Mediaboss Marketing

Our State of the Agency report has become an annual traditiona report full of data-backed insights into how internet marketing agencies manage and grow their businesses (and advertise their clients businesses).

Were back for a third year. This time, we asked more questions than ever before. If youd like to know more about the services agencies offer, the fees they charge for those services, the biggest challenges they face, and more, youve come to the right place.

We collected the data youll find below by surveying our agency customers (who represent roughly a third of the companies who use WordStream Advisor). We heard back from hundreds of agencies, many located outside the US.

Ready to learn more about how internet marketing agencies run in 2019? Lets get started!

No time to read this report now? You can download it for later.

Whereas roughly half of our agency customers use a flat fee model to charge clients for their paid search serviceswe observed nearly the exact same thing in 201834% charge according to percentage of ad spend. This marks a sizeable jump; only 25% of respondents reported using a percentage of spend model last year.

In step with last year, 11% of agencies charge for paid search with billable hours. The percentage using an alternative model has fallen from 12% to 5% year-over-year. Ostensibly, many of those who used an alternative model in 2018 have made the switch to percentage of spend.

The chief advantage of the percentage of ad spend model is that your revenue automatically jumps as soon as your client boosts their monthly budget. The big downside, though, is that some clients will change their budget every monththus forcing you to deal with some volatility in your revenue.

Nearly 70% of our agency customers who use the percentage of ad spend model for their paid search services charge somewhere between 10 and 20%. 6% charge less than 10%, and 14% charge over 20%.

Last year, we found that one out of every five agencies charges no additional fees. This year, that figure is down to one out of every seven.

As was the case last year, nearly two-thirds of agencies charge their clients extra for landing page creation. This makes sense, given the creative resources required to build visually appealing landing pages.

Email marketing, display creative, and campaign creation are also commonly offered for additional fees.

Nothing new here. Just like last year, we find that roughly two-thirds of agencies charge setup fees when onboarding new clients. We recommend doing so, as bringing on a new client requires learning more about their business, their goals, and their industry.

Among those agencies that do charge a setup fee, 58% charge less than $1,000. 25% charge between $1,000 and $2,499, and 9% charge over $2,500.

As far as offering services outside of paid search goes, we observe similar results for SEO, content creation, social marketing, email marketing, and creative services.

But we find some substantial changes, too. Last year, 77% of agencies reported offering website development to their clients; this year, that figure is 85%. Plus, the percentage of agencies offering display marketing has fallen from 78% to 68% year-over-year.

Considering the importance of site optimization and user experience, its not surprising that more and more agencies are offering to take care of this for their clients. At the same time, as Google continues to improve Responsive Display Ads, display advertising becomes more accessible to small business owners.

The responses to this question are some of the most telling so far. Last year, 38% of agencies reported having one full-time paid search employee, and 28% reported having between two and five full-time paid search employees.

This year, only 29% report a full-timer, and only 22% report between two and five full-timers. Correspondingly, whereas 31% reported having no full-time paid search employees in 2018, that figure is now 45%.

This doesnt mean that paid search is any less important than it used to be, of course. We can attribute the decline in full-time paid search specialists to the demand for agency employees who can wear multiple marketing hats.

Compared to 48% last year, 57% of agencies say they spend less than 25% of their time on paid searchpresumably because theyre busy with all the other stuff they do for their clients.

It appears that, over the past year, a good number of agencies have moved from the 25-50% bucket to the less than 25% bucket.

Just about half of our agency customers dedicate between one and five hours per week to managing each clients PPC accounts. 38% spend an hour or less per week, and 14% spend at least five hours per week.

That 86% of agencies spend less than five hours per week on each clients PPC accounts is great news. Evidently, efficiency is commonplace among ourcustomers.

Happily, 91% of agencies spend five hours or less per week on reporting for each client (up from 85% in 2018). This tells us that our customers are finding more and more time to focus on growing their clientsand their ownbusinesses.

Over two-thirds of our agency customers leverage the reporting functionality within WordStream Advisor for Agencies to keep their clients up to date on performance. Google Data Studio and Microsoft Excel are also fairly popular.

The good news: 64% of our agency customers are managing more PPC spend now than they were a year ago. Thats a lot of strong growth!

The not-so-good news: Those figures dont quite match the expectations our agency customers reported a year ago. In 2018, 58% of agencies said they expected to grow PPC spend under management by more than 25% (only 37% did this). Only 5% of agencies predicted their PPC spend under management would decrease, but this ended up being the case for 11%.

Our agency customers remain optimistic nonetheless! 45% expect to grow their spend under management by more than 25%, and 44% expect to do so by less than 25%. Only 11% of agencies report no expectations for growth in spend under management.

As was the case in 2018, half of our agency customers list client referrals as their main source of new clients. On a more interesting note, it appears that agencies have become less dependent on upsells and more dependent on content and digital marketing. Upsells are still slightly more common, but the gap between the two sources has closed considerably in the past year.

Content isnt just a tool for client acquisition, though; its a tool for client education as well. This is another tactic we recommend to agencies. The more educated your clients are, the less time you can spend walking them through the basics and the more time you can spend discussing high-level strategy.

In step with last year, the majority of our agency customers say theyve created over 75% of the paid search accounts under their management. However, this is less common than it used to be: Whereas 75% of agencies said they had created more than 75% of the paid search accounts under their management in 2018, this figure has fallen to 64%.

Now, nearly one-fourth of agencies say theyve created between 50 and 75% of the paid search accounts they manage. 14% say theyve created less than 50% of the accounts they manage.

On average, our agency customers retain each client for roughly 28 months (or two years and four months). We shared some of our most effective client retention strategies here.

Just like last year, we find that our agency customers most commonly represent clients in healthcare, home services, and ecommerce. Real estate, travel & hospitality, and automotive are frequently represented as well. In comparison to the 2018 report, we do not observe any major changes in regards to the industries our agency customers represent.

Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of agencies manage Google Ads and Facebook Ads on behalf of their clients. Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Bing are also popular advertising platforms, and we expect to find them becoming even more popular in the coming year.

Because Quora Ads is still in its infancy and Amazon advertising is limited to ecommerce businesses, their low representation among agencies isnt too surprising. If youre willing to give either of these platforms a try, you may reap the benefits of getting their before the vast majority of your competitors.

Last year, the most common challenge reported among our agency customers was getting new clients. This year, thats no different. Consistently, the hardship at the core of running an agency is balancing the need to drive results for current clients with the need to identify and pitch prospective clients.

As was the case last year, the only other major concern among agencies is time management. In fact, whereas only 23% of agencies reported this as their biggest challenge in 2018, 31% have reported it this year. Evidently, striking that retention/growth balance is getting more difficult.

Not much has changed among the responses to this question in the past year. Overwhelmingly, conducting keyword research and identifying negative keywords are the most popular account optimization practices. While copywriting has become slightly less prioritized, landing page optimization become slightly more so.

Although Google Ads popularity as a competitive research tool hasnt changed, SEMrush has become considerably more popular among our agency customers. Correspondingly, SpyFu has become considerably less popular.

As we observed last year, agencies turn to a wide variety of online resources to learn more about digital marketing and agency strategy. According to this years responses, among the most popular resources are:

Sowhat insights can you take with you from this years State of the Agency report?

All right, internet marketing agenciesover to you. How have you evolved? How do you plan to continue evolving? Let us know in the comments!

Click here to download this report as a PDF.

A huge thank you to Kate Lindsay, Jess Armstrong, Chris McHale, Elisa Gabbert,Ceillie Clark-Keane, and our wonderful customersfor their help in collecting this data and creating this report.

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State of the Internet Marketing Agency in 2019 | WordStream