This is the story of how our suite of custom developed tools, SpecsTech, enables MG OMD to create difference that matters to Specsavers, unlocking over £43M in sales revenue annually.

This entry outlines a unique and highly innovative real-time search solution that enabled AIA New Zealand to capitalise on its big spending competitors. Armed with the insight that the highest intent prospects hit Google within minutes of a life or health insurance TV ad running, we built a solution that triggered search bids based on competitor TV ads running in real-time. This meant AIA’s smaller budget was focused on being in the moments that really matter. This Region-first solution, that uses real-time data and search technology powered by smart analytics, has driven outstanding results.

The Digitas Integrated Search team recognizes that today's consumer search journey is a personalized, multi-platform, and multi-touch experience. Success for brands hinges on capturing consumer attention and spurring action in as many moments as possible. To push the boundaries of search, we use and develop actionable tools that help us understand consumer search behavior and intent, the competitive landscape, and customer experience. Our Integrated Search team is woven into our Multicultural Center of Excellence, and regularly produces guidance and thought leadership for our teams and clients on how to build a diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplace. We’re proud of the progress we have made and will continue to guild. By collaborating and using our collective strengths, we’ve been able to drive growth across multiple owned, earned, and media channels throughout the entire consumer journey, enabling our clients to react in real time and maximize their growth.  

Our Discoverability team’s current theme is “Elite.” We focus on modeling our team behaviors after elite athletes regarding our work, business and culture. At VMLY&R, we're not just a global agency with 13,000+ employees worldwide. We're a team of elite search athletes who push the industry forward and elevate our clients in innovative ways. But we don't just deliver results - we do it with an elite mindset and approach. We've grown agency contribution by over $9M in revenue, designated health and commerce workflows and leaders resulting in over $433,000 in health client revenue and over $535,000 in commerce client revenue in Q1 2023 alone. We've earned 35 new certifications, presented at 14 conferences and webinars, and published 5 online thought leadership pieces and 2 podcasts. And we've planted over 2,400 trees through our work with TREES for the Future Foundation. We've faced challenges along the way, from resourcing and staffing to economic downturns. But as elite search athletes, we prioritize seamless communication and cooperation, leadership development, continuous learning, and keeping a competitive edge in our field. That's why we're taking on new growth verticals in 2023 and chasing after a revenue goal of $11 million. Because at VMLY&R, we're not just elite search athletes - we're champions.

Performics @ Starcom, a globally recognised performance marketing arm of Publicis Media, has taken the search industry by storm with innovative strategies and data-driven approach, achieving remarkable success over the past year. It’s all in the numbers: a 71% all-time high new business conversion rate, 95% client retention rate, and 7 new business wins (including Western Union and Bank of America) - all whilst taking home 18 shiny industry awards this year alone. Along with delivering effective cross-channel performance strategies, insights, and campaigns - the team has also been busy pioneering groundbreaking proprietary solutions for clients: from the machine learning tool ‘Intent-based planning’ which uncovers user motivations behind each click, to ‘AccuSuite’ our bespoke tool for forecasting. This has catapulted us into the realm of tech-savvy trailblazers, armed with cutting-edge tools and a data-driven mindset perfectly attuned to conquer the search landscape. And with 90% of our team recommending Starcom as a great place to work, it’s no wonder we’re producing amazing work. From innovative data-driven content strategies for Primark to crucial initiatives that make a positive impact, like bringing all our expertise to support the charity Choose Love in their Ukrainian Appeal. Our team of brilliant minds thrives on collaboration and innovation - making the Performics @ Starcom team deserving recipients of this award.

Razorfish is a full-service marketing agency. We define strategies, build brands, create experiences and consistently deliver results beyond expectations in organic search for some of the world’s largest companies. Our culture sets us apart from other entries with a flexible work environment, conference speaking opportunities, DE&I initiatives and more. For our Trojan (Church & Dwight) client, we took on a risqué challenge and found “squirting” had over 90K average monthly searches, but the content was owned by porn sites and misinformation within search. Our team helped create squirting content to give Trojan visibility for this topic within the SERP. This resulted in ranking for +140 terms above the fold and +900 Page 1 terms. For our Grey Goose client, we helped them own the martini cocktail in all marketing channels - primarily by developing relevant FAQ content. Throughout 2022, the increased rankings from this content resulted in a 50% increase in martini organic clicks YoY. Our agency should win the Search: Agency Team of the Year Award because we are experts going above and beyond the requests of clients, allowing us to gain Fortune 500 clients over the last year. We implement new technology and help clients demonstrate the ROI of SEO, are active in the SEO community and dedicated to sharing knowledge.

Auto Trader is the No.1 destination for used car buyers in the UK and has also made strides in the new car market, but found it was losing out on organic traffic in the fast-growing EV market. The business relies on driving a high volume of potential buyers to the platform, in order to attract paid listings, so maximising organic traffic is central to commercial success. Auto Trader only held a 1.86% share of voice for the top 200 EV-related keywords, so turned to Reddico for help. Our objectives for the campaign were: - Grow share of voice for the top 200 EV keywords from 14th place at 1.86% into a top 5 position with a +5% share. - Boost organic traffic to the electric cars subfolder from 8,000 to 50,000 visits per month (5x). The solution combined: - A detailed analysis of the top 50 competitors, by organic share of voice and backlink profile, and the behaviour of target domains. - Creating six carefully selected content assets we were confident would be well received by webmasters. - PR outreach to suitable websites to secure valuable placements and backlinks, with content launched in four phases. We not only delivered on these objectives but significantly exceeded them: - Auto Trader climbed 11 places to hold the 3rd highest share of voice for the top 200 EV keywords at 7.8%. - Organic traffic to Auto Trader’s electric cars folder has grown to 110,000 per month (12x).

2023 has been the year of AI in marketing. The buzz is huge, with automation set to change all our lives. But can AI do our work for us? This entry will show that automation is no replacement for expert teams. Instead, we need to work together with AI to create success for brands. Isuzu’s previous partners had let Google’s Automated tools take control of their PPC account, making decisions on campaigns, keywords and strategy. And we had a sneaking suspicion that this was driving inefficiencies in performance. They brought tmwi on board to audit and improve, and we brought the AI under control. Our search experts discovered Google was running automations that spent money, but didn’t deliver results. We then built a paid search strategy that works, pausing and limiting automations to overlay our own expertise in the account, identifying wasted spend and opening up new opportunities. Our results in just 3 months speak for themselves: Clicks +39% with spend -12%, meaning 57% more spend efficiency. And 3-month targets smashed in just 2 months! More bang for Isuzu’s buck. It’s not that the automations are bad - they’re smart in principle - but brands must have oversight of these or the computers run away chasing the biggest volumes, not the best outcomes. Targets smashed, robots tamed and clients delighted. This is a win not just for us, but for all marketers who know that their knowledge can steer the technology in the right way. That’s the power of people!

In a world where automation and AI is becoming ever more prominent (especially across digital marketing), it’s important that we embrace these tools and harness their power for good by helping businesses increase profits, reducing wastage and freeing us from carrying out boring, repetitive tasks that no one enjoys (for example, generating reports first thing on a Monday morning). This submission showcases how automation can be used to skyrocket performance and create a happier, more sustainable and more productive work environment for us all, I am yet to see this level of automation and efficiency elsewhere.

Zipcar’s goal is to be the go-to name in car-sharing. They want to make life simpler and easier for city dwellers, giving members easy access to vehicles whenever and wherever they need them. In 2020, and during the Coronavirus pandemic, a record number of Londoners joined Zipcar - a service that was deemed essential. However, in 2021, continued lockdowns, a shift in work patterns, lack of brand awareness and rises in the cost of living impacted Zipcar’s customer acquisition and resulted in lower usage rates. Zipcar approached Tug with ambitious growth targets, as they looked to be more responsive to an ever-changing UK landscape whilst still positioning themselves as a sustainable and affordable solution. Tug employed SEO and PPC tactics, building three flexible media strategies to drive Awareness, Acquisition and Activation to tackle this challenge. The campaign was a huge success, with a 20% increase in new users to the website, new member acquisition up 40% YoY and online bookings up a further 54% YoY.

We increased visibility 7 fold! 60% more organic conversion YoY by the end of the award period Over 3,000 linking domains 226% rise in organic Car sessions last 12 months compared to the previous 69% rise in organic all sessions last 12 months compared to the previous We have regularly gained topical links from the likes of UK Motor 1, Business Motoring, Autoevolution and the motoring sections of iNews, Express and The Sun. We’ve also gained links from hard-to-reach publications such as Hypebeast, Independent, The Next Web, Mashable, Digital Trends, BGR, Business Insider, T3 and many, many more.

It was reported that within Q1 2022, the number of SME insolvencies was the highest since 2012 (source: money.co.uk). Along with a 23% increase in SME business failures, it has been a challenging time for SMEs due to the lasting impacts of COVID and the cost of living (source: money.co.uk). Virgin Money offer unrivalled support for SMEs with their business banking offering with the revolutionary market-first no monthly fee, mentoring for start-ups and masterclasses for SME owners. However, there is little awareness of this offering. The Personal Current Account webpage was visited 1.4x more times compared to the business banking webpage. Virgin Money have been growing their personal current account offering to become one of the UK’s leading banks, being awarded Best Current Account provider by MoneyFacts in 2022. How could we replicate this success with their B2B offering? When briefed on Q1 activity for 2023, as a search team we had to develop a strategy which would not only generate more awareness but drive applications of business banking accounts. There are 5.5 million SMEs in the UK as of 2022, 4 in 10 had never switched bank accounts (source: Finder) so there was scope to generate more awareness and influence consideration of switching. The client tasked us to an increase in applications by 29% YoY at a 44% better CPA with a 28% decreased budget 225k. An ambitious target considering the reducing rate of SMEs within the UK!

Calendly was focused on reaching untapped international markets and driving high quality leads. To accomplish these marketing objectives, Closed Loop leveraged Google's Market finder to launch strategic campaigns, focused on the international markets with the most growth opportunities, consolidated by region & language so we could capture the most conversion data possible to power AI. We initially measured conversion volume and cost per sign up, and then shifted goals further down the funnel and leveraged tROAS bidding to help us not only meet our marketing objectives, but exceed them.

Verint had a major site migration, a blog subdomain migration, and several acquired business unit migrations to perform. We needed to ensure the migrations went smoothly, we were also tasked with improving the site experience and increasing the amount of organic search traffic. Verint was looking to increase non-branded traffic in a very competitive space and seeking ways to expand their content into new topic areas where their competitors were winning. Many of the brand names for their solutions are not what users are searching for, so they were looking for research and guidance. NP Digital closely partnered with the Verint product and marketing teams to develop a holistic SEO strategy as a part of their website migration. Our efforts encompassed in-depth research, targeted content development, the implementation of technical SEO best practices and Digital PR. If executed properly platform and website migrations can have a huge impact on traffic, the user-experience, leads and the bottom line. Within only 30 days of launch, virtually all Verint’s migration KPI’s increased. As of Q1 2023, Verint had over 42,000 keywords ranking on Google, up more than 50% since engagement kickoff. Post migration, Verint saw a 210% increase in non-branded organic search clicks year-over-year, a 32% increase in total clicks coming from organic search.

At Stella Rising, a marketing and media services agency where we create transformative business value for superstar brands, we are thrilled to support Persil®, a laundry care brand owned by Henkel. For Persil®, we aimed to enhance their online presence and drive traffic to their laundry tips content. Our strategy encompassed several key elements aimed at achieving growth and improving user experience. One essential aspect was the prioritization of content refreshes and internal linking optimizations. By updating and improving existing content and ensuring seamless navigation through internal links, we sought to enhance the overall user experience on the Persil® website. Additionally, we approached SEO implementation creatively to overcome hurdles posed by development resources. We utilized the advanced features of the SEOScout tool to implement various technical recommendations. This allowed us to make changes to title tags, meta descriptions, optimize anchor text, add and tweak blocks of copy, and even incorporate dynamic structured data for star ratings. Our thorough approach to SEO for Persil® drove significant organic search growth across key KPIs, elevating the brand amidst its laundry care competitors. Thank you for considering our work and we wish best of luck to all The Drum entrants!

One of the key services Trade Me (the leading New Zealand-based auction and classified advertising website with over three million active members and over one million listings) provides is Trade Me Jobs, where employers can post jobs and job seekers can search for vacancies. However, Trade Me isn’t the exclusive player in the space, it has to compete with dedicated job sites including Seek, CareersNZ and Tradestaff. The brief to Reddico was clear – boost organic non-branded traffic for Trade Me Jobs: At the start of the project, the site attracted an average of 24,000 organic non-branded clicks per month. Our objective was to increase traffic by 40%, an increase of 9,600 clicks per month. The key challenge we faced, was complex technical problems preventing areas of the site from being discoverable by search engines. The solution was exceptional in its scale, ingenuity and impact. Our team undertook: - Extensive competitor analysis - Bulk-changing of headings, titles and meta descriptions across hundreds of URLs - Finding and filling keyword gaps - Enhancements in internal linking - Improvements in crawl efficiencies This solution resulted in thousands more page-1 rankings and non-branding page-1 rankings. This proved extremely effective: we exceeded our target by 15%, increasing Trade Me Jobs organic non-branded traffic by 13,000 visits per month – that’s 55% growth.

In Q2 of 2023, Google started prioritizing local “map-pack” results above the campus pages on UTI.edu. Almost overnight, most of UTI's national organic rankings were pushed down the result’s page (often below the fold), causing significant decreases in organic sessions and new student inquiries from organic search across all UTI’s Core programs. UTI tasked NP Digital (NPD) with recapturing the lost organic search visibility, sessions, and inquiries for their Core Programs. In addition to the Core Programs, we were asked to grow search awareness and consideration for all New Programs and UTI’s campus expansion efforts. NPD partnered with the UTI marketing team to develop a holistic SEO and local content strategy. Our efforts encompassed in-depth research, on-page optimization, targeted content development, Google Business Profile optimization, digital PR, local citation building and the implementation of technical SEO best practices. In under 3 months, total organic sessions and inquiries bounced back, above pre-Google update levels. Our focus on local results and their associated pages increased organic search inquires by +18% year-over year. Location and program pages that were hit the hardest (Houston, Orlando, Sacramento, Dallas, and Long Beach) saw session increases of 75%+ from their lowest levels in April of 2023.

Dutch Telecoms business, VodafoneZiggo, wanted to optimize its paid search performance to drive cost and time efficiencies and increase revenue, while protecting its brand from trademark infringements. Partnering with search intelligence platform, Adthena, the brand gained unique analysis and insights into market trends, ad copy messaging, and Google’s Performance Max campaign performance, as well as alerts to competitors bidding on VodafoneZiggo’s brand terms. By employing this holistic strategy, the business was able to not only hit all of its targets but significantly exceed them. In utilizing Adthena, VodafoneZiggo gained a 70% boost in impression share, generated a 500% increase in orders and achieved a revenue that was 29% above its target. The business was also able to save over 60% of their paid search spend target.

Scrap Car Comparison (SCC) is a UK-based scrap car comparison service, allowing customers to find the best deal for scrapping their vehicles. Having worked with this client for a number of years, we’ve established that SCC’s target audience is anyone that owns a car that may at some point need to scrap it. For this campaign specifically, we wanted to target people who are ready to scrap a vehicle but who, in the context of the cost-of-living crisis in 2022, may not be able to afford a new car to replace their current vehicle – enter our ‘Buried Treasure’ nationwide treasure hunt... With the challenge to come up with a ‘big’ idea which would help drivers who were ready to scrap an old vehicle, the Propellernet team developed a campaign around the launch of the world’s first new car treasure hunt – where one lucky winner could alleviate the costs and concerns of getting a new car, and win one for free, if they could only find where its keys were hidden. By taking a relatively unknown (and unsexy) brand and using creativity, we were able to place Scrap Car Comparison in publications all over the world, including in front of whole new audiences, thanks to new linking domains and mainstream news and social media coverage of the story. Results spanning traditional media coverage, impactful links for SEO and social media engagement allowed us to widen SCC’s audience and place the brand front and centre of a global story.

This is how we combined the powers of Freedom Finance, their CRM, RocketMill and Google to transform always-on paid search activity and drive a 344% increase in gross profit. Using a combination of online and offline data to assign a value to each lead driven for Freedom Finance, our two-phased approach fueled Google’s algorithm with the knowledge needed to reach the most valuable customers at the lowest cost. Read on to find out how.

Safestyle came to us with the task of improving the quality of leads that PPC was driving, in addition they also required the ability to be able to flex spend towards specific sales teams. We analysed Safestyle customer journeys on and offline looking at channel, on-site and sales rep. engagement. It was clear that this journey was fragmented. The business didn’t have a paid search strategy that optimised towards the right business metrics and as a result they had no ability to feed regional sales hubs with quality leads. The decision was therefore made to restructure Safestyle’s Paid Media account. Our location based segmentation could then allow us to flex spend in line with the requirements of specific sales teams across the country. This resulted in: - 10% Improvement in lead quality - 27% Improvement in qualified lead volume - 10% Reduction in cost “The team at Journey Further truly exceeded our expectations in restructuring our Paid Media strategy. Their expertise in location-based segmentation and utilising the latest technology allowed us to flexibly allocate our spend to specific sales teams, resulting in a significant improvement in lead quality and volume, as well as a reduction in cost. We couldn’t be happier with the results and highly recommend them to any business looking to take their Paid Media efforts to the next level.” Adam Pawson, Safestyle Marketing Director.

In 2022, the business insurance market size had dwindled due to the after-effects of the pandemic, and coupled with weakening brand awareness, Hiscox’s organic performance was waning. Search traffic took a hit when Hiscox was severely affected by the May 2022 Core Algorithm Update, particularly for their top commercial terms and sales drivers. Our top priority was to rescue commercial performance by recovering rankings quickly and getting the business back on track for YoY growth. Our objectives were to: 1) Minimise the impact on commercial performance including organic traffic and conversion numbers, the algorithm update and other external market factors. 2) Identify why Hiscox was so heavily impacted and discover which of its competitors were facing a similar situation. 3) Recover rankings of commercial head terms “public liability insurance” and “business insurance”. 4) Learn how to avoid or minimise impacts from future Google algorithm updates. We identified three core challenges: 1) Lower brand awareness 2) Finite customer base due to brand positioning and business priorities 3) Limitations on maximum attainable position To overcome these challenges, we created a content-diversified strategy. We focused on optimising existing commercial content for rankings recovery and creating new informational and experience-led content in the form of blogs and claims stories. Our enhancements across key commercial pages had an almost-immediate effect – boosting Google visibility, increasing sales, and smashing targets. Our holistic SEO strategy successfully turned their pandemic lows into performance highs, breaking several historic records since then.

In the highly competitive care home sector, which has transformed significantly post-COVID-19, Care UK faced the challenge of growing search visibility to increase sales enquiries. Their SEO goals centred on efficiently targeting and engaging care seekers at the top-of-funnel stage to boost new customer leads. Highlights include creating valuable content, optimising location pages, integrating relevant keywords, improving local search map-pack presence, and enhancing user journeys through strategic interlinking to improve conversion rate of organic search traffic. These initiatives collectively strengthened our online presence and engagement, and significantly improved sales call volumes from organic search. The results included: • 29% increase in organic keywords on page 1 in Google • 42% improvement in engagement rate from organic search traffic • 8% increase in sales calls from organic search • 370% increase in sales calls from local listing results • 332:1 ROI on SEO investment

Our objective was to increase search market share, drive sustainable, long-term growth and deliver incremental traffic and sales. A minimum of 33% of all People’s Postcode Lottery ticket sales goes to charity, so not only was this growth key for driving success for our client, but also to help to increase support for these worthwhile causes. We built a collaborative relationship with the client-side Performance and Data and Analytics teams to identify key lifetime value (LTV) attributes and trends. This insight enabled us to accelerate activity away from the standard CPA model, allowing us to reach peak search maturity and incorporate true lifetime value into our reporting and optimisation. By identifying LTV, and incorporating this model within our floodlight configuration, we were able to show the real long-term value of our search activity, unlocking a huge 300% increase in budget, and delivering more than 22,000 additional sales vs. the previous period (despite this being a seasonally lower period historically). During the three months since implementation, we’ve also seen CPA come down 43% - proving long-term growth doesn’t have to mean short-term sacrifices in efficiency. Following the huge success, described by People’s Postcode Lottery as “nothing short of exceptional”, the higher spend levels are set to continue, and we’re now incorporating more LTV attributes into the model, watch this space!

The Babybel team came to Spark to increase branded and non-branded visibility for their new Plant-Based snack. Bel needed an innovative strategy to focus on increasing visibility and brand awareness aimed at driving increased organic traffic to their channels. First, we had to understand how the target audiences engaged with Babybel usually. Our meticulous research revealed that UGC video, particularly of unwrapping and tasting Babybel on social channels, drove the main engagement and high view rates. We knew that video is a powerful content asset for driving organic traffic. So, as well as typical SEO on-page optimisation and boosting FAQ effectiveness, we used the keyword data set against the video trend for tasting challenges, such as LADbible’s ‘Snack Wars’, to propose a more light-hearted, authentic yet budget-friendly ‘taste-test’ video. We invited both vegan and non-vegans to our studio set up to try the product and share their thoughts – good, bad or otherwise! Relying on resourcefulness to stay on budget, we developed a collaborative approach between ourselves, our in-house creative design team (instead of the high-end film unit) and the client. We hosted the video on a landing page that targeted all the keywords. And stepping out of our SEO remit, we provided content for the client’s social channels to further drive organic traffic and social signals to search engines. This combination meant we secured #1 ranking.

Libresse, the global taboo-breaking feminine hygiene brand, embarked on a mission to dismantle the stigma surrounding women+’s intimate experiences, fostering inclusivity and understanding. The challenge was to help Libresse's appear in places where women+ were looking for period-positive, inclusive health content around topics such as; first periods, parenting and period problems. With a budget of €244K, Libresse aimed to achieve substantial growth in organic traffic, increase keyword rankings, and empower women+ globally with life-changing information about their health. Zenith, in partnership with Libresse, formulated a multi-market content strategy, generating SEO-optimised editorial content addressing taboo subjects with a global resonance. This included an ambitious transcreation and localisation project, ensuring our SEO-optimised health content was seen far and wide in all 10 Libresse key markets, to allow women+ to live more fearlessly than ever before. The consistent SEO-focused approach has led to a record-breaking year of organic results for Libresse, including 7.6M total incremental organic sessions, 2M monthly organic clicks, 605K keywords currently ranking on Page 1 of Google and an ROI of 745%. Zenith smashed their targets and pulled off the monumental task of coordinating multi-language SEO content on a global scale. But more importantly, they made life-changing health information on many of the taboos that women+ face more accessible to the people that need it.

This is the story of how our suite of custom developed tools, SpecsTech, enables MG OMD to create difference that matters to Specsavers, unlocking over £43M in sales revenue annually.

As the UK’s number one Quit Smoking brand - a destination for one third of people looking to quit smoking – Nicorette didn’t have the site to match. Our research revealed that despite the brand's number one position in the category on metrics like engagement, user experience and ranking for critical topics and keywords, Nicorette was not in a competitive position vs competing brands. The legacy site was also lacking in functionality, limiting what we could achieve – so a migration became our primary objective. This would enable us to create a site from the ground up, with SEO and UX at the forefront, on a platform that would bring our ideas to life. Not only did we improve the site’s overall functionality, but by building a targeted audience strategy, we expanded and deepened the content available to consumers in the form of quizzes, product selectors, content hubs on how to quit vaping, and more. The migration was a roaring success, with no significant technical issues identified within the post-launch technical audit. As a result, there was no negative impact on visibility in the eyes of Google. Among other incredible results, organic conversions have increased significantly since launch with an increase of +90% YoY. This also included a +113% increase YoY in January which is a peak period for Nicorette. Plus, organic conversion rate increased from 3.49% to 3.96%. These additional conversions have generated over £20,000 additional revenue so far for Nicorette – purely from organic search!

The infant formula category is perceived to have very little difference between products, making it difficult to drive preference for one brand over another. Compounding this general category hurdle, what happens when a national baby formula shortage caused by a competitor brand throws the whole category into crisis? It’s hard enough to distinguish between formula brands in general, but even more so when a shortage means parents don’t know where to turn or whom they can trust. Against this backdrop, Reckitt Nutrition ramped up production of Enfamil baby formula to get product onto shelves and meet the surging demand while also leveraging a revamped search methodology unseen in the category, to establish trust with consumers and provide vital information to parents in need. Concurrently, Enfamil partnered with Everyday Health (EDH), a trusted source of information on parenting-focused topics from pregnancy through children’s health, to pivot its entire marketing approach into a singular trusted voice that parents could turn to in a time of uncertainty and stick with long after. In doing so, the brand boosted both sales and affinity, all while measuring results in the most granular of detail to maximize return on ad spend and increase business results.

Heather Physioc, Chief Discoverability Officer at VMLY&R, started in 2014 with a team of two and brought in $0.5 million in revenue. Nine years later, Heather has grown the team to 50+ professionals in an integrated search team comprised of Organic Search, Paid Search and Performance Content. She has taken the team to new heights with nine years of consecutive revenue growth. The Discoverability team is currently tracking to hit our revenue goal of $11M for 2023. The exponential growth of the Discoverability team in the past nine years has brought with it major successes and understandable challenges. Heather has led the team through three agency acquisitions. As the global agency is constantly expanding its capabilities, she has shouldered the challenge of exploring new verticals of search work, including Healthcare, Commerce and Automotive. Outside of work, Heather shares her knowledge far and wide, speaking on the international SEO circuit at conferences, including BrightonSEO in San Diego, DigitalZone in Turkey, Friends of Search in the Netherlands, SearchLove, MozCon, and more. Heather can be found traveling or hiking (and blogging along the way on her KCTRVLR blog), crushing pop culture trivia with her teammates in Kansas City, and cultivating a life rich in balance, wellness and relationships. Although Heather faces many demands as a C-Suite executive and her team has grown exponentially, she still takes time to do one-on-one coffee meetings with her team members to personally check in and see how they are doing.

While CNN is already an established authority in the news market, it had not positioned itself for long-term relevance in the local Brasilian market, which is essential for consistently attracting new audiences and readers. NP Digital (NPD) was tasked with increasing organic search visibility, organic sessions, and the number of pageviews coming from the organic search channel. Our critical KPI was to help deliver 1 billion pageviews in 2022. CNN also aimed to increase the percentage of organic traffic compared to all other digital channels. NP Digital partnered with the CNN marketing teams to develop a holistic SEO and content strategy. Our efforts encompassed in-depth research, on-page optimization, targeted content development, best practice workshops, and the implementation of technical SEO best practices at scale. We hit our goal of 1 billion pageviews in early November, over a full month ahead of schedule. 50% of all pageviews originated from the organic search channel, a 91% increase in organic pageviews. 77,500 keywords were now ranking in the top 10 positions on Google, up 19%. The total number of results returning featured snippets in Google increase by 79%. According to ComScore, the CNN Brasil website advanced four positions in the number of unique visitors. With this, the site enters the Top 10, occupying the seventh ranking position in the “News and Information” category.

Greetings Island are an established electronic greetings card company. Their stellar SEO work was not matched by their SEM and they asked us to take help their stalled accounts fly. This is how we grew their revenue by 401% in 8 months at a ROAS that was 35% higher. Three key interventions were pivotal: 1. Helping Google’s smart bidding be smarter: We identified two areas where Google’s bidding was producing very uneven ROAS results: by country and by product type (cards vs invitations). Those two areas were resulting in Google frequently over and under bidding. A simple but elegant account design enabled Google’s bidding to work far more efficiently to generate maximum revenue yield. 2. Focusing on Account Fundamentals: Using our proprietary AI system ATLAS we were able to identify 1000’s of relevant keywords and then generate super specific ads directed to the most relevant pages. 3. Dealing with the unwelcome surprise: A hidden issue with the value being passed back to Google was hampering its ability to optimise. In collaboration with the client, we shifted to passing back lifetime value rather than just the purchase value. The results? Fantastic In the 2nd month revenue had doubled at an improved ROAS. That success persisted through the year and by Dec 22 had reached 401% vs Feb 22. That was achieved whilst also delivering a 35% improvement in ROAS in the same period.

This is the story of how our suite of custom developed tools, SpecsTech, enables MG OMD to create difference that matters to Specsavers, unlocking over £43M in sales revenue annually.

The automotive industry is heavily reliant on the generation of leads to capture interest from users potentially interested in their cars. BMW have historically focused on the volume of leads and overall cost per lead (CPL) generated. With support from Google, we helped transition BMW to a value-based bidding model across their search efforts. We moved BMW’s substantial paid search activity from a cost and conversion-based bidding strategy to a ROAS model. In an industry-first, the model allowed for the prioritisation of lead generation to those actions that would drive sales rather than just lead volume. This was done using a combination of BMW’s first party sales data and historic PPC performance to create a model which placed a value on a customer's propensity to convert to a sale based on the lead type they submitted. As a result, greater value was achieved with ROAS increasing by 82%, with an 80% increase in conversions of BMW’s highest value lead type.

Universal Technical Institute (UTI) is an accredited trade school offering a variety of programs or areas of interest (AOIs) for students looking to pursue a career in the trade industry. Area of Interest (AOIs) programs include Automotive, Diesel, Collision, Welding, Motorcycle, Marine, Energy Technology, Robotics & Automation, Wind and NASCAR Tech. UTI tasked NP Digital with increasing the number of gross and workable inquiries coming from paid search and paid social for all their Core Programs. Our specific targets were to increase gross inquiries by 8%, and workable inquires by 5%. Furthermore, we needed to meet or exceed these goals with a budget that was being reduce by 15%. After conducting a comprehensive account and campaign audit, NP Digital (NPD) implemented restructures across all paid search and paid social platforms (Google, Microsoft, Meta, Snapchat, TikTok). We did this through a phased approach to minimize disruption to performance and prioritized AOIs with the greatest opportunity for improvement. Additionally, we performed creative testing across ad formats to help increase conversion and drive scale. And, leveraged AI technology to drive savings while minimizing impact to performance. When looking at all paid media under NPD management, comparing restructured performance to legacy campaign performance, workable inquiries have increased 8% and gross inquiries increased 11%, significant increases despite a 15% decrease in year-over-year paid media budget.

Citroën, the renowned French car brand part of Stellantis group faced a challenge. Once content with a uniform cost-per-acquisition (tCPA) approach across diverse lead types, their ambitions now soared higher. Enter Starcom and their recipe for success, using Google's Value-Based Bidding as the catalyst for this transformation, armed with data insights and AI prowess that breathed new life into their campaigns. By aligning Google Marketing campaigns with core business objectives and leveraging first-party data, we harnessed the power of Value-Based Bidding. This dynamic approach allowed us to direct budget to the most promising actions, supercharging efficiency and maximising customer value. The results? Nothing short of astounding. Citroën surged past their goals, achieving a remarkable increase in ROAS and a surge in car offer requests. This triumph was no fleeting moment – Citroën swiftly expanded Value-Based Bidding, cementing its role as the cornerstone of Stellantis' strategy.

Our overall goal was to drive leads that could be converted to high value sales for Royal Mail Business Parcels, whilst not cannibalising any traffic intended for the Consumer Parcels arm of the business. We had to achieve this under harsh economic conditions, both within the B2B vertical, and within the company as a whole, which would affect any ability to gain additional budget to achieve further growth. We had to start by restructuring the Royal Mail business account and ensuring there could be little to no overlap with other arms of the Royal Mail or Parcelforce delivery services which also fall under their business. As well as this, we utilised the third-party tool ‘Search Squared’ to automate the cross negatives between the accounts to ensure we would not bid against each other. We also had to consider the ambiguous intent behind a lot of users’ search queries that could be deemed as either looking for a consumer-based delivery service, or for business purposes. This involved utilising an existing ‘grey page’ to qualify the traffic, as well as a more complex bidding model to ensure both business objectives could be optimised towards. Through these actions, as well as seeing much better efficiencies in traffic driven to the account YoY, we were also able to drive 169% more web leads, as well as 17.9% more sales, which would translate into an additional £1.25m in revenue YoY.

Faced with falling consumer confidence and poor ROAS during peak seasons, Cuckooland, a luxury homeware and furniture brand, approached us in mid-2022 seeking help with their paid search and shopping. We immediately identified our main challenges, most notably (1) improving Cuckooland’s ROAS, (2) driving higher-value product sales, and (3) tracking complex customer journeys. To address these issues, a three-step solution was implemented. Firstly, we needed to solve tracking gaps, namely the insufficient tracking on online purchases with finance, and offline purchases. This was resolved through the capture of Google Click IDs, forwarding numbers and order values, in addition to an application that we built that ran atop Google Ads’ API, enabling us to match phone numbers and clicks with transaction values. By tracking these additional routes, we could provide Google with a full value-based picture of the channel performance, primarily so we could implement value-based strategies with full confidence. This was then accomplished through grouping products by margin, with dynamically-updating SKU-level performance data from Google, and the Shoptimised platform. We also optimised feed data both manually and using rules, focusing on top-performing products. Cuckooland ultimately achieved a 72% increase in revenue and 35% increase in ROAS, at only a 27% increase in spend. Their transformation showcased the efficacy of DemandMore’s strategic optimisation and innovative tracking solutions, demonstrating how DemandMore not only successfully ‘navigated the complexities of the paid search channel’, but also personally supported the company’s struggle within the retail field through particularly challenging trading conditions.

Circus PPC helped Miele, a high-end household appliance brand, to optimise their product feed and ultimately, help to drive a 30-day revenue increase of 275%, and a sales increase of 400%, across their 'vacuum' product area. Upon receiving extra budget, the agency looked at how they could best maximise budget efficiency, which ultimately led them to re-imagine how Performance Max campaigns could be edited and explored to better drive revenue in desired areas, and inspire the algorithm for more visibility across individual products. The results saw huge uplifts in revenue, ROI, and sales, along with a significant decrease in cost-of-sale for the client. Following the success of the campaign, the client expressed their interest in continuing to put budget into testing, and Circus won the Miele Ireland account, further strengthening their relationship with the client.

In a world where automation and AI is becoming ever more prominent (especially across digital marketing), it’s important that we embrace these tools and harness their power for good by helping businesses increase profits, reducing wastage and freeing us from carrying out boring, repetitive tasks that no one enjoys (for example, generating reports first thing on a Monday morning). This submission showcases how automation can be used to skyrocket performance and create a happier, more sustainable and more productive work environment for us all, I am yet to see this level of automation and efficiency elsewhere.

How does a luxury travel business come back from the brink of collapse after a global pandemic? With the help of an expert Paid Team, of course! Faced with a generous budget for a second year, our Paid Team set about supercharging the volume of Jacada’s enquiries, with the goal of securing high-value deals. We left no stone unturned to uncover new audiences, utilise new views of data, restructure the account, and work in ingenious ways to uncover new keyword strategies and design visually appealing ads to sell the experience. This, plus using Paid as a test bed for optimising a wealth of landing pages, created a seamless user experience that saw Jacada achieve its best year yet.

After previous content and technical work to the Pour Moi site, an audit showed that the key activity needed to increase organic rankings, traffic and revenue would be to increase the volume of links to the site. However, our strategy was not just to get any links – we wanted them to be both targeted and relevant. We used digital PR to achieve high quality (sites with a domain authority over 30) links from coverage on publications that Pour Moi’s customers and potential customers visit, with stories that aligned with Pour Moi’s brand, products and values.

Libresse, the global taboo-breaking feminine hygiene brand, embarked on a mission to dismantle the stigma surrounding women+’s intimate experiences, fostering inclusivity and understanding. The challenge was to help Libresse's appear in places where women+ were looking for period-positive, inclusive health content around topics such as; first periods, parenting and period problems. With a budget of €244K, Libresse aimed to achieve substantial growth in organic traffic, increase keyword rankings, and empower women+ globally with life-changing information about their health. Zenith, in partnership with Libresse, formulated a multi-market content strategy, generating SEO-optimised editorial content addressing taboo subjects with a global resonance. This included an ambitious transcreation and localisation project, ensuring our SEO-optimised health content was seen far and wide in all 10 Libresse key markets, to allow women+ to live more fearlessly than ever before. The consistent SEO-focused approach has led to a record-breaking year of organic results for Libresse, including 7.6M total incremental organic sessions, 2M monthly organic clicks, 605K keywords currently ranking on Page 1 of Google and an ROI of 745%. Zenith smashed their targets and pulled off the monumental task of coordinating multi-language SEO content on a global scale. But more importantly, they made life-changing health information on many of the taboos that women+ face more accessible to the people that need it.

Adthena’s search intelligence technology, Whole Market View, creates a custom map of the most-relevant search keywords for a customer’s business. This allows them to see every market shift and competitor move in their search landscape, and shape their Google Ads strategy for success. With global economic uncertainty and marketing budgets slashed in a post-pandemic market landscape, Adthena launched Brand Activator - a breakthrough automated add-on solution that immediately helped search advertisers save money and improve Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) when they needed it most. The idea behind Brand Activator is ingeniously simple. It automatically pauses Google Ads bidding on brand terms a company is already winning organically and where no other competitors are bidding. Paying for these “Lone Ranger” terms unnecessarily wastes marketers’ search budgets to the tune of thousands, and even millions in some cases, per year. Just as important, if rival advertisers resume bidding on the term, Brand Activator automatically reactivates bidding to keep the company competitive, so no clicks or market share are lost. Not only that, Adthena enables the savings to be reinvested into higher-performing search terms for strategic growth. Unrivaled in the industry, Brand Activator is now saving up to 20% of brand search spend for 26 enterprise customers in diverse verticals across the globe. One brand’s savings alone are already into the millions and the remaining customers are set to save $2m in the first year collectively.

Intent Based Planning (IBP) is Performics' insights and planning framework using search data to understand user motivations, market trends, and provide a structured approach to cross channel marketing and measurement. There are over 7 billion searches done on Google every day, meaning we are sitting on a wealth of free data about what consumers are searching for. IBP automatically pulls keyword-level historic search data across a full vertical, often in excess of 100k unique keywords, and categorises the terms at scale: by brand, product, motivation, feature, intent and more. This allows our clients, planning and activation teams to understand what their consumers are looking for, when and where, enabling marketers to better plan and target consumers effectively. Even though the tech that sits behind IBP is powerful, it is the insights and business decisions made off the back of the data that really sets it apart.

Using a a data driven customer-centric and empathetic approach, the Schneider Electric North American SEO and PPC teams collaborated on a successful landing page for a new services launch called EcoCare, in service to sales and business goals. Together the teams: - Researched to uncover customer needs and questions - Collaborated with in-house experts: sales, content and media teams to create and deploy content - Elevated primary CTA to support conversion and assist revenue goals - Simplified and provided new SEO optimized content to answer customer questions - Removed extra, underperforming, and multiple gated links that don’t support CTA - Added relevant videos and social proof being used in active marketing - Personalized the experience with a custom Marketo sales page Together the teams achieved: - Primary CTA on landing page: 5X clicks = +550% gain - Primary CTA conversion rate: 16.9% = +14% gain - PPC Ads: +31.1% clicks - +3 KWs p1 Google ranking, +2 rich SERP features - 4.6% reduction in CPC for PPC This initiative highlighted the positive business impact of cross-functional team collaboration using a customer-centric approach.

Zipcar’s goal is to be the go-to name in car-sharing. They want to make life simpler and easier for city dwellers, giving members easy access to vehicles whenever and wherever they need them. In 2020, and during the Coronavirus pandemic, a record number of Londoners joined Zipcar - a service that was deemed essential. However, in 2021 and early 2022, continued lockdowns, a shift in work patterns, lack of brand awareness and rises in the cost of living impacted Zipcar’s customer acquisition and resulted in lower usage rates. Zipcar approached Tug with ambitious growth targets, as they looked to be more responsive to an ever-changing UK landscape whilst still positioning themselves as a sustainable and affordable solution. Tug employed SEO and PPC tactics, building three flexible media strategies to drive Awareness, Acquisition and Activation to tackle this challenge. Key to this campaign was the development and application of two propriety tools: SearchUncut and Lift Analytics. The campaign was a huge success, with a 20% increase in new users to the website, new member acquisition up 40% YoY, and online bookings up a further 54% YoY.

In 2022, the Constellation SEO and SEM teams aligned on a one-search approach that focuses on search as a holistic channel and a behavior. By aligning our SEO and SEM approach for three major product categories – Refrigerators, Vacuums, and Ranges – we set out to achieve the following objectives: - Improve organic search rankings - Improve our quality score for our range and vacuum pages - Reduce our paid cost per click for our refrigerators category, which tends to be where most of our budget is allocated - Improve our paid conversion rate for our range and vacuum pages - Improve overall orders and search revenue Once we aligned on these categories, we chose important landing pages on Samsung.com that we were already driving paid search traffic to but were not performing as well in organic search that we wanted to optimize. Optimizations were fully rolled out by June 2022. We put a measurement plan in place to measure how organic rankings improved, how revenue and orders were impacted across search, and aligned specific paid KPIs to each page. The results were presented as part of our search quarterly business reviews and are reviewed on an ongoing basis with our paid and organic report in Google Ads. We saw positive results across all of our KPIs. Performance of our optimizations to-date show long-term success of keyword alignments and curation toward relevant audiences by page theme and can help save thousands of dollars annually.

In January 2023, true, on behalf of St Austell Brewery, initiated a comprehensive digital strategy merging SEO, paid search, and paid social efforts to amplify direct room reservations for its venues. The objectives were to diminish reliance on Online Travel Agents (OTAs), slash cost-per-acquisition, and elevate overall occupancy rates. St Austell leaned heavily on OTAs to secure room bookings but faced escalating costs and limited ability to build direct customer relationships. The integrated strategy amalgamated paid search, paid social ads, and SEO, bolstering the brand’s presence across digital platforms used by holidaymakers during their research and booking process. This approach lessened the dependency on OTAs but also allowed St Austell to assert its brand identity and distinct offerings, fostering sustained customer relationships. Positioned in the South West of the UK, St Austell's venues experienced a surge in demand post-Covid restrictions. The strategy targeted post-pandemic interest, encouraging staycations in the region by highlighting affordable accommodations and cost-effective activities. The approach catered to older, active couples seeking to escape routine. Insights indicated that UK holidays were preferred due to their affordability, thus aligning with St Austell's focus on cost-effective offerings, like budget-friendly activities and nature-centric experiences. To manage budget constraints and venues (26 in total), the strategy devised quarterly campaigns for subsets of pubs, optimizing SEO and Meta for specific attributes such as dog-friendliness and sea-view rooms. The strategy yielded strong results effectively reducing OTA dependence, establishing direct customer relationships, and achieving substantial growth in room bookings and revenue.

Microminder launched its cybersecurity arm in 2022 when the industry was booming. The market had grown exponentially the previous 2 years and investment was at an all-time high. But once the COVID-19 pandemic ended, business took a sharp, unexpected decline. To compete in a hypercompetitive market that was experiencing regressing demand, Microminder turned to Nuoptima to help them outrank industry giants on Google. Content Our team opted for a topical authority strategy designed to signpost Microminder as a trustworthy source of cybersecurity information, focusing on the following article types: - 105 macro and micro service pages - Informative blog posts on relevant topics - Listicles targeting location + cybersecurity keywords Backlinks For a young website like Microminder’s, building a good backlink profile is a longer-term project. But we needed backlinks to work harder for us short term to achieve our objectives. We targeted the same listicle keywords (location + cybersecurity) with backlink articles on third-party publisher websites. Microminder was positioned first in both articles with a call to action. Both listicles ranked in the top 3 in Google broadening the opportunity for conversions in the short-term, while simultaneously building domain authority for the long-term. Objectives and results Nuoptima exceeded all objectives in 9 months of SEO work. - Increased average monthly traffic from 33 to 2119 (1000) - Increased monthly average organic leads from 0 to 8-12 (5) - 5x'd (2x) average monthly revenue from organic search - Microminder achieved a staggering 16.6x ROAS after our agency fees

In 2022, the business insurance market size had dwindled due to the after-effects of the pandemic, and coupled with weakening brand awareness, Hiscox’s organic performance was waning. Search traffic took a hit when Hiscox was severely affected by the May 2022 Core Algorithm Update, particularly for their top commercial terms and sales drivers. Our top priority was to rescue commercial performance by recovering rankings quickly and getting the business back on track for YoY growth. Our objectives were to: 1) Minimise the impact on commercial performance including organic traffic and conversion numbers, the algorithm update and other external market factors. 2) Identify why Hiscox was so heavily impacted and discover which of its competitors were facing a similar situation. 3) Recover rankings of commercial head terms “public liability insurance” and “business insurance”. 4) Learn how to avoid or minimise impacts from future Google algorithm updates. We identified three core challenges: 1) Lower brand awareness 2) Finite customer base due to brand positioning and business priorities 3) Limitations on maximum attainable position To overcome these challenges, we created a content-diversified strategy. We focused on optimising existing commercial content for rankings recovery and creating new informational and experience-led content in the form of blogs and claims stories. Our enhancements across key commercial pages had an almost-immediate effect – boosting Google visibility, increasing sales, and smashing targets. Our holistic SEO strategy successfully turned their pandemic lows into performance highs, breaking several historic records since then.

Pooch & Mutt is one of the UK’s fastest growing and most-loved pet food brands, focussed on healthy ingredients and natural supplements. To tackle their ambitious growth objectives, we gave their website a thorough tech optimisation, implemented a comprehensive content strategy, and built out high-authority links to reach their core target audience. Our data-led strategy resulted in unprecedented success across all target categories from a holistic SEO strategy, smashing their revenue targets and growing their share in a competitive market – setting Pooch & Mutt up for a strong future trajectory!

1 year after launch, LanternCredit.com had very little non-brand organic search visibility. Lantern’s top competitors (Nerdwallet, Bankrate, and Credit Karma) have aggressive content marketing strategies, robust backlink profiles, and were dominating the search engine result pages (SERPS). While Lantern had some foundational content to leverage, the website simply did not have the content depth required to compete. The Lantern category pages lacked the brand authority and link equity required to gain organic search visibility for competitive, high-volume, non-branded search queries, and there was very little content supporting the less competitive, informational keyword sets. Our strategy was to increase semantic relevance for high scoring, uber-competitive transactional “head” keywords. We would do this by building greater content depth via the less competitive informational “tail” queries. 6 content hubs were established and live under a newly created “/learn” folder, right off the LanternCredit.com root: Personal Loans, Small Business Loans, Student Loans, Credit Cards, Auto Loans, and Mortgages. These keywords had 3,000,000+ supporting keyword derivatives and search demand estimates of over 92,500,000/month tied to them.  The number of keywords ranking in positions 1-3 on Google went from 181 to 2,288. Lantern has now secured 1st page visibility for 8,921 different search queries. 38,394 keywords are now ranking in top 50 positions, primed for further optimization. The number of referring domains pointing to LanternCredit.com increased by 218% YoY. Organic search traffic increased by 561% YoY (+160% greater than the established goal) and organic search conversions increased by 260%.

As the UK’s number one Quit Smoking brand - a destination for one third of people looking to quit smoking – Nicorette didn’t have the site to match. Our research revealed that despite the brand's number one position in the category on metrics like engagement, user experience and ranking for critical topics and keywords, Nicorette was not in a competitive position vs competing brands. The legacy site was also lacking in functionality, limiting what we could achieve – so a migration became our primary objective. This would enable us to create a site from the ground up, with SEO and UX at the forefront, on a platform that would bring our ideas to life. Not only did we improve the site’s overall functionality, but by building a targeted audience strategy, we expanded and deepened the content available to consumers in the form of quizzes, product selectors, content hubs on how to quit vaping, and more. The migration was a roaring success, with no significant technical issues identified within the post-launch technical audit. As a result, there was no negative impact on visibility in the eyes of Google. Among other incredible results, organic conversions have increased significantly since launch with an increase of +90% YoY. This also included a +113% increase YoY in January which is a peak period for Nicorette. Plus, organic conversion rate increased from 3.49% to 3.96%. These additional conversions have generated over £20,000 additional revenue so far for Nicorette – purely from organic search!

Sinful, a Danish sex toy brand, wanted to connect with a new UK audience, attract a new wave of brand advocates and establish themselves as the authority on sexual wellness. We had five months to build the Sinful brand, land some amazing links in online publications and grow online visibility. It’s notoriously hard to build links in the sex toy space, due to the delicate and adult nature of the product. We knew we needed a strong PR strategy that would propel Sinful as the go-to experts on sexual wellness in the UK, take on sexual taboos, all while staying mainstream enough to generate coverage in major online publications. Backed with original findings from surveys, extensive audience research, and insights from Sinful’s sexual wellness experts we took a three-tiered approach to our digital PR strategy incorporating product gifting, survey-led content, and relationship style content. Our strategy opened the conversation around sex-related topics that we knew our audience wanted to read about such as communication around sex, wanting a more fulfilled sex life and keeping things exciting in a long-term relationship. To enhance our campaigns further, our content was coupled with bespoke designs and well-written onsite content. We created content that broke through sexual taboos, positioned Sinful as sexual wellness experts, and achieved placement in health, lifestyle, national and regional press including Metro, The Sun, Huff Post, Indy100, The Independent and more. On top of this Sinful saw significant online growth, amazing improvements in keyword rankings, visibility and revenue.

Adthena’s search intelligence technology, Whole Market View, creates a custom map of the most-relevant search keywords for a customer’s business. This allows them to see every market shift and competitor move in their search landscape, and shape their Google Ads strategy for success. With global economic uncertainty and marketing budgets slashed in a post-pandemic market landscape, Adthena launched Brand Activator - a breakthrough automated add-on solution that immediately helped search advertisers save money and improve Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) when they needed it most. The idea behind Brand Activator is ingeniously simple. It automatically pauses Google Ads bidding on brand terms a company is already winning organically and where no other competitors are bidding. Paying for these “Lone Ranger” terms unnecessarily wastes marketers’ search budgets to the tune of thousands, and even millions in some cases, per year. Just as important, if rival advertisers resume bidding on the term, Brand Activator automatically reactivates bidding to keep the company competitive, so no clicks or market share are lost. Not only that, Adthena enables the savings to be reinvested into higher-performing search terms for strategic growth. Unrivaled in the industry, Brand Activator is now saving up to 20% of brand search spend for 26 enterprise customers in diverse verticals across the globe. One brand’s savings alone are already into the millions and the remaining customers are set to save $2m in the first year collectively.

This is the story of how our suite of custom developed tools, SpecsTech, enables MG OMD to create difference that matters to Specsavers, unlocking over £43M in sales revenue annually.

The Cheltenham Festival is one of the most lucrative events for the betting market, and Sky Bet challenged RocketMill to drive growth in first-time deposits, achieving reduced cost per conversion year-on-year. To meet this challenge, RocketMill combined automation, relevance, and best practice to improve efficiency and increase revenue. Overhauling the campaign structure, splitting it into four key campaigns to have greater control over budgets, we covered every single race and horse running over the five days with bespoke keywords and ad copy. This meant creating 308 unique ads, a mammoth task automated using Google Big Query, data feeds, and scripts. As a result, we grew FTDs 125% while reducing cost per acquisition by 47%. The campaign also saw significant gains in click-through-rate, increasing 209% and a 43% increase in CVR.

This entry outlines a unique and highly innovative real-time search solution that enabled AIA New Zealand to capitalise on its big spending competitors. Armed with the insight that the highest intent prospects hit Google within minutes of a life or health insurance TV ad running, we built a solution that triggered search bids based on competitor TV ads running in real-time. This meant AIA’s smaller budget was focused on being in the moments that really matter. This Region-first solution, that uses real-time data and search technology powered by smart analytics, has driven outstanding results.

This is the story of how our suite of custom developed tools, SpecsTech, enables MG OMD to create difference that matters to Specsavers, unlocking over £43M in sales revenue annually.

Executive summary Omniamed had the goal of accurately targeting healthcare professionals through the use of paid search. To achieve this, SYZYGY employed an AI language model to identify keywords that doctors were more likely to search for. We first selected topics from the enormous collection of medical guidance and journals on Omniameds site. We then used specific prompts, such as 'how would a doctor search for this subject?', to elicit relevant keyword suggestions. Suggestions were then subject to a sign-off process by measuring search volume and a QA of the search terms produced. By leveraging the AI language model's capabilities, SYZYGY could generate valuable insights into the specific language and phrasing doctors used when searching for relevant topics. This approach allowed SYZYGY to refine Omniamed's keyword selection, ensuring that their online content and advertising would align better with medical professional's search habits closely linked to their medical terminology that your civilian would not necessarily know. It also meant we could bid on terms less ‘obvious’ and so benefit from reduced competition which will impact our CPC and in term CPA. This methodology saved the team a considerable amount of time which they could spend on the account optimising as well as driving an additional 6K in highly engaged users. This led to 100 relevant sign ups at 49% lower CPA than the generic terms.

Mr & Mrs Smith are a longstanding client who we delivered 10x growth for in our first three years of managing their accounts. The challenge was how to continue growing their accounts so Q1 2023 would beat Q1 2022, the previous record. We believed the big opportunity was in bidding but the nature of Mr & Mrs Smith’s hotels meant that value based bidding was not working for them. We had a theory that the issue was the variability of their booking value was causing issues for Google’s bidding. The hotel campaigns were organized by geography which meant in one campaign we could have a hotel with £100 per night stays and another at £10000 per night. Our analysis showed that this was the problem. There was a direct correlation between low booking value and low ROI and high booking value and high ROI. Google delivered the overall ROI goal but it was very inefficient. We redesigned the hotel campaigns to group hotels into 7 booking value brackets based on their average booking value. This should help Google’s value based bidding. Q1 2023 results were outstanding. Conversion Value rose by 25% ROI improved by 15% Average Booking Value increased by 24% This is how we delivered breakthrough 25% revenue growth to an already mature account.

Paid search is typically not considered an upper-funnel activity, but by understanding the customer journey and taking an innovative approach to campaign strategy and goals, the Marriott & Publicis Paid Search team was able to create a new tactic that efficiently builds brand awareness. Through targeted, engaging, and efficient search campaigns, we were able to achieve a strong ROI and a higher conversion rate among brand site visitors compared to overall site visitors. By expanding our first-party audience pool for future remarketing efforts, we were also able to achieve long-term benefits for Marriott. Overall, our innovative approach to paid search and our commitment to achieving our specific targets and KPIs has proven to be highly effective in driving traffic, building brand awareness, and generating long-term benefits for the Marriott brand.

Avanti West Coast, the UK’s west coast mainline train service operator, has enlisted our support in enhancing their SEO performance since 2019. At first we focused on decision and conversion-related keywords, but found that our efforts faced challenges after train strikes began in July 2022, which saw many of their leisure customers shifting from trains to cars. We were briefed to find a way to increase Avanti’s visibility for awareness content and entice leisure travellers back to trains. We bridged the content gap to their top competitor by creating 50 additional articles for Avanti’s blog, covering diverse topics from local attractions to travel queries. Based on a reader-first approach to content, we curated 100 ideas and selected the top 50. Leveraging Croud’s network of expert copywriters and editors, we were able to deliver all 50 articles within a turnaround time of just one month. The project delivered remarkable results within 100 days of publication: - The 50 blog posts garnered 10,332 clicks and 841,727 impressions - Overall blog traffic surged, seeing a 294% increase in clicks and a 462% increase in impressions - Rankings to the blog skyrocketed, with Page 1 rankings increasing by 423% and total rankings seeing a 166% uplift The project was regarded as highly successful by the client. After seeing the results of the 50 blog posts, the Avanti team commissioned Croud to create another 90 blog posts to close the gap and start outperforming key competitors.