Marketing Agency in Egypt and the Gulf: How to Choose Well

Agency or freelancer?

The first question to answer before you even look for a marketing agency: what exactly do you need?

• You only need ads run and improved, and the offer, page and tracking are genuinely right? Then one media buyer is enough, cheaper, and faster to communicate with.
• You need creative, pages, tracking and content along with the ads? Then an agency fits better, because those are different jobs and nobody is great at all of them.

The common mistake is paying an agency price and actually getting one media buyer working for them across 8 accounts. Ask by name: who will work on my account? How many other accounts does that person handle?

3 things to ask for before you sign

1. Who exactly will handle the account

At some agencies you meet the co-founder and then the account goes to someone new. A new person handling it isn't the problem. Not knowing about it is. Ask to meet the person who will actually do the work, and ask about a case of their own, not the agency's.

2. How they measure results

This separates an agency selling you numbers from one building you a business. Ask literally: which attribution window does the ROAS you'll show me come from? From the ads manager or the backend? And is cost per order calculated on placed orders or delivered ones?

In the Egyptian market especially, the gap between a placed order and an order that arrived and got paid can turn a winning campaign into a losing one. Details are in the article COD in Egypt and why it changes all your numbers.

3. What stays with you if you leave

A good agency leaves you assets: a properly set pixel, creatives you own, optimized pages, and a written understanding of your customer. A bad agency leaves you a stalled account. Ask from day one: are the accounts and assets in my name or yours?

Marketing agency or digital marketing agency? Same thing

The name changes with who's talking. In Egypt people say marketing agency or advertising agency, and in the Gulf and in formal writing you'll find digital marketing agency or online marketing company. All of them describe the same work, but three very different models hide under that name:

• Media Buying Agency: its core work is buying and managing ads. It works if the offer, page and tracking are already right.
• Full-service agency: ads, creative, content, social media and branding. It works if you're building a brand from zero, and it tends to be more expensive and slower to decide.
• Performance / Growth agency: measures itself on profit rather than reach, working on the offer, funnel, conversion and retention alongside the ads. This is the one for a store that's already selling and wants to grow.

The first question to ask any marketing agency: which of the three models are you? Many sell the third model at its price and deliver the first.

Who we are

Saduq Agency manages ecommerce, real estate and digital product accounts in Egypt and the Arab world, and builds growth systems based on data. I'm Ahmed Ebrahem, its founder, and I handle performance.

Services, work and case studies are all on the agency's site: saduq.agency · Services · Stores we've built · Case studies.

The work covers: media buying on Meta, TikTok, Snapchat and Google, building and optimizing stores and landing pages on Shopify, conversion rate optimization (CRO), creative direction and offers, and tracking and measurement.

And instead of saying we're the best marketing agency, a line every agency uses, here are numbers you can see with their screenshots right now:

• Fashion brand in Egypt: EGP 66.9 million over 4 consecutive months from the store dashboard.
• Fitness brand in the Gulf: $415K over 4 months with a returning customer rate reaching 56.67%.
• Meta account in the Gulf: $1.09 million in purchase value across 448 campaigns.
• Snapchat account: ROAS 13.57 over the account's whole lifetime.

All of these are real screenshots from live dashboards, with brand names hidden and the numbers as they are. See them all here. The full case studies include the period, the attribution window and the source of every number.

How we start

1. A free audit. We look at the account, the page and the offer, and tell you where the money is leaking.
2. If the problem isn't in the ads, we tell you. Sometimes the fix is a page repair and not a bigger budget.
3. If the work is a fit, we start with a written plan covering target numbers and how they'll be measured.

And sometimes we say no. If the margin can't carry the acquisition cost in that market, or the product hasn't yet proven anyone wants it, ads won't fix that. They'll only speed up the loss.