Acquisio SEARCH
Benoit Allaire, Co-Founder and VP Technology, is quoted as saying "Ad agencies need to be able to produce white-label PDF reports at the end of the month for each of their clients – our goal is to help streamline this process.
Acquisio is a software development company based in Montreal, Canada – their flagship product, acquisio SEARCH, is a paid search management solution built with agency oriented features.
April 2008 saw the release of the latest version of acquisio SEARCH, notable for the launch of the acquisio editor – a tool designed very much like the Google Adwords editor, but one which allows for management of both Google's Adwords program and Yahoo's Search Marketing program from the same interface. There are short-term plans to include Microsft AdCenter management into the mix, to be followed with a number of second-tier search providers over the course of the year.
Acquisio SEARCH is well known as being the first product of its kind to develop in accordance with agency level needs. They realized in 2005 that traditional advertising firms were beginning to take on more and more interactive mandates, and often lacked the combination of expertise and manpower needed to be as effective in the online arena as they may have been offline. At that point, acquisio conceptualized a universal tool built to accommodate all of the major search providers, designed to allow management and reporting from one place - it seemed a logical need in the advertising industry, and it had yet to be filled.
"Our goal is to design a product for agency SEM departments that removes the need to go and log-in to the provider's web interfaces – a single point of access for everything: launching and management of campaigns, optimization and reporting on all of their client's PPC efforts. Everything." Says Marc Poirer, Co-Founder of acquisio.
The first quarter of 2008 has seen a number of product development improvements at acquisio, including an optimization module for campaigns that is particularly intuitive to use. "We've been dealing with the issue of presenting what might otherwise appear to be complex processes, or ones which would require a fairly demanding combination of technical and marketing knowledge, in a manner which appeals to more traditional marketers – you know, ones without mathematics or computer degrees" says Richard Couture, Co-Founder and VP Product Development for a team of nearly 20 programmers on Montreal's south shore.
The elegant optimization module gives account mangers the option of maximizing or minimizing one of four metrics: cost, impressions, clicks or conversions. From there you can simply play with some slider bars to maintain a certain percentage of the other metrics, and find some mathematical sweet spots for things like reduction of Cost Per Acquisition (CPA). For example, in a few seconds acquisio optimizer will allow you to set your sliders to minimize cost, while maintaining conversions along with whatever amount of clicks or impressions you like – then in real time it calculates if there is a way to achieve this scenario for the campaign, and promptly shows you just how much you've been able to effectively reduce CPA.
Value added built in tools could be considered a main constituent of the product offering – there are other management tools out there for multiple engines, but as of yet nobody is providing reporting functionality on par with acquisio.
Benoit Allaire, Co-Founder and VP Technology, is quoted as saying "Ad agencies need to be able to produce white-label PDF reports at the end of the month for each of their clients – our goal is to help streamline this process. Once the account manager has assembled and saved a report for their client in the built-in WYSIWYG report editor, they can simply duplicate it the next month – we can help by shifting along the date range information for all of the data in the graphs and tables".
This simple yet innovative approach has managed to yield a huge reduction in month-end reporting time for many of the agencies currently using acquisio SEARCH.
When asked why acquisio focuses so much on agencies, co-founder and President Marc Poirier responds by saying "We actually started as an interactive agency ourselves – we've been dealing with SEO and paid search mandates since long before Google Adwords arrived on the scene, so it only seemed natural for us to see the opportunity for an industry-wide product that caters to agencies. An advertising firm is fundamentally different from an individual advertiser, and because of this they require different tools, different interfaces, and different ways to communicate with who matters to them most: their clients".
The development of an enterprise level product as opposed to a one-off solution for an advertiser means the development is necessarily more complex, and the price point for the software is higher than some other products which might be seen as competitors. These are not issues if you ask acquisio's sales team, who are intimately familiar with what agencies are craving at the moment. Eric Lacourciere, Director of Sales is quoted as saying "The time saving benefits that our tool presents with its reporting functionality alone, not to mention its other benefits, represents a potential savings for medium sized agencies of tens and sometimes hundreds of hours per-month – there is no question we feel we're very competitively priced in comparison with other enterprise level products on the market – we simply have more to offer."
There is a buzz in the air surrounding acquisio's latest release – the simple concept of a multi-engine editing tool that mimics Google Adwords Editor has been openly asked for on forums and blogs around the internet for quite some time. Some claim to have developed in-house solutions to help their firm carry out some of the more mundane tasks associated with management, but it is doubtful that anyone has developed a full-fledged solution encompassing multi-campaign management, optimization and built-in reporting functionality that would rival the product acquisio is currently offering the market.
"Working with Google's API team and diligently designing a tool that stays safely within the terms of service is a very high priority for us." States Marc Poirier "We need to offer something which allows for a stress-free port of data from one provider to another, but Google's API License Terms makes this difficult. We've developed a method that allows quick exportation and importation of data, no rule-breaking at all going on, to give campaign managers exactly what they want – a quick way to deploy campaigns on many providers."
This combination of quick development integration and a highly efficient feedback look with it's own clients, major advertising agencies around the world (acquisio SEARCH is in use professionally on every continent except Antarctica), lends this small team of developers out of Montreal confidence in the fact that they are developing the ideal Pay-Per-Click management solution for the broadest range of agencies possible.
