Clickable Product Used: Clickable Pro
Industry: Advertising Agency
Problem Solved:
Max Sequeira, the founder of the Costa Rican advertising agency Noosphera, uses Clickable to help establish himself as a top player in the new and growing online market. After trying some tools that promised to automate his bid management, Max turned to Clickable, preferring an adviser to an application that tried to think for him. Today, Clickable's prioritized recommendations immediately highlight where he should spend his time on each of his client's accounts. And with Clickable's Manage section, simple administrative tasks that used to require multiple interfaces can all be done in a single, user-friendly interface, allowing him to stop navigating the interfaces of multiple search networks, and instead use his time to build his customer's accounts.
The Business
Few of our customers better demonstrate the global reach of search marketing than Max Sequeira, founder of the ad agency Noosphera, which works with internal marketing departments to advise clients ranging from Econolodge to 1-800-BAKERY on their online strategies. They manage search marketing campaigns, arrange partnerships with third-party solutions, and suggest how clients can capitalize on their virtual efforts offline. And they do it all from Costa Rica, positioning themselves as early players in a new and growing market.
Search Advertising without Tools
When Max first began focusing on Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising four years ago, he did most of his work directly in the AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing and Microsoft adCenter web interfaces. He ran custom reports he built in Excel, and supplemented these with analytics from ClickTracks that compared PPC and organic keyword performance. He'd spend about 4 hours a week on each account (twice as much if he were starting a new campaign) and much of this time went into "switching channels" mentally when trying to perform the same tasks in different interfaces. And while Max's Excel and ClickTracks reports highlighted some risks and opportunities, he still needed to keep an eye on nearly every aspect of his campaigns. As he puts today, "you had to do it by hand."
The Perils of "Automation"
It wasn't long before Max decided that he needed to find a tool to help him manage his search marketing campaigns. He focused on finding something that would help him with bid management and tried Keyword Max, among others. It was good, he said, but not what he was looking for. The first tools he tried automated his keyword bidding, but the process was too opaque and he had to do a significant amount of work to monitor the decisions his tools were making. When he let the tools run on their own, he could end up with a significant amount of money being spent between one afternoon and the next morning because his tool made a decision that was never properly explained. Instead of a tool that "thinks for you," Max wanted something that would direct his actions. That's what he found in Clickable.
Working Smarter, Achieving Results
Today, Max still spends about 4 hours a week on his each of his clients' search marketing accounts, but he spends that time much more efficiently. In the past, he and his colleagues were faced with a number of variables - including keywords, ad copy, bids, and over-all campaign budget strategies - distributed over dozens of campaigns on three ad networks. It wasn't always obvious where they should focus their time each day. This is where he found Clickable most valuable. The prioritized actions and alerts told Max, in effect, "pay attention to these things." By having a quick overview of his top risks and biggest opportunities every day, Max could quickly say, "First, fix this. If I have time, do these other things. And these things over here would be nice, but aren't that urgent." When Max first tried using search marketing tools, he thought that automation in bid management would save him time. Then realized that time savings wasn't exactly what he was looking for. "It's not really about saving time," he said. "It's about doing better." Clickable has helped him do exactly that.
Simplified Management
In addition to a more efficient approach to search marketing, Clickable has given Max a simplified tool for managing his campaigns. He doesn't need to "switch channels" anymore when trying to do something straightforward like add a few new keywords to his AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing campaigns. As he said, the search networks have different ways of navigating functionality, "but they essentially do the same things." Clickable, on the other hand, "has a better thought-out way of distributing the real estate of the screen and the information in it." Today, Max can add or edit keywords; create campaigns; change bids and budgets; and whatever else he needs to do to keep his campaigns running smoothly, and he can do it in Clickable's "very user-friendly" Manage section. He wasn't even looking for it, but, in addition to recommendations and advice, Clickable provided time savings after all.