Digital marketing in Costa Rica

The question nobody asks their agency

Before you compare proposals, ask each one how they get paid. It decides what they will recommend for the next two years, and it is the one thing a sales call never volunteers.

• A percentage of your ad spend. The most common model: the agency keeps 10% to 20% of whatever you put into Google and Meta. Read that again. Nobody paid that way will ever tell you to cut a budget that is already working well enough.
• A flat monthly fee. The incentive goes neutral — the agency earns the same whether your budget goes up or down, so it can recommend switching a campaign off. This is how we charge.
• Pay per result. Sounds perfect and rarely is. It requires agreeing on what counts as a result and auditing it, and it pushes the provider toward whatever lead is cheapest to generate rather than the customer you want.

A percentage model does not make an agency dishonest. It means you should read their "let's increase the budget" emails with different eyes.

What we run

Google Ads

Search campaigns for people already looking for what you sell — the highest intent traffic that exists. For hotels, clinics, law firms and anything a person needs urgently, this is usually where the first dollar should go.

Meta Ads — Instagram and Facebook

For demand you have to create rather than capture: products people did not know they wanted, launches, events, remarketing to people who already visited your site. Cheaper per click than Google and worse at closing, which is exactly why the two belong together.

Content for social media

Photography, short video and copy that sounds like your business instead of a template. Ads amplify whatever you already have; if what you have is a blurry photo and a price, more budget just shows it to more people.

WhatsApp, where Costa Rica actually replies

Almost every campaign here ends in a WhatsApp conversation, and that is where most of the money leaks: an enquiry at 9pm that gets answered at 11am the next day is usually gone. An AI agent can answer, quote and book at any hour and hand you only the conversations worth your time.

Foreign-owned business? Read this part

If you moved here or invested here, you are competing on two fronts at once and most agencies only see one. The traveler searching from abroad, the resident foreigner searching in English, and the Costa Rican customer searching in Spanish behave like three different markets — different words, different seasons, different prices per click.

We split them into separate campaigns from day one. It costs the same to run and it is the only way to find out which of the three is paying for the other two, which is information nobody hands you at the end of a translated campaign.

What you get every month

• What came in: enquiries, calls, WhatsApp conversations and where each came from.
• What it cost: spend, cost per enquiry, and which campaigns earned or lost.
• What we changed, and why.
• What we recommend for next month — including "spend less here" when that is the answer.

No dashboard with forty metrics nobody opens. Four questions, answered in the language you run your business in.

When we will tell you not to advertise

If your website does not convert, if you cannot answer enquiries within a few hours, or if your margin cannot survive the cost per customer in your category, ads will lose you money faster and more reliably than doing nothing. We say so before taking the project, because the business that felt pushed into spending never comes back.

Often the honest first step is cheaper than advertising: fix the website, or start with SEO and let the traffic build without a meter running.