in how the development firm uses their time.
For a website do you really even need a timesheet? As long as the product gets delivered on time and to your liking does it matter how they got there? The answer is, as always, it depends.
If you paid for a custom coded site you should request a timesheet as a way to verify no template was used. Sometimes firms will sell custom coded sites and they are, it’s just that they were custom coded years ago and now this agencies pumps out a slightly different version of this template for each new client
Another reason to get a timesheet is to be able to hold the developer accountable to any site malfunctions in the future that could end up costing you a high hourly rate.
If you have an e-commerce site where you are paying someone to upload products you will almost always get a timesheet without asking as this is typically an hourly charge.
When you work with Mad Mango Marketing, you and your team get a live link to track all the work completed on your behalf. No more wondering if your agency is actually doing any work for your site. We encourage transparency from the start and providing a way for our clients to see our work without exchanging emails or phone calls is the peace of mind you get with Mad Mango.
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