Advertising agency

An advertising agency is a team that runs your advertising from strategy to report: it decides which channels to look for customers in, launches campaigns, keeps the budget under control and shows what every enquiry cost. Adcore has been working since 2012, has 24 specialists in-house, has completed more than 600 projects, and our average client relationship lasts over five years.

One boundary up front: we run advertising online. Printing, signage, branded gifts and billboards are not our field, and if that is what you need, we will say so in the first conversation. Online advertising differs from offline precisely because every hryvnia in it is visible: what the click cost, what the enquiry cost and which channel brought the customer.

Advertising channels we run

A channel is not a matter of taste but of where your customer makes the decision. Some people search for a service, some come across it in a feed, and some ask an AI assistant for advice. Here is what we work with and when each channel makes sense.

• Google Search ads — when demand already exists and people are searching for your service in words. The fastest way to get first enquiries: the person already knows what they want, you just need to appear at the right moment.
• Shopping ads and Google Shopping — for online stores: the customer sees the product, price and photo right in the results, so they arrive already warmed up. Everything here rests on the feed: title, availability, price and delivery must match the site, or products simply will not show.
• Performance Max — a single campaign that distributes impressions across search, Maps, Gmail, YouTube and the display network by itself. A powerful tool, but dangerous unsupervised: without excluding brand queries it will take traffic that was already yours and produce a flattering report on someone else's merit. We launch it with exclusions and review the placement report weekly.
• Social media — Meta, TikTok, Telegram — when demand has to be created. The person was not looking for you but saw you and got interested. Here the creative decides, not the bid: the same offer in different execution changes cost per lead several times over.
• YouTube and video advertising — when the product needs to be shown in action or something complex explained. It works well where text takes long and video makes it clear in half a minute.
• Display and banner advertising — when the goal is not the click but being remembered and returned to later. We buy impressions in the Google Display Network, and when placements outside it or direct deals with publishers are needed, through programmatic. The Display Network is usually enough: programmatic makes sense when the volume of buying justifies it. In sensitive categories we work with whitelists and cap how often one person sees the ad.
• Remarketing — bringing back those who have already been. Someone viewed a product page, added it to the basket and left, or visited the site and left no enquiry — these are different situations, and the messages differ too. We split audiences by depth of interest and show ads in the display network and on YouTube. These are usually the cheapest enquiries in the account: the person already knows who you are.
• GPT ads — a new channel: ads appear inside an AI assistant when someone asks for advice instead of searching. Competition there is still lower than in search, and this is one of those rare cases where being early really is cheaper.
• Local advertising on Maps — for businesses with an address: the customer searches "near me" and finds you on the map with reviews, photos and directions.

Starting with every channel at once is a bad idea: the budget spreads thin and none of them reaches a sensible cost per enquiry. At the briefing we pick one or two and add the rest once the first ones produce clear results. Advertising services can be ordered as a package or channel by channel — the second option is perfectly reasonable if you want to test us on a smaller task first.

Platforms and tools

Below are the ad accounts and systems our team works with. The exact set depends on the task: a small business does not need the whole list, and we do not push tools for the sake of tools.

How the work goes: from briefing to first enquiries

Six steps from the first conversation to the point where a campaign runs at target cost per enquiry. The timings below are for one channel; each additional one adds roughly a week.

1. Briefing and landing page check. We ask about the product, price, geography and seasonality, but first of all we look at where the traffic will go. A campaign pointed at a page with no price, no form and no mobile version will burn the budget regardless of how well it is set up.
2. Media plan. We calculate what a click costs in your niche, how many clicks it takes to get one enquiry, and how many enquiries convert into a deal. Those three numbers produce the budget — and show whether the economics work before launch rather than after.
3. Analytics before the first impression. GA4, Google Tag Manager and call tracking go in before campaigns are switched on. Otherwise the most expensive month — the one when the algorithm is learning — passes blind, and that data is lost for good.
4. Creatives built per auction. Search rewards a precise answer to the query; a feed rewards the first three seconds of video. For social we prepare several variants at once: a creative burns out within two to three weeks and has to be replaced before the cost per enquiry climbs.
5. Launch and learning. For the first two to four weeks the algorithm is gathering conversions and therefore runs above target cost. During this period we cut search terms, placements and audiences that spend without producing enquiries — but we do not change the structure: every such edit resets the learning and sends the campaign back to the start.
6. Optimisation on data. After that we review cost per enquiry by campaign and audience weekly, and decide together each month: scale what has reached target cost, or move the budget into another channel.

When to expect the first enquiries. In search they can arrive on launch day — the demand is already there. Social and display do not work that way: people were not looking for your product, so impressions and clicks come first and enquiries follow after the second or third contact.

What advertising costs and what the budget consists of

In advertising you pay twice, into two different places. The two sums follow different rules, and as long as they are mixed up, any conversation about price goes nowhere.

• The ad budget — money that goes to Google, Meta or TikTok and is spent showing your ads to customers. Price here is set by auction: you pay not a fixed rate but slightly more than the next competitor. That is why in competitive niches a click gets more expensive without a single change on your side — someone nearby simply raised their bid.
• The agency fee — for the media plan, setup, daily management, creatives and analytics. It depends on the number of channels and the scope of work, not on the size of your budget: running a million or a hundred thousand in one channel takes roughly the same hours.

Why small budgets do not work. Algorithms need conversions to learn: roughly thirty per campaign per month. If the budget stretches to five enquiries, the campaign never exits the learning phase and keeps running at an inflated price. A minimum budget is not an agency whim but the threshold below which paid traffic cannot be optimised at all.

You cannot save on the second sum. The auction runs around the clock: a competitor raises a bid, your campaign quietly shifts to more expensive clicks, junk seeps into the search terms, and the creative that was producing enquiries last week burns out. Without daily intervention the budget is still spent in full — just no longer on the right people.

What goes into the contract. No agency can guarantee a number of enquiries in advance: the outcome depends on your pricing, the competitors in the auction, the season and how fast you handle leads. A promise of "so many leads at so much each" without access to your statistics means one of two things — either the figure was invented, or everything including wrong numbers will be counted as a lead.

In search promotion the budget works differently: there is no second sum at all, because no money goes to the search engine. How that changes the invoice and what SEO costs on the market — we covered separately.

What you see in the reports

The main question asked of advertising is "where did the money go". Impressions and clicks do not answer it, which is why we set up reporting before switching campaigns on. Here is what it shows.

• Cost per enquiry for each campaign, not averaged across the account. An average hides the essential part: usually two or three campaigns hold an acceptable price while the rest quietly drain the budget. Split figures show what to switch off this week.
• Impression share lost to budget and lost to rank. Two separate numbers answering the question "could we get more". Losing half your impressions to budget means the demand exists and can be bought. Losing them to rank means the problem is not money but ad quality and the landing page.
• Frequency on social. When the same person sees a creative for the sixth time, clicks get cheaper and enquiries disappear: the audience has burned out. This is visible a week before the cost per enquiry starts to rise.
• The path from click to deal. Call tracking ties a phone call to a campaign; end-to-end analytics brings the deal status back from your CRM. What you then see is not the number of leads but which channel brought money: ten cheap enquiries that all fell through cost more than two expensive ones that closed.

All of it sits in a Looker Studio dashboard with permanent access, not in a monthly presentation. The data stays yours: if you ever decide to change contractor, the campaign history and conversion statistics go nowhere.

How to choose an advertising agency

A question usually answered by rankings and directories rather than by agencies themselves. Here are seven checks you can make in a single call — they reveal the level of a contractor more reliably than any portfolio.

• Find out whose name the ad accounts are in. Google Ads and Meta Business Manager should belong to you, with the agency given access by you. The account carries the campaign history and conversion data your algorithms are trained on: that takes years to build and cannot be transferred anywhere.
• Ask about the pixel and the audiences separately. This is the part most often forgotten. Remarketing lists, lookalikes and pixel data take months to accumulate. If they live on the agency's side, changing contractor means starting with empty audiences — even when the account itself is yours.
• Ask to see the campaign structure of a current client, anonymised is fine. One campaign covering every product and every region means the budget is not being managed: in that structure you can neither separate bids nor see what actually brings enquiries.
• Check how conversions are counted. If a form submission, a phone call and an email from the same person land in the report as three conversions, the cost per enquiry is understated threefold. It is not always deliberate — more often it is simply not configured — but you are the one paying for it.
• Ask how many creatives are included and what each additional one costs. During a month of active testing, a separate fee for every banner edit easily doubles the invoice.
• Ask about the learning period. Google and Meta algorithms reach a stable cost per enquiry in two to four weeks, and throughout that time it runs higher than the eventual figure. A contractor promising target cost from week one has either never run campaigns or will quietly bury that difference in your budget.
• Verify Google Partner status at the source. A badge on a website is just an image, and anyone can draw one. Current status is visible only in the official Google Partners directory: if the agency is not listed there, the badge means nothing.

That last point applies to us as well, so here it is upfront: the Adcore listing in the Google Partners directory — Google Premier Partner status with certifications across all five areas: search, display, video, shopping and apps. Premier is not granted to every partner, only to the top tier of the programme in each country.

When it is too early to advertise

Sometimes the honest answer is "wait". Advertising amplifies what is already there; it will not fix what is broken. Here are the cases where we recommend doing something else first.

• There is nowhere to send people. A page with no service description, no prices and no way to get in touch turns any budget into pure cost.
• There is nobody to handle enquiries. If requests sit until tomorrow and calls go unanswered, the channel is not to blame.
• The product is still changing. When price and offer are rewritten every week, the campaign never finishes learning, and each relaunch wipes the data collected so far.

A separate case is when demand already exists and people search for your service by name, but your site is nowhere in the results. Advertising will work, yet you will also be paying for clicks you could get without a budget: it makes more sense to start search promotion in parallel.

This is not a refusal to work, it is a sequence: prepare first, switch on second. Ordering advertising this way costs less than paying for traffic that leads nowhere.

Who runs your advertising

A Google Ads account and a Meta account are different professions, not two tabs in the same browser. That is why a team works on the project.

• The strategist allocates budget across channels and fixes the target cost per enquiry before launch. That figure then becomes the criterion: the campaign either works or it does not.
• The search specialist works daily with bids, negative keywords and search terms. The most important part of that job is invisible: cutting away what you are paying for in vain. On shopping campaigns the feed belongs here too — its quality decides whether a product appears at all.
• The social specialist manages audiences and watches frequency and creative burnout. Here the cost per enquiry is set not by the bid but by what a person sees in the first three seconds.
• The designer prepares banners and video for each platform separately, allowing for its requirements on format and the share of text in frame.
• The analyst makes sure the numbers add up: that a form submission reaches the report, a call is attributed to its campaign, and one person is not counted as three conversions.

All of them are on the Adcore payroll. Which means the question "why has the cost per lead gone up" and the question "is this conversion counted correctly" are settled in one meeting, not in correspondence between two contractors.

Industries we have worked in

The niche changes not the set of channels but the rules you have to play by. We have run advertising for property developers, agribusiness, finance, pharmaceuticals, healthcare and small and medium businesses.

Three constraints come up most often. Moderation: medical and financial advertising goes through review, some wording is prohibited outright, and certain categories require prior certification with Google — without it the ads simply will not run. Long cycles: in property, months pass between the first click and the contract, so judging a campaign by first-week enquiries is meaningless and the algorithm has to be optimised towards an intermediate action. Seasonality: in agriculture the demand window is narrow, and a budget spread evenly across the year is largely wasted.

These things are better known before launch. Rebuilding a campaign to fit platform rules costs more than assembling it correctly in the first place.

An advertising agency in Kyiv and across Ukraine

Our office is in Kyiv, at 21 Sichovykh Striltsiv Street. The client base is wider: we run advertising for businesses across Ukraine and abroad. The city makes no difference to daily work — ad accounts are the same from anywhere — and you are welcome at the office whenever it suits you.

Where the city does matter is in campaign settings. A click costs more in Kyiv than in the regions, so a single campaign covering the whole country dilutes the result: capital impressions consume the budget first. We separate regions and run them independently, each with its own bids.

Write to us or fill in the brief: we will look at your niche in the auction and tell you what a click costs and what minimum budget makes sense in your case. If the numbers do not add up, we will say that too.