This week I spoke with Covario’s VP of marketing and product management, Craig Macdonald about the interactive marketing analytics firm’s partnership with Neo@Ogilvy, Ogilvy Worldwide’s search marketing division. The companies work together with clients like Intel Corp and Adobe Systems to optimize and manage global search. Neo works on search strategies and Covario provides the technology to monitor the initiatives across various languages, business units and product lines. Craig discussed the challenges facing global search.
Craig said that the trick to launching a new product globally is combining online and off-line campaigns. “Consolidating and monitoring search programs is very complex,” he said. “You need to be able to track performance on all of the different platforms, both paid and organic, to see how you can drive additional performance.”
“With global campaigns, many assume that 50% of the total resources would go towards data aggregation. That’s not an insignificant amount of money,” Craig said. “You’ve got to be as automated as possible.”
He also said that data collection, as of late, has been “pretty atrocious.” He said, “Having different formats and information coming from various sources is a problem. We need to identify where something isn’t working, whether it’s the landing page, the creative or something else.”
He continued, “With search, you need to maximize the speed in which we get the performance information back to the client so you can see where you’re doing well or poorly within 24 hours and then adjust strategies your strategy accordingly.”
