How to find a good direct advertising contractor? What is required of him?

Question

contextual advertising

How to find a good direct advertising contractor? What is required of him?
1. Tell me how to find a good and not very expensive contractor? Private or firm?
- through acquaintances, search among advertisements of firms, through stock exchanges or in another way?
2. How to choose a contractor? What to pay attention to? Ask for certificates, customer contacts?
3. What is the task to set?
4. How to work with a contractor? How to control? And how often?
5. What reports must the contractor submit and by what time?
6. What subtleties should be taken into account so as not to waste the budget?
We plan to allocate up to 100 thousand per month for companies in Yandex + Google in total.

Answer 1

A really difficult question, to which, in my opinion, there is no single right answer. I'll try to be brief.
1. Both a private specialist and a firm can be good. It's impossible to say for sure.
On the one hand, a specialist will be able to provide an individual approach, a more careful setting, and the absence of a formal approach. And this is for, sometimes, a lower cost. But you can get on an inexperienced freelancer who will disappear at a crucial moment. In addition, you will have to decide the question of how to make calculations with it.
Agencies will be able to provide a contract, reliable payment methods, constant contact with managers. But many agencies use a "conveyor" approach, when only the initial setup and maintenance of a certain level is provided. Initiatives can be hard to come by.
It is best to search through acquaintances. When there is someone and for what to recommend. I don’t recommend it at all through the exchanges - you can’t find good specialists there. You can try to look for private specialists on specialized forums, telegram channels or websites, for example, even here. But top specialists, who are always in sight, will charge appropriately for their services.
2. This is the most difficult moment. You won't surprise anyone with certificates. Many do not give customer contacts (or give only with really large budgets), and it is also not always possible to trust them.
Try to understand how long this agency or specialist has been working. How many third-party reviews or manifestations of any of its core activities already exist on third-party resources (not on its own website) is an indicator of experience.
And we need to communicate. You should see that the specialist / agency offer some kind of intelligible strategy, see the goals, understand the features of your business. Evaluate the overall adequacy, but do not let them chat you up and hang you with promises of mountains of gold.
3. The really right task should come from the indicators of your business. For some, this is sales, for some, calls, for some, the amount of traffic or even ad impressions. Everything depends on the goals.
If you already have some accumulated indicators, you can set tasks to improve them by a certain percentage. But keep in mind that sales and conversion are also strongly influenced by the site and the work of managers.
4. Control the indicator for the task, compliance with the budget and compliance of advertising offers with your site. Everything else is superfluous for you.
5. According to the previous paragraph, decide how often you summarize statistics on sales or applications from all sources. Someone does it once a week, someone once a month, someone even once a quarter.
Still, fluctuations in indicators from day to day can be, it depends on many factors. You should be concerned only with the result for the indicated period.
Reduce the number of reports. Otherwise, then you yourself will dig into them and simply will not have time to study them. But in addition to key indicators, it’s good when a specialist periodically outlines his immediate plans and new options for launches. For this, reports from you will also be needed - what is the situation now in general.
6. Start slowly, working within your budget over the course of the week. Then it will be easier to control it.
And look at the semantic core that will be prepared for launch, it must clearly meet the realities of your business.