Answers
Straight answers
These are real questions, taken from the queries this site already shows up for. Each one gets the answer in the first sentence, the caveat in the second, and a link to the page that goes properly into it. Nothing here is gated and none of it requires a call.
- Questions
- 16
- Source
- Our search data
- Gated
- None
01
Choosing an agency
What separates a top-tier PPC agency from a standard one?
How many accounts one person carries, and whether they will tell you the number. Six accounts per manager and twenty are completely different products at the same headline fee, and the number decides whether anybody looks at your campaigns on an ordinary Tuesday. Everything else a buyer can check – published rates, named staff, account ownership – follows from the same willingness to be specific. We take this apart on how to compare PPC agencies.
How do I compare leading PPC management agencies?
Ask all of them the same three questions before any proposal arrives: what management costs at your spend level, who works on the account day to day, and how many other accounts that person carries. Those answers are comparable across agencies in a way bespoke proposals are designed not to be. Treat directory rankings as advertising rather than as evidence, and read any case study for its denominator rather than its percentage, which is the subject of reading an agency case study.
How do I compare agency fees and performance guarantees?
Fees compare cleanly once you make every agency quote the same thing: a monthly number at your actual spend, with media budget on a separate line from the management fee. Performance guarantees do not compare at all, and a guaranteed result is a reason to walk rather than a reason to sign, because nobody can guarantee an auction they do not control. What the guarantee usually buys is a longer lock-in. The terms worth negotiating instead are on what to negotiate in an agency contract.
How do SaaS PPC agency pricing models compare?
Three shapes dominate: a flat retainer, a percentage of spend, and a hybrid that starts flat and becomes a percentage above a threshold. Ours is the third, published in full: from $2,500 a month, then 10–15% of spend above $25,000, with no minimum ad budget and no minimum term. The thing to check in any of the three is where the fee comes from, because a fee taken out of media spend means cutting the budget cuts their income. Numbers and reasoning on what PPC management costs.
When should I not hire an agency at all?
When your spend is small enough that the fee is a large share of it, when the problem is the product or the landing page rather than the buying, or when nobody internally has time to answer questions. We wrote the long version of this against our own interest: when not to hire a PPC agency.
02
Attribution and MMPs
Which MMP has the best ROI reporting out of the box, without custom dashboards?
On published plans, Singular: cost aggregation and ROI analytics sit on its free tier, so spend is joined to outcomes without anybody building a pipeline. Adjust lists SpendWorks, its cost product, among add-ons sold to Core and Enterprise clients, and AppsFlyer lists cost aggregation on its plan comparison without publishing a price for it. That is a fact about what each vendor publishes rather than a measurement of quality. All four plans are laid out in choosing an MMP.
We run four channels and need revenue attribution. AppsFlyer, Singular or Airbridge?
If the four are Google, Meta, Apple Ads and TikTok, look at Airbridge first on cost alone: its Core plan covers exactly those four, starts at $40 a month and carries no annual contract. Add a fifth network, custom events or a third integration and Core stops covering you, at which point you are comparing enterprise quotes from all of them anyway. Singular is the one to beat if cost aggregation is the hard part.
Which works better for SKAN 4 in real life, AppsFlyer or Adjust?
Neither, in the sense the question expects: both receive the same postbacks under the same Apple rules, and Adjust states in its own pricing FAQ that it does not charge extra for iOS 14+ and SKAN. What differs is the ergonomics of the conversion-value editor and the modelling layered on top, and the schema you design matters more than either. That design is the whole subject of SKAdNetwork conversion values.
What are the real alternatives to AppsFlyer?
Adjust, Singular and Airbridge, and they are genuinely different rather than interchangeable: Adjust sells automation and fraud tooling, Singular is marketing analytics with attribution inside it, and Airbridge prices aggressively for teams buying on a handful of networks. The honest caveat is that switching costs weeks and breaks historical comparability, so a current tool that answers your questions beats a better tool that you have to migrate to.
How do I measure SaaS campaigns through GA4, GTM, the CRM and offline conversions?
In that order, and the order is the point: events defined once in GTM, sent to GA4 with names that mean what they say, pushed into the CRM with the click identifier attached, and returned to the ad platforms as offline conversions when the deal closes. Skip the identifier at the start and the last step is impossible later, which is the single most common thing we find broken. It is the first thing the free audit checks.
03
Subscription apps
How long should a free trial be?
Long enough for the user to reach the moment the product becomes obviously useful, which is a property of your onboarding rather than a number you can copy. Three days and seven days are both defensible and they move different levers: three forces the decision while intent is high, seven gives a weekly-habit product time to form the habit. Test it on cohort revenue rather than on trial-to-paid rate, because the shorter trial usually wins the rate and loses the money. Worked through on choosing a trial length.
What is the most reliable way to test a paywall with real interactions?
A server-side split on new installs only, one variable at a time, run until the cohort has had time to renew at least once rather than until the conversion rate looks good. Testing on mixed traffic or reading the result at day three is how teams ship paywalls that raise trial starts and lower revenue. The order worth testing in, and the sample each test actually needs, is on paywall tests that move revenue.
Which paywall optimisation tools are worth considering?
If your subscriptions already run through RevenueCat, Adapty or Superwall, use the paywall testing their platform gives you before buying anything else, because the thing that limits most teams is the number of tests they run rather than the sophistication of the tool. Worth knowing that Airbridge pulls subscription revenue from RevenueCat and Adapty directly, so revenue can reach your attribution reporting without custom work.
What should install-to-trial-to-paid actually look like?
There is no single number, and anybody quoting one without a sample size and a date is selling something. What is worth comparing is your own previous cohorts, because they share your product, price and audience, which is most of what determines the figure. Published industry ranges, with the methodology and the population attached, are on subscription funnel benchmarks.
How many onboarding screens should come before the paywall?
Few enough that the user still remembers why they installed, which in practice means every screen has to earn its place by either collecting something you will use or demonstrating value. Long onboarding is not automatically wrong, and a personalisation sequence that makes the paywall relevant can pay for itself. Measured properly on how many onboarding screens.
04
Channels
Is Bing worth investing in for B2B SaaS, and who manages it?
Usually yes as a supplement and never as a replacement: the auctions are thinner, the clicks are cheaper, and Microsoft carries LinkedIn firmographic targeting on search, which matters when your buyer is a job title rather than an interest. The honest caveat is volume, and for many B2B advertisers the whole channel is smaller than a week of Google spend, which is a real reason to skip it. Sizing and structure on Microsoft Ads.
Who is the best agency for Google App Campaigns?
Nobody can answer that for you honestly, including us, and an agency that ranks itself first on its own page is telling you about its content rather than its work. What you can check is whether the agency runs app campaigns as a practice rather than as an add-on, whether it talks about the conversion schema rather than only the bidding, and whether it will say what the account costs before the second call. Ours is on Google App Campaigns, and the comparison with Meta is on App Campaigns against Meta.
Does Notion run ads?
Yes, and the interesting part is how restrained they are: no price, no offer, no urgency, and one description written to satisfy both the person who wants the tool and the person who has to approve it. We pulled the live US ads and went through them on Notion's advertising, taken apart, with the opposite approach from the same category on monday.com.
Ask the one that is not on this page
Describe what is not working and we will tell you what we would do about it. If it needs more than an email, the free audit takes about 5 working days and costs nothing.