Digital marketing measured against enquiries, not impressions
Digital marketing covers the paid and organic channels that bring people to your business: search and social advertising, content, conversion optimisation and the analytics that connect them. MBGDesk sets up tracking first, so spend can be judged against enquiries rather than impressions.
Most marketing reports describe activity. Impressions, reach, engagement rate and click-through are all real numbers, and none of them tell you whether the money produced customers. The gap between those two things is where most marketing budgets are lost, and it is usually a measurement problem rather than a creative one.
The measurement is broken more often than the campaigns are. Conversion tracking was never configured, so the platform optimises toward clicks. Phone enquiries — the main channel for many local businesses — are invisible to analytics entirely. Attribution is last-click, so the channel that introduced the customer gets none of the credit. Decisions then get made on the numbers that happen to exist rather than the ones that matter. Underneath all of this sits a reporting habit: the numbers that are easy to produce get shown, and the number that matters — what a customer cost — gets estimated at the end of the quarter, if at all.
When this work makes sense
Questions worth asking any supplier
Is conversion tracking working before spend starts? Without it, the platform optimises toward the wrong thing from day one.
Are phone calls tracked? For many businesses, untracked calls are the majority of enquiries.
Who owns the ad accounts? If the agency does, you lose your history and your learnings when you leave.
Does reporting show cost per enquiry, or cost per click? Only one of those is a business number.
Is anyone working on the landing page? Sending more traffic to a page that does not convert raises cost per enquiry rather than lowering it.
Deliverables
Analytics and conversion tracking configured and verified before any spend
Call tracking where phone enquiries matter
Campaign setup and management in Google Ads and Meta Ads
Landing pages built for the campaign rather than repurposed from the site
Conversion rate work on the pages traffic already lands on
Reporting in cost per enquiry and cost per customer, against a recorded baseline
Accounts in your ownership, with us as a managed user
Built with
Process
Nothing is spent until tracking is verified. We configure analytics, conversion events and call tracking, then submit a real test enquiry and confirm it appears correctly end to end. It delays the launch by days and is the difference between a campaign you can judge and one you can only describe. Campaigns then start deliberately small to gather signal before scaling.
The standard nine stages — discovery, strategy, UX/UI, development, content and SEO, testing, launch, measurement, continuous improvement — apply to every project. The paragraph above is what differs for this one.
What moves the number
Pricing depends on scope, functionality, integrations and content requirements. These are the factors that change it most:
Paid search, paid social, or organic
Paid search (Google Ads)
Fits: Capturing people already searching for what you sell — highest intent
Limits: Costs rise with competition; traffic stops when spend stops
Paid social (Meta)
Fits: Creating demand and reaching people not yet searching
Limits: Lower intent; needs creative that keeps working as audiences tire of it
Organic search and content
Fits: Compounding traffic at no cost per click
Limits: Slow — months before meaningful return, which makes it a poor fit for urgent revenue needs
Case studies
No published digital marketing case study yet. Return-on-spend figures are trivially easy to present selectively; we would rather publish none than a flattering slice.
MBGDesk operates from 4 offices — India, United States, United Kingdom, United Arab Emirates. We hold no industry certifications and do not imply otherwise.
Frequently asked questions
How much should we spend on ads?
Enough to gather signal in your market, which depends on the cost per click for your terms and how many conversions you need before the data means anything. We size this during setup rather than quoting a number that sounds reasonable.
Do you charge a percentage of ad spend?
We agree the fee structure before starting. Percentage-of-spend creates an obvious incentive problem — the agency earns more when you spend more, whether or not that spend works.
Can you guarantee leads?
No. We can guarantee that tracking will be correct, that spend will be visible against enquiries, and that we will tell you when a campaign is not working rather than continuing to bill for it.
How do you track phone calls?
Through call tracking numbers that attribute the call to its source. For many local businesses most enquiries arrive by phone, so without this the reporting describes a minority of the actual results.
Ads or SEO?
Ads if you need traffic this month or want to test demand before investing in content. SEO if you are building something that compounds. Most businesses eventually run both, and the keyword data from ads is genuinely useful input to the SEO work.
Who owns the ad accounts?
You. We work as a managed user on your accounts. Account history and machine learning built up over months belong to the account, and it should be yours when the relationship ends.
Why do the platform numbers not match our analytics?
They rarely do, and the gap is usually attribution rather than error. Ad platforms count a conversion against the ad that was seen or clicked within their own window, and each platform claims the ones it touched. Analytics applies its own model. Expect the platforms to add up to more than your actual total, and judge spend on enquiries you can verify in your own system rather than on the sum of platform reports.
What is a realistic cost per enquiry?
It varies enormously by industry and market — the same campaign structure can produce very different numbers for a local trade and a B2B software product. Anyone quoting a figure before seeing your market is guessing. We establish yours from the first weeks of data and then work on lowering it.
Should the landing page be part of our main site?
Usually a separate page built for the campaign, matching the ad's promise closely. Sending paid traffic to a general service page loses people who were responding to something specific. It also keeps campaign experiments away from the pages doing your organic work.
Services that connect to this
Talk to us about this
Tell us what you are trying to build and we will come back with scope, approach and an estimate.