Marketing Week Profiles: Greenlight

●●● Who we are… Greenlight is an award-winning, independent search marketing agency. We work across industries, geographies and organisations, from our offices in London and New York. We work with leading and ambitious organisations to deliver search marketing performance through organic and paid listings.

●●● What we do… Greenlight provides targeted and accountable search marketing solutions, including searchengine optimisation (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC) management, link building, consultancy and training. On the SEO side, we deliver page one results quickly and ethically, for the phrases that deliver majority market share and massively increase traffic, page impressions, orders and profits. We also offer outstanding client services backed with strong assurances and service-level agreements.

●●● Who we work with… Our client portfolio includes global brands and top interactive agencies across vertical markets as diverse as publishing, finance, retail, travel, hospitality, leisure, property and entertainment, such as: American Express, Expedia, Proctor and Gamble, RBS, Fish4, FindaProperty.com, NatWest, Monarch Airlines, Radisson, Legal & General, Asda, Alliance & Leicester, The Train Line, handbag.com, Britannia Building Society and Mecca Bingo.

●●● Why work with us…? Greenlight acts as an extension of your in-house marketing team. Our dedicated account teams work closely with you to provide a personalised service that integrates seamlessly with your other marketing activity to meet your brand objectives. Through our SEO service we guarantee page one rankings and our PPC department uses the most intelligent systems around to achieve the best ROI, which you won’t find elsewhere. We immerse ourselves in your industry and nurture your brands, to achieve rapid, consistent and predictable results.

●●● What we did for handbag
As a leading women’s lifestyle portal, handbag.com reaches over 1.5 million readers every month, delivering fresh editorial content on fashion, beauty, celebrity gossip and much more. The portal has gone from strength to strength since it was set up in 1999 and continues to lead the women’s portal market.

●●● The brief and objective
handbag.com is an expanding online business with an ambitious growth strategy and has worked with Greenlight for over a year to develop a clear and focused paid search strategy aimed at increasing page impressions and reaching new audiences cost effectively. The objectives were to increase the number of page impressions by reaching new audiences and to drive down the cost per click and maximise ROI.

●●● Execution
Greenlight conducted a review of handbag’s existing PPC activity to uncover new opportunities. We found that although handbag. com had a good understanding of how to use PPC, they lacked tactical expertise and were missing out on thousands of searches and potential clicks.

Greenlight’s PPC experts held in-depth meetings with handbag’s editorial team to discuss the site’s content areas and to identify primary targets across all the handbag websites. We identified distinct themes which centred on forward features and articles, and used these as the basis of the PPC campaigns. handbag.com’s previous approach to PPC had involved bidding on keywords such as celebrity names or generic topics like “beauty”, “fashion”, “horoscopes” and so on. With such generic terms, the cost per click was high due to thousands of businesses bidding on these words every day. Greenlight’s strategy was to fine tune the keywords and form detailed groups on specialist topics. handbag.com now bids on thousands of keyword variations around each individual topic.

The campaigns were rolled out in Google and monitored daily by our dedicated team of analysts. Each campaign was tracked and refined continuously to ensure an optimum level of performance. The campaigns were integrated with handbag. com’s editorial strategy, so that as editorial content was refreshed on the site providing new search opportunities, the campaigns were also updated to reflect this, often on a daily basis.

●●● Results
The PPC campaign increased the number of impressions from 48 million in the second quarter of 2006, to 245 million impressions by the same period in 2007. Our campaigns have driven down CPC to their lowest point, with a reduction of 42% within a 12 month period. Greenlight continue to consult handbag on their paid search strategy, managing ever more complex and dynamic campaigns.

Greenlight
2nd Floor, 1 West Smithfield, London EC1A 9JU

● Chief executive, Warren Cowan
● T: 0207 253 7000
● E: info@greenlightsearch.com
● W: www.greenlightsearch.com