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

The sequence is the same for any channel; only the depth of each step differs.

1. Briefing. We ask about the product, price, geography, seasonality and what you have already tried. At the same time we check whether there is anywhere to send traffic: a site, a landing page, a social media profile.
2. Strategy and media plan. We decide which channels to use, how to split the budget and what cost per enquiry counts as acceptable. That figure is agreed before launch so there is something to compare against later.
3. Analytics before launch. First we set up GA4, Google Tag Manager and call tracking, and only then turn the ads on. Otherwise the first month of budget runs blind, and that is the most expensive month: it is when the campaign gathers its data.
4. Creatives and copy. We prepare ads for each channel separately — what works in search does not work in a feed. For social media we make several versions so there is something to compare.
5. Launch and learning. In the first month the campaign learns: we cut queries, placements and audiences that spend budget without producing enquiries. Setting up advertising does not end here, it begins here.
6. Optimisation and reporting. Every month we show where the money went and what it brought, and agree the next step: scale what works or test a new channel.

How long it takes. Basic analytics setup takes one to two weeks. Campaign and creative preparation runs in parallel, so two to three weeks usually pass between the briefing and the first impression. Clicks and enquiries are visible within days of launch, but it is worth judging cost per lead no earlier than a month in: until then the campaign is still learning and an early verdict is almost always wrong. End-to-end analytics with a CRM can take longer — that depends on the system and how ready its API is.

What advertising costs and what the budget consists of

Confusion here is the most common reason negotiations fall apart, so let us separate it at once. Advertising involves two different sums.

• The advertising budget — money that goes directly to Google, Meta or TikTok. It does not pass through the agency and is spent on showing your ads. The size depends on the niche: in competitive categories a click costs more, and gathering enough data for conclusions takes a bigger budget.
• The agency fee — for strategy, setup, day-to-day management, creatives and analytics. It depends on the number of channels and the scope of work, not on the size of your budget.

The most expensive mistake is counting only the first sum. A campaign without management eats the budget just the same, only quietly: bids rise, irrelevant impressions multiply, and a month later it turns out the money is gone and there are no enquiries.

The second mistake is too small a starting budget. If a campaign gathered two dozen clicks in a month, no conclusions can be drawn from them: that is not statistics, it is chance. At the briefing we say straight away what minimum makes sense in your niche, and if it is not there, it is better to start with a different channel.

What the contract fixes. No agency can guarantee a specific number of enquiries in advance: the result depends on your pricing, competitors, the season and how fast enquiries are handled. A promise of "this many leads for this much" without access to your statistics is a sign the number was invented. We commit to things that can be checked instead: the list of work and channels, reporting frequency, the target cost per enquiry we are working towards and the launch timeline. Ad accounts are registered to you and stay yours along with the full campaign history — if you ever change provider, you take the accumulated data with you.

What you see in the reports

The main question about advertising is "where did the money go". Answering it with impressions and clicks is dishonest: they say nothing about enquiries. That is why we put reporting in place before switching campaigns on.

• GA4 and Google Tag Manager — we track form submissions, clicks on phone numbers and messengers, and basket steps in a store. Tags live in the container rather than in the site code, so changes do not require a release.
• Call tracking — a swapped number shows which campaign a call came from. Without it, in phone-driven niches half of all enquiries stay invisible and the channel that actually brings customers looks unprofitable.
• End-to-end analytics — the enquiry reaches your CRM together with its source, and the deal status comes back into the report. Then you see not the number of leads but which channel brought money: ten cheap enquiries that never closed cost more than two expensive ones that did.
• Looker Studio dashboard — every channel in one window. Your access is permanent rather than a presentation once a month: you can check the numbers whenever you like.

The report shows the whole chain: what the click cost, what the enquiry cost, which channel produced it and which one spent budget for nothing. These are the numbers we use to decide what to scale and what to switch off — and the same numbers you can take with you if you ever change provider.

How to choose an advertising agency

A question usually answered by rankings and directories rather than by agencies themselves. Here is what is worth checking before you sign anything.

• Ask to see another client's report — anonymised is fine. If it contains only impressions and clicks with no enquiries, there is nothing to measure results by, and in six months the conversation will be exactly the same.
• Ask who exactly will run the project and whether those people are in-house. A common pattern: the experienced one sells, the intern runs it.
• Find out whose ad account it is. The account should stay yours, along with campaign history and accumulated data. Otherwise changing provider means starting from zero, and that is the main lever unscrupulous agencies use.
• Clarify what the fee covers: management only, or creatives, analytics and reports as well. A separate charge for every creative easily doubles the invoice.
• Ask about the minimum budget for your niche. An agency willing to take any amount either has not done the maths or will run it as a formality.
• Check whether they ever say no. A provider who agrees to everything usually lacks the experience to object — or has no intention of answering for the result.
• Verify the Google partner status at source. A badge on a website is just an image, and anyone can draw one. Current status is only visible in the official Google Partners directory: if the agency is not there, the badge means nothing.

That last point applies to us too, so here it is up front: Adcore's 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 given 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.

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

Advertising is not one person with access to an account. A team works on the project and each person answers for their part.

• The strategist decides which channels the money goes into and in what proportion. They also set the cost-per-enquiry figure the work is later judged by.
• Channel specialists run campaigns daily: bids, audiences, negative keywords, placements. Search and social are handled by different people — the tools are too different to do both half-heartedly.
• The creative designer prepares banners and video. On social media it is the creative, not the bid, that decides cost per lead.
• The web analyst makes sure the data adds up: that a form submission reaches the report and a call is attributed to its campaign.

Everyone is on the Adcore payroll. That means the task does not travel between subcontractors, and the budget question and the analytics question are settled in the same meeting.

Industries we have worked in

A niche changes not the set of channels but what an enquiry costs and how long the decision takes. We have run advertising for property developers, agribusiness, finance, pharmaceuticals, healthcare and small and medium businesses.

Each of these has its own constraints — from moderation of medical advertising to the long deal cycle in real estate, where months pass between the first click and the contract. It is better to know about them before launch than after the first rejected ad: rewriting a campaign costs more than building it to the platform's rules from the start.

An advertising agency in Kyiv and across Ukraine

Our office is in Kyiv, at 21 Sichovykh Striltsiv Street. But our clients are spread wider: we run advertising for businesses across Ukraine and abroad, and the way we work does not depend on the city. An advertising agency in Kyiv is convenient in that you can meet in person, but that does not affect the day-to-day work. Briefings, creative approvals and monthly reports happen online; meeting at the office is an option whenever it suits you.

To get a budget calculated for your task, fill in the brief or write to us — in the first conversation we will tell you which channels make sense and which ones are too early to spend on.