This week we had the opportunity to interview Marc Poirier, Co-Founder and CMO of Acquisio. Hero Conf is proud to not only have Marc as a speaker, but also to have Acquisio as our Platinum Sponsor! We enjoyed hearing Marc share some great information about PPC and Acquiso.
PPC Hero: Welcome to this exclusive twitter interview with Marc Poirier, Co-Founder and CMO of Acquisio. Hero Conf is proud to have Acquisio as our Platinum Sponsor. It’s a pleasure to have you join us today, Marc!
Marc: The pleasure is all mine, this is such a cool way to do an interview, hopefully I can keep up.
PPC Hero: To begin with, tell us a bit about your background & experience in paid search.
Marc: Sure, I guess I started using SEO in 1997 but in those days it did not exactly mean the same thing it does now. It was MUCH easier to succeed back then than it is now. Paid search started for me in 2002. While I worked on my own affiliate marketing ventures, I found GOTO to be excellent for generating additional volume.
I guess I was on board with performance marketing very early on.
PPC Hero: That must have been interesting seeing the industry develop over the past several years.
Marc: It has been a great ride, the fun part is seeing some of the things I knew had to happen become reality. Things like display RTB for example.
PPC Hero: So how did Acquisio get started as a company?
Marc: The company was founded in 2003. We were originally an agency focused on SEO and paid search as well as web analytics. As we grew the business we found ourselves needing to provide better performance and better and more timely reports. So we started hiring more people which was a drain on our financial resources. It was very difficult to make any profits. In 2007 we decided to sell our agency & focus on making a platform to help agencies scale their paid search operations. The company has amassed quite a following, hundreds of agencies use our platform, representing more than 10k brands.
PPC Hero: What a great story. Could you tell us about the products Acquisio offers?
Marc: Acquisio completed the acquisition of ClickEquations in December, so there are 2 products: Acquisio and Click Equations. Acquisio is a complete performance marketing management suite designed specifically to help agencies scale their business. It covers 3 channels at the moment – Paid Search, Facebook Ads and RTB display. Tracking, Reporting, Automation, Editing.
ClickEquations product is hyper focused on paid search, and is aimed at professional SEM managers working for advertisers. I think CE is custom built for those who are looking for deeper insight and maximum ROI from their SEM campaigns. It features great tracking, excellent bid management, a powerful Excel plugin, and my faves: Keyword & Text Ad Zoom.
PPC Hero: Sounds excellent! What makes Acquisio unique from other management software?
Marc: Great question. I think we’re the only company in this space whose only goal is to make agencies more successful. As such, a significant amount of functionality in Acquisio is designed to scale the operations of an agency. For example, we offer self-serve reporting for clients through our white label agency extranet. Our clients think the quality and depth of reporting you will find in Acquisio is miles ahead of all our competitors. It has to be this way because for agencies, reporting to their clients on time every time is mission critical.
We also allow agencies to implement their own secret sauce by leveraging our business rule engine. It is an “if-then” framework that is extremely flexible – you can automate just about anything by using these rules. We spend a lot of time working with our clients to create, test and deploy rules to fit their specific needs. Our competitors usually create their recipe for bid management in a black box and put it out there for everyone to use.
I guess if you’re an agency and you’re out there looking for new business, you have to differentiate from the others You can’t win by implementing generic off-the-shelf bid management algorithm that everyone else is using. You need something better. With ClickEquations we’re adding more differentiators – better tracking, Excel plugin for reporting, Keyword & Ad Zoom.
PPC Hero: That all sounds great, it’s so true that differentiation is important. Is Acquisio or ClickEquations developing any new features or updates that you are excited about?
Marc: We are developing new features constantly, we release every 2 months. I’m really excited about the next few releases. I can tell you we’re working on integrating ClickEquations functionality into Acquisio. The rest is TOP SECRET! 🙂
PPC Hero: With Acquisio’s social media platform, have you noticed much change in the time since Google + was released?
Marc: As it relates to our FB ads integration, nothing has changed, we’re eager to see Google release social ads of course.
PPC Hero: Definitely! What would you suggest people should keep in mind when selecting a management software company?
Marc: You need to understand what your needs are and find the company that offers the best match for you. I mean the best match for those needs. There is a lot of great software out there. We focus on helping agencies scale their business. Any SEM agency should consider speaking with someone at Acquisio.
PPC Hero: As Hero Conf’s Platinum Sponsor, what are you looking forward to the most at Hero Conf?
Marc: We want to support initiatives like this one, we sponsor a lot of events & we’re very active on the conference circuit. I look forward to speaking there very much, especially that this is the first ever Hero Conf! It’s gonna be awesome! Plus I’ve never been to Indiana. How’s the fishing there this time of year? 🙂
PPC Hero: We are very excited you are coming! The fishing should be good, unless we get one of those April snowstorms! 🙂
Marc, thank you very much for joining us today and taking the time to share more about Acquisio & ClickEquations. We are delighted to have Acquisio as a Platinum sponsor, and are also looking forward to hearing you speak at Hero Conf, Marc!
Marc: It was fun, thanks for organizing this, I look forward to Hero Conf very much! Cheers!
PPC Hero: Hero Conf is April 16-17, 2012, in Indianapolis, IN. Hero Conf is a PPC conference with exclusive content and an extended agenda. To register or for more information, visit www.heroconf.com.
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Marc Poirier is a professional Internet Marketer with more than a decade experience in the Search industry. He is Co-Founder and Chief Marketing Officer of Acquisio where he leads all sales and marketing activities. He often speaks at events like SES, SMX, Ad:Tech, TFM&A and OMMA, and writes columns and articles for various publications, including Search Engine Watch, Visibility Magazine, SES Magazine, and the Acquisio blog, to name a few.
Prior to his position at Acquisio, he was founder and president at Canalytics, a boutique SEM and SEO agency which was widely regarded as one of the most active Google Analytics Authorized Consultants in the world. He also held various e-marketing management positions for technology and software companies that include Komunik – an email marketing software vendor, Cognicase – a Canadian leading IT consulting and systems integration firms, aside from being a strategic consultant at U.S. based marchFIRST.
Marc began his entrepreneurial career in 1996 while working on his Ph. D. in Cognitive Science. That’s when he co-founded Webaxis Alliance, an interactive agency that worked on major Canadian websites such as sympatico.ca and canada411.ca.
Whenever the opportunity arises, Marc loves to fish and is an amateur walleye fisherman who shares his passion on his blog.
