FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
The questions worth asking before you invest.
Plain answers to the questions we hear most often - about paid media, SEO, AI marketing, automation, and what it actually looks like to work with a specialist agency. No jargon. No sales spin.
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Before you get in touch.
WORKING WITH DUCIE
What to know about how we work, who we work with, and what a typical engagement looks like.
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Choose a digital marketing agency that specialises in the channels you need rather than offering everything. Look for demonstrated results in your sector, clear reporting, and a team that can explain their strategy in plain language.
Avoid agencies that lead with outputs - posts, blogs, ad impressions - rather than outcomes like leads, revenue, and growth. Ask to see case studies that are specific about results, not just directional. A good agency should be able to tell you exactly what they would do for your business before you sign anything. Book a free strategy call with Ducie and we will do exactly that.
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Ducie works with scaling businesses - typically 10 to 50 employees - where growth is a genuine board-level objective and the budget exists to invest properly. Sector varies: we have worked with B2B technology, eCommerce, professional services, industrial marketplaces, and local trade businesses.
What our clients share is ambition rather than a specific sector or size. If you are a larger business looking for specialist expertise in a specific discipline, we work with those too. The common thread is wanting a partner who takes accountability for commercial outcomes rather than just activity.
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Every engagement starts with a free strategy call - no commitment, no pitch deck. We learn about your business, your goals, and your current marketing position. If there is a fit, we put together a scoped proposal tailored to your objectives.
We do not have off-the-shelf packages. Some clients retain us across multiple disciplines; others start with a single service or a one-off audit. Retainers typically begin within two to four weeks of a signed agreement. You will always know exactly what we are doing, why, and what difference it is making.
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Both. Some clients start with a one-off audit or strategy project before committing to ongoing work. Others move straight into a retainer. We are flexible on structure - what matters is that the scope matches your current stage and objectives.
One-off projects tend to work well for businesses who want an independent view of their current marketing, or who need a specific piece of work done well before building a broader relationship. Retainers work best when you want consistent progress and ongoing optimisation rather than a single deliverable.
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Yes. Ducie is a remote-first agency and works with clients across the UK and internationally. Geography is rarely a barrier - most client relationships are managed through regular video calls, shared reporting dashboards, and async communication.
If your target audience is primarily UK-based, we bring local market knowledge regardless of where you are headquartered. If you are targeting international markets, we build campaigns around your audience geography rather than ours.
Google Ads, Meta, LinkedIn and beyond.
PAID MEDIA
Questions about paid media strategy, budgets, performance benchmarks, and what AI-informed campaign management actually means in practice.
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Paid media is any form of digital advertising you pay for directly - including Google Search Ads, Google Shopping, Meta (Facebook and Instagram) ads, LinkedIn Ads, and YouTube Ads. Unlike organic channels, paid media delivers immediate visibility in exchange for ad spend.
Results are directly tied to budget and strategy quality. A well-run paid media account at modest spend will consistently outperform a poorly-run account at high spend. The quality of the strategy - audience targeting, keyword selection, creative, and bidding logic - is what determines whether your budget works or gets wasted.
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PPC agency fees in the UK typically range from £500 to £3,000+ per month in management fees, separate from your ad spend. Some agencies charge a percentage of ad spend (usually 10–20%), others charge a flat retainer. At Ducie, fees are scoped to your specific requirements rather than fixed packages.
Be cautious of very low management fees - they often signal that your account will be under-managed or handled by a junior team member. The management fee should reflect the level of active optimisation, strategic input, and reporting your account actually receives. Talk to us about what's right for your budget.
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Most businesses need at least £1,000–£2,000 per month in Google Ads spend to generate enough data for meaningful optimisation. The right budget depends on your sector, average transaction value, and target cost per acquisition.
We recommend starting with a budget you can sustain for at least three months rather than a large short-term test. Google's algorithm takes time to learn - campaigns launched and paused within weeks rarely produce useful data. A lower consistent budget over a longer period will outperform a high budget that gets cut before the account has optimised.
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A good ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) for Google Ads varies by sector and business model. eCommerce businesses typically target 3x–6x ROAS. Lead generation businesses usually measure cost per lead rather than ROAS directly.
The most important benchmark is your break-even ROAS - the point at which revenue from ads covers both ad spend and the cost of your product or service. Anything above break-even is profitable; the goal is to maximise volume while staying above it. We benchmark ROAS against your specific unit economics rather than generic industry averages.
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Performance Max (PMax) is Google's AI-driven campaign type that serves ads across all Google channels - Search, Shopping, Display, YouTube, Gmail, and Maps - from a single campaign. It uses machine learning to allocate budget and targeting automatically based on your conversion goals.
Whether you should run it depends on your goals and setup. PMax performs well when you have strong conversion data for Google to optimise against, high-quality creative assets, and a clear signal of what a good conversion looks like. It performs poorly with thin data, weak creative, or poorly defined conversion actions. Many advertisers find a hybrid approach - PMax alongside traditional Search campaigns - delivers the best results. We evaluate this on a per-account basis.
Search, rankings, and organic growth.
SEO
Questions about how SEO works, how long it takes, and how it is evolving in an AI-first search landscape.
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SEO typically takes three to six months to show meaningful ranking improvements, and six to twelve months to deliver significant organic traffic growth. Technical SEO fixes can improve crawlability within weeks, but building topical authority and ranking for competitive keywords is a longer process.
Sites with existing domain authority move faster than those starting from scratch. The consistency of effort matters too — SEO that is started, paused, and restarted rarely compounds effectively. The businesses that invest consistently over twelve months or more tend to see the results that make organic search a genuinely competitive advantage.
Results are directly tied to budget and strategy quality. A well-run paid media account at modest spend will consistently outperform a poorly-run account at high spend. The quality of the strategy - audience targeting, keyword selection, creative, and bidding logic - is what determines whether your budget works or gets wasted.
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Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) is the practice of structuring content to be cited and recommended by AI-powered answer engines - including Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT Search, Perplexity, and Bing Copilot. Unlike traditional SEO, which targets ranked links, AEO targets AI-generated summaries that now appear before organic results for many searches.
AEO requires direct, structured answers near the top of each page section, strong E-E-A-T signals, FAQ schema markup, and content that uses specific proper nouns and citable statistics. It is not a separate discipline from SEO - it is an extension of it, built on the same technical and content foundations.
Be cautious of very low management fees - they often signal that your account will be under-managed or handled by a junior team member. The management fee should reflect the level of active optimisation, strategic input, and reporting your account actually receives. Talk to us about what's right for your budget.
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SEO optimises content to rank in traditional search results as a clickable link. AEO optimises content to be extracted and cited by AI-generated answers in tools like Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity. Strong SEO makes AEO more effective - they are complementary, not competing.
The key difference is intent. SEO drives clicks; AEO drives citations and brand mentions in AI-generated responses. As zero-click searches grow - 69% of Google searches now end without a click (Sparktoro, 2025) - AEO becomes increasingly important for maintaining visibility even when users do not click through to your site.
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To appear in Google AI Overviews, your content needs strong E-E-A-T signals, structured data markup, and direct answers to questions in the first 60 words of each section. Google prioritises content that concisely and accurately answers the search query - vague or padded content is rarely cited.
Specific steps include: implementing FAQ and HowTo schema, citing statistics with named sources, using question-format subheadings that match real search queries, and building topical authority across a cluster of related content. It is also worth noting that pages that already rank well in traditional search are more likely to be cited in AI Overviews - so SEO and AEO share the same foundations.
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Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) is the practice of optimising content to be surfaced by AI-powered generative tools - including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google Gemini, and Bing Copilot. It extends the principles of AEO beyond Google to cover all AI platforms that generate answers from web content.
GEO focuses on authority signals, structured content, citation-worthy specificity, and consistent brand presence across the web. The businesses that invest in GEO now - while most competitors have not yet started - will compound a meaningful visibility advantage over the next two to three years as AI search usage continues to grow.
AI strategy, consulting, and custom agents.
MARKETING AI
Questions about what AI marketing actually means in practice, and what Ducie specifically builds and delivers.
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A custom AI marketing agent is a purpose-built tool that automates a specific marketing task using large language models and your own data. Unlike general AI tools like ChatGPT, a custom agent is trained on your brand, audience, and workflows - so the output is consistent, on-brand, and useful without heavy prompting every time.
Examples include: keyword research agents that surface high-intent, low-competition opportunities in minutes; content briefing agents that generate fully structured SEO briefs from a single input; competitive intelligence agents that monitor competitor activity continuously; and campaign analysis agents that interpret performance data and surface recommendations automatically. We build these as bespoke tools for your specific marketing function.
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No. Part of our job is making AI tools genuinely usable for non-technical marketing teams. We design custom agents and prompt frameworks to be simple to operate day-to-day - the technical complexity is our problem, not yours.
We also train your team on how to get consistent, high-quality output from the tools we build. The goal is always that your team can use what we create independently - not that you become dependent on us to run it every time. AI tools that require constant hand-holding are not well-designed tools.
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The three disciplines are designed to work together. AI search visibility is a natural extension of SEO work. AI-powered keyword and audience research directly informs both paid media targeting and SEO strategy. Custom agents can be built to support whichever channels you are running.
You do not need to be running all three to benefit from AI marketing consulting. Some clients come to us specifically for AI strategy as a standalone engagement - particularly if they want to understand how AI is changing their marketing landscape before investing in other channels. Others add AI consulting to an existing retainer once we understand their setup well enough to identify the highest-value opportunities.
Connected systems, better results.
CRM & AUTOMATION
Questions about CRMs, marketing automation platforms, and how to make your systems work together effectively.
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Marketing automation is the use of software to run marketing tasks automatically based on triggers, rules, or schedules - without manual intervention each time. Common examples include email welcome sequences, lead nurture journeys, abandoned cart emails, and CRM pipeline automations.
Platforms like HubSpot, Klaviyo, and Mailchimp are the most widely used tools for marketing automation. The difference between good and poor automation is not which platform you use - it is whether the logic behind the sequences is built around a real customer journey with a clear commercial objective at each stage.
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A CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system manages your contacts, tracks interactions, and organises your sales pipeline. If you are generating leads and following up manually, a CRM will almost certainly increase your conversion rate by ensuring no lead is lost or contacted at the wrong time.
HubSpot, Pipedrive, and Salesforce are the most commonly used CRMs for scaling businesses, each suited to different sizes and sales processes. HubSpot is typically the strongest choice for businesses that want CRM and marketing automation in a single platform. Pipedrive works well for teams with a straightforward sales pipeline that do not need heavy marketing automation. We recommend based on your specific workflow - not on platform preference.
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HubSpot is a full CRM and marketing platform suited to B2B businesses and service-based companies with a sales pipeline to manage. Klaviyo is an email and SMS marketing platform built specifically for eCommerce, with deep integrations into Shopify and WooCommerce and advanced flow-building capabilities.
The two are not directly competing tools - they serve different business models. A B2B SaaS company needs HubSpot; a direct-to-consumer eCommerce brand needs Klaviyo. Some businesses use both if they have both a B2B and a consumer arm. We configure whichever platform best matches your business model rather than defaulting to one or the other.
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Yes, and this connection is one of the most valuable things you can do for paid media performance. Connecting your CRM to your ad platforms allows you to suppress existing customers from acquisition campaigns, retarget unconverted leads with precision, and use closed-won data to build lookalike audiences.
Running paid media and CRM in separate silos means your ad platform has no idea who your best customers actually are - it is optimising blind. When you close the loop, the algorithm has a real signal to work from. This consistently improves efficiency without increasing spend. It is one of the first things we audit when working across both paid media and CRM for the same client.
Not sure where AI
fits in your marketing?
Book a free 30-minute strategy call. We will assess where you stand, where the biggest opportunities are, and what a practical AI marketing plan looks like for your business.
FREE STRATEGY CALL