Interview with Marc Poirier – Acquisio Founder
Listen to Marc Poirier InterviewCo-founder of Acquisio Marc Poirier Shares Search Strategy with Siftable
James Green: Hi Marc, thanks again for taking time to speak with me today.
Marc Poirier: Sure.
James Green: Perhaps you can start out by talking a little bit about yourself, as well as a little bit about the history of Acquisio.com
Marc Poirier: Sure, so my name is Marc Poirier. I am the cofounder of Acquisio. My background, academically speaking, I studied cognitive science and I did not finish my P.h.D, but I tried. During my studies, I basically paid my way through school doing web development from 1996 on and worked on several interesting projects up here in Canada. At some point, I started getting interested in web applications and worked for a company called Komunik. They were an email marketing software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform, so I got interested in that.
I was the first employee at Komunik and built a nice business and I discovered my entrepreneurial side. In 2003, I decided to go ahead and start my own business, which is now Acquisio, but at the time we were essentially an SEM shop, just an agency helping companies understand search engines and how to leverage them to generate business for themselves. So, we did that for several years; we did pretty well at it. We ran into some issues, you know, and I always wanted to have my own software-as-a-service business. I was looking for an idea, you know, what should I do, and it sort of came to me. We had these problems. There were bid management platforms—there is no doubt about it—but they didn’t address the needs that we had. It wasn’t so much about managing bids, but it was more about gaining efficiencies in the workplace. We had a lot of clients to serve and we spent more than 50% of all our time on building reports—assembling data, making sense of it, presenting it nicely, sending it to the client, and organizing the calls. That always took more than two weeks every month. We thought it was an opportunity and we essentially sold that service company and used that money to hire developers to start building our product, which is now called Acquisio Search. It is our flagship product and it is a PPC-management software designed specifically for agencies. Although we have a number of large advertisers on board, most of our clients— I’d say 80%-85% of our clients—are agencies, so they have the same sorts of problems. They share the same business model—we don’t need to serve others—so this is how we positioned ourselves early on. And it’s kind of like, at first, it was a way to position ourselves, but it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Over time, you start serving more and more of these people and they have more and more specific requests. So, we’ve made our niche pretty, pretty clear and this is definitely where we are going to stay inside that market for agency tools.
James Green: That’s great. A lot of search-based businesses see reporting as being a big obstacle and a big time-suck at the same time. Interesting that Acquisio has used that as a big differentiator. What other things do you feel you have done to differentiate yourself as a product and as a company?
Marc Poirier: There are a number of things, but one of the first things we hear from people—and this is funny—because it’s the wow factor of how beautiful the application looks. I know it doesn’t really add that much to a normal company, but for agencies, they like it. They like presenting the reports we put out; they like presenting the application as their own because it’s a white-label platform, so you can make it your own if you want. So, we hear a lot of customers going in and differentiating themselves against really large, well-organized, well-known, paid search businesses that have their own technology, but don’t go in against our clients who are much smaller typically. And they win the business and they love that. So, just the fact that the interface looks so slick is a plus. Obviously, we have, I think you may have seen the application yourself, but there is report automation. So, we automate the report process, so it’s not just that the reports look nice, but we provide people with the ability to design a report template with dynamic date ranges and have your reports ready at the beginning of each month. It’s not just saving a little time, but in some cases it’s saving 80% of the time; it’s pretty big.
The other thing we do really well is bulk editing. We’re improving on that still, but we have a great bulk editor. It’s just like Google’s AdWords editor, but it supports Yahoo and Microsoft AdCenter, as well. So from one interface, you are able to manipulate ads, keywords, and settings of campaigns and ad groups fairly easily, which saves on log in/log out time across all these different applications. That has been quite useful. It has its limitations in terms of the size of the campaign you can put in there because it loads into your computer/into the client, but we’ve discovered ways to optimize that which we are implementing now, which are going to make it more useful for even the largest of campaigns. This is something that’s different that I guess we’re known for.
The third part is the campaign automation module—the way we built it. There are very flexible campaign automation rules that you can create yourself. That means you can modify prices automatically, modify your bids, and also modify the status of something. You can pause items, keywords, or ad groups, and you can also send alerts to yourself. You can run your rules fully-automatically or semi-automatically. So, if you prefer to have the changes prepared for you, you can take a look at what your rule would change; that can be very useful if you are not confident in the rule you are building. There is a lot of power in that tool. It can be very dangerous, but if it is in the right hands of someone who understands paid search very well, it is the most powerful search tool you can imagine.
Read Part 2 of this Interview with Marc Poirier
or Read Our Review of Acquisio