Overview
The Agency account is pretty much what it sounds like. An account with features that makes life easier if you are an Agency - or more specifically, if you have clients.
You might have realised by now that CAASie is a pre-paid advertising system. So, naturally if you’re running an Agency, you don’t want credits belonging to one of your clients funding a campaign run for another client. That would be bad.
The Agency account cannot run campaigns for itself, but what it does let you do is create separate clients with their own separate credits so that each client’s campaigns run in their own unique silo.
Agency Account Basics
The key thing to know about Agency accounts is that its sole purpose is to let you create and manage campaigns on behalf of clients. Let’s walk through some of the core concepts here. Firstly though, we’ll start with creating an Agency account in the first place.
Set up an agency account
You can choose your account type when you first register. When asked, pick ‘Agency’ and not ‘Advertiser’. It’s pretty much as simple as that.
If you’ve accidentally changed your account type, reach out to the team (there’s a live chat!) and we can help switch your account type over.
What are Clients?
Well, you obviously know what a client is. In the context of CAASie, though, a client is essentially just a sub-organisation within your Agency account.
Think of each client as having their own internal CAASie account. You can’t (yet) invite people into a client organisation, but it acts as its own entity. It has its own credits, its own campaigns, its own ads, and so forth. This allows you, as an Agency account-holder to manage the entirety of the client campaigns without needing to sign up with 50 different email addresses. Yay.
Campaigns
Agency accounts can only create campaigns for clients. In other words, unlike an Advertiser, it is not possible for an Agency to run a campaign from themselves. You must create at least one client before creating a campaign.
See how to create and manage clients here ->
Agency vs. Advertiser
UI Changes
The UI of the platform looks much the same for Agencies and Advertisers. There are a couple of differences to bear in mind if you’re coming from an Advertiser to an Agency or vice versa.
Sidebar
First off, as we mentioned earlier, Agencies cannot run campaigns for themselves. By extension, this means that Agencies cannot have an “Agency-wide” credit store either. So, when you’re looking at your sidebar, you won’t see a credit count.
You’ll also, as an agency, get a link to see the list of your clients. This is (for obvious reasons), not available in an Advertiser account.
Home Page
The home page of an Agency account is slightly different to that of an Advertiser as well. At first glance both pages would look the same, but you’ll notice that you’re initially greeted by an Agency-wide campaign performance graph.
This graph shows you the impressions you’ve delivered as an Agency (over a 7-day period) by default. However, you’re able to pick specific clients (on the right-hand-side) to be able to see performance overviews for a specific client.
Organisation Page
As you might expect, the organisation page of an Agency looks quite significantly different from an Advertiser. The primary reason for this is the credit-ownership piece. Here, you’ll find that adding credits will force you to have to pick a client or create a new one to create it for.
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New Campaign Wizard
The new campaign wizard also has a couple of Agency-specific changes. Namely the one step to choose the client that the campaign in question belongs to, which is (as you can imagine), compulsory!
You also get a brief look at the client’s current credit level, as well as their current spend rate. This should help you work out whether you need to top up their credits (or not) for the given campaign.
Which should you pick?
Honestly, this is entirely up to you.
You might pick an Agency account because you’re running campaigns on behalf of clients rather than for your own organisation. You might also pick an Agency account because you want to keep different “divisions” of your business (e.g. a franchise-style organisation, or one with branches) billed separately.
In any case, the benefit of the Agency account is the centralisation of control to a single set of users, but also the ability to ensure that all the campaigns you’re running can be completely isolated from each other.
If you want the most straight-forward and simple way to get started with CAASie, we’d recommend picking an Advertiser account.
More Reading
Learn about client management here ->
