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Your side of it: what has to be true at your end for this level to produce anything

At this level the outcome is decided at your end more than at ours. Advertising is half an act, and you hold the other half.

Published on 8 August 2026 — Algeria Agency

The article beside this one is about the money: which platform, which channel, the threshold below which a campaign does not learn, the cost of an enquiry. Everything it describes is on our side of the line.

This one is about the other side, and at the entry level that is the side that decides. A campaign produces a conversation; what happens next does not depend on it. Nobody answers, no price exists, the item advertised is unavailable, and the money was spent correctly for nothing.

This is not a way of excusing ourselves. It is the most repeated observation at this level of service: when a starter fails, nine times out of ten the cause is a missing action at the client’s end, and that action is almost always free.

This article says what has to be true at your end before the first advertisement, what to watch during the first three weeks, what this level cannot do for you, and why we will never put a figure on lost enquiries.

The entry level succeeds or fails at your end

A campaign sells nothing. It produces an opportunity to sell: somebody writes, calls, or arrives on a page with an intention. Everything that turns that opportunity into a customer happens afterwards, and happens at your end.

At the higher levels part of that sequence is taken on — a page built to convert, content that answers questions before they are asked, follow-up that catches the people who did not proceed. At the entry level none of that is included, and that is what makes this level cheap.

The consequence is arithmetic and it is rarely said before signing: at this level, the share of the result that depends on you is larger than the share that depends on us. That is not corrected by spending more, because spending more produces more opportunities, not more actions.

It is also why two identical businesses with the same budget get results with nothing in common. It is almost never the campaign that separates them: it is response time, the existence of a price, and whether somebody is responsible by name for what arrives.

The eight sections that follow are that list. None of them costs money, all of them cost a decision, and they are taken before the first advertisement rather than at the end of the first disappointing month.

Answering: the action that decides nearly everything

The first and most decisive is also the simplest: somebody answers, and quickly. In this market most first conversations happen through messaging, and a conversation that opens with a half-day wait opens badly.

The reason is not politeness. Somebody writing to three businesses writes to all three within the same minute, and whoever replies first gets the conversation — the other two receive a polite reply or none at all. You are not judged on your response time, you are ranked by it.

What counts is the first message, not the complete answer. "Hello, I’ll check and confirm within the hour" keeps the conversation open and costs ten seconds. Silence while you go and find the information is what closes it.

So two things have to be decided before the first advertisement: who watches the messages, and how often through the day. Three checks a day at fixed times beats continuous monitoring promised and not kept, and beats "we look when we can" by a wide margin.

Finally, the question of hours. A campaign running in the evening produces messages in the evening, and there are two acceptable answers: reply in the evening, or stop the delivery during hours when nobody answers. The third — run it and let the messages wait until morning — is what everybody chooses by default, and it is the one that pays for conversations somebody else will pick up.

A price has to exist before the campaign

The second thing that has to be true at your end is that a price exists and that whoever answers knows it. It sounds obvious and it is the most frequent blockage we meet.

Many businesses have no price in the strict sense: they have a range depending on the customer, the quantity, the moment and the negotiation. That is perfectly workable over a counter and untenable in a written conversation, where the first question is "how much" and where no answer is read as evasion.

What is asked for is not a published tariff. It is that an answer exists: a price, a starting price, or a precise sentence explaining what it depends on and giving an order of magnitude. "It depends" is not an answer; "from this much, depending on the surface, and I’ll confirm after a photo" is one.

The rule that avoids most of the losses is this: nobody should need to ask you before being able to answer a customer. A business where only the owner knows the prices has exactly one person able to hold a commercial conversation, and that person is busy.

There is one particular case worth naming: prices that move often. They exist and they are legitimate. The solution is not to refuse to answer, it is to give the rule rather than the number — which is also a way of not being tied to an old price left sitting in a conversation.

What you advertise has to be available

The third condition is more basic still and costs just as much: what is advertised has to exist, in stock or in capacity, while the advertisement is running.

The commonest case is not a complete stock-out. It is the reference, size or colour shown in the image no longer being available while everything else is. The customer replies to the image, not to the catalogue, and an answer of "not that one, but I have this" loses one conversation in two.

The second case is capacity, for service trades. A campaign filling an already full diary produces appointments three weeks out, which is sometimes excellent and sometimes the most efficient way to pay for sending customers to a competitor who can take them tomorrow.

What that needs is a habit rather than a tool: tell whoever runs the campaigns when something goes out of stock, on the day it happens. A message is enough. Without it, advertising carries on pushing towards an unavailable item for days, and nobody makes the connection because they are two different people.

The mirror rule applies too and is rarer: tell them when something comes back. Fully half the campaigns we see are still avoiding a product that returned to stock three weeks earlier, because the first piece of information travelled and the second did not.

A person, not "us"

The fourth condition is not a task but a name. Somebody at your end has to be responsible for this service, and it has to be a person rather than a department, a shared inbox or a general willingness.

The reason is banal: what belongs to everybody belongs to nobody. A message arriving in an inbox three people watch is a message three people assume another has handled — and that is mechanical rather than negligent.

That person does not need advertising skills. They need three things: to see messages arrive, to know prices and availability, and to be able to decide alone in ordinary cases. It is often somebody from the counter or from sales, rarely the owner, and never an intern nobody has briefed.

They are also our counterpart, and that is the more useful half of the role. A campaign is tuned with information only that person has: what people ask for, what keeps coming back, what they misunderstand in the advertisement. Without them we steer on numbers and without the only qualitative source there is.

The test that this point is settled is one question: if we call tomorrow to ask what customers asked about this week, who picks up and knows the answer. If the answer is "you’d have to ask around", it is not yet a person.

The telephone ringing into nothing

You have to look at the channel everybody forgets because it existed before the campaign: the telephone. An advertisement makes it ring, and your line’s behaviour becomes part of the arrangement without anybody having decided it.

The test costs two minutes and is unpleasant, which is why it is almost never done: ask somebody to call your own number on a Thursday at two in the afternoon and tell yourself what happened. How many rings, who answers, what is said, and how long before a useful reply.

The faults it turns up are always the same and are corrected for nothing. A number diverting to an extension nobody picks up at lunchtime. A voicemail that was never set up. A number on the advertisement that is no longer the shop’s. Somebody answering and saying "call back later".

That last case is the most expensive and the most invisible. A failed call leaves no trace: no message, no name, nothing to call back. Unlike a written message that waits, a missed call disappears, and it disappears with the person.

The correction is almost always administrative: a voicemail recorded in the right language, a divert to a mobile during quiet hours, and the instruction that "call back later" is replaced by "give me your number and we’ll call you at such a time". None of those three costs anything.

What you have to be able to say yes to

An entry-level campaign produces ordinary enquiries, and some of them run aground on things unrelated to the product: delivery, payment, opening hours, invoicing.

So a few answers have to be decided in advance, because they will come back every week. Do you deliver, where, at what price. Do you accept anything other than cash. Do you issue an invoice. Are you open on Friday. Each is a ten-second question and a hesitant answer costs a sale.

The useful rule is this: every "I don’t know" your team has to say to a customer is a leak, and the list of those is short and known within a week. It is assembled by simply asking whoever answers what they were asked and could not answer.

You also have to be able to refuse cleanly, which is a separate skill. A customer outside the delivery area, a request you do not handle, an order too small: the right answer is a clear refusal with, if possible, a direction to go in. Silence on these cases is what produces bad reviews, far more than the refusal itself.

Finally, one thing that gets decided or gets endured: how far you are willing to go for a first customer. A discount, free delivery, a shorter lead time. Decided in advance it is a tool; improvised under pressure it is margin leaving without anybody knowing how much.

Photographs and the name: what advertising cannot repair

A campaign shows what you give it. At this level no production is included, and the material you supply decides half the result — it is where the entry level is most constrained and also easiest to improve without spending.

For photographs, the rule is the one the article on project decisions already gives: consistency beats quality. The same background, the same distance, the same light, taken on a phone, produce a set that looks like a set. Ten superb, mismatched photographs look assembled, which reads as a reseller rather than a shop.

For text, what is nearly always missing is not style but information: what it is, how much, where, and what to do next. An advertisement that does not say where you are loses everybody for whom distance decides, and there are many of them.

Finally, there is one thing advertising cannot repair and that is better known before spending: if your name, your frontage or your page give the impression of a business that has stopped, the campaign will bring people who leave again. A page whose last post is ten months old is a stronger signal than any advertisement.

That does not need a rebuild. Three recent posts, an exact address, correct opening hours and a photograph of the frontage are enough to make the difference between "they exist" and "I don’t know if they’re still open". It is half a day and it is often worth more than the first month’s budget.

Three weeks of patience, and what to watch meanwhile

The article beside this one says the first month returns nothing and that this is its job. That is true on the campaign side, and what should be added is what it asks of you: not judging too early, and knowing what to judge on meanwhile.

What not to look at during those three weeks is the number of sales. At these volumes, three weeks does not separate a good campaign from a bad one, and a decision taken on that basis is taken on noise — the same arithmetic as the learning threshold.

What to look at is on your side and is available immediately: are conversations arriving, are they handled quickly, what do they run aground on. Those three pieces of information exist from the first week and say far more than a sales figure.

What to note is simpler still, and almost nobody does it: the questions that keep coming back. Five lines in a notebook. That is the material that improves the advertisement, the page and the next month’s content, and it can only come from whoever answers.

And you need a date. Decide in advance when you will take the decision — the end of the second month, usually — and on what criteria. Without that date a campaign is judged on the day somebody loses patience, and that day always arrives before the question can be settled.

What this level cannot do for you

There has to be a section saying plainly what this level will not do, because it is what we sell and because selling it while letting anybody believe otherwise is the only way to genuinely fail a client at this price.

It will not build demand where there is none. A campaign finds people already looking for what you sell, or who recognise it when they see it. It does not create a need, and for a very new or very expensive product for its market this level is the wrong tool and we will say so.

It will not correct a price. If your offer is dearer than the competition with no reason a buyer can see, advertising will bring people who compare and leave. It makes the problem more visible and more expensive, not smaller.

It does not compensate for a damaged reputation. Recent bad reviews, a page full of unanswered complaints, a shop the neighbourhood avoids: the campaign brings those people to what they are going to read, and funds their discovery of it. There is work to do first, and it is not in this level.

And it replaces none of the eight points above. A starter where nobody answers is not a campaign that fails, it is spending that buys conversations for somebody else. When we see that during the first fortnight we say so and propose suspending delivery — which reduces our invoice and is the only honest recommendation.

Why we do not put a figure on lost enquiries

The natural question after all this is: what does it actually cost us to answer in half a day rather than ten minutes. We do not give that figure, and the reason is a particular one.

To know it you would have to ask the people who left. But those people left no trace: they wrote, they did not get an answer quickly enough, they bought elsewhere, and they told you nothing. No list of them exists anywhere, at your end or at ours.

It is an impossibility of a particular kind and it is worth naming precisely. One of the two parties observed exactly what happened — the customer knows precisely why they went elsewhere. But they are unreachable by construction, because being reachable is exactly what failed. The population is defined by the absence of the one link that would allow it to be questioned.

That distinguishes this case from every other missing figure in this series. Elsewhere nobody observed, or the instrument is mis-aimed, or the subject moved. Here the observation happened, complete, at somebody who cannot be found.

What we look at instead is entirely on your side and is measured in two weeks: the delay between a message arriving and the first reply, recorded by hand on the enquiries you did receive. Add the Thursday-afternoon test call. Those two measurements do not say what you lost, and they say exactly what to change — which is the only thing a figure on losses would have been good for.

What we do, and what we refuse to do here

Before the first advertisement we go through the list of eight points with you. It takes one meeting, it is not invoiced separately, and it decides most of what this level produces.

We ask for a name, not a department. We ask that this person knows the prices. We ask to be told about stock-outs the same day. And we make the test call ourselves if you prefer, because it is easier to hear from outside.

We refuse to launch a campaign when nobody is in a position to answer within the day. That is not a posture: at this level, running advertising with no answer buys conversations for the shop next door, with your money, and we would carry the responsibility for as long as we invoice.

We refuse to propose this level when the problem is elsewhere — a price out of the market, a reputation to repair, a product that has to be explained first. We say so even when it means selling nothing that month, because a starter in those conditions spends a budget that would have served elsewhere.

And we will tell you to suspend if the first fortnight shows that conversations are arriving and are not being handled. That reduces our invoice, it moves the work towards something we do not sell at this level, and it is the only recommendation that serves the client who listens to it — it is also, to close this series of ninety-four articles, the position we try to hold in all of them: saying what will not work, before being paid to do it.

Frequently asked questions

How quickly do we have to answer?

As fast as possible, and the first message matters more than the complete answer — "I’ll check and confirm within the hour" costs ten seconds and keeps the conversation open. Somebody writing to three businesses does it in the same minute: you are not judged on your response time, you are ranked by it.

Do we have to display prices?

Not necessarily, but an answer has to exist and whoever replies has to know it. A price, a starting price, or a precise rule with an order of magnitude. "It depends" is read as evasion, and a business where only the owner knows the prices has one person able to hold a commercial conversation.

Who should handle this at our end?

A named person, not a department or an inbox three people watch. They need to see messages, know prices and availability, and decide alone in ordinary cases. Often somebody from the counter, rarely the owner. The test: if we call tomorrow to ask what customers asked about this week, who answers.

What do late replies cost us?

We do not give that figure. The people who left have left no trace and no list of them exists: they are unreachable by construction, since being reachable is exactly what failed. Measure your own first-response time for two weeks instead — that is entirely knowable.

How long before we can judge?

The end of the second month, and the date is fixed in advance with its criteria — otherwise the campaign is judged on the day somebody loses patience. During the first three weeks do not look at sales: look at whether conversations arrive, whether they are handled quickly, and what they run aground on.

What if our page has posted nothing for months?

That is repaired in half a day and is often worth more than the first month’s budget: three recent posts, an exact address, correct hours, a photograph of the frontage. A dormant page is a stronger signal than any advertisement, and the campaign would bring people who leave again.

Where we come in

On Thursday at two in the afternoon, your phone number decides half the result, and that half is not for sale.

We check the eight points with you present, before the first advert.
We write into the contract who answers and at which hours.
We leave you the test call: it happens today, without us.

We will not answer messages in your place: at this level the reply comes from your side, or it is not worth what it cost.

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