Your amount of commercial experience in a senior eCommerce role?
>Running e-commerce & content for global startup MedicExchange for 18 months (mid 2006 – end 2007) and heading up e-commerce in terms of marketing and SEO at eBay Inc’s Shopping.com UK for 15 months (June 2010 – Sept 2011); most recently in an innovative social commerce analytics role (contract) for Sony EU.
Your level of PPC Account Management and Optimisation skills?
>Ran the PPC campaign for MedicExchange to promote the site globally to specialists in the US, EU and Asia; monitored the results and altered the bidding and budget accordingly to optimise results; site estimated worth of $15m when I exited in 2007)
Your multichannel marketing (Print, Display, PPC, SEO, Mobile, Affiliate) experience?
>Shopping.com was a truly multi-channel marketing role, working with BallouPR to create print-based marketing in the form of a shopper survey in the Metro, and working with the Sun to run a Xmas mercy story for example; I worked in close collaboration with the PPC manager at Shopping.com to maxmise our ROI based on my previous experience at MedicExchange; in SEO I took the lead for building backlinks through blogger outreach, for undertaking an audit of on-page technical fixes including keyword optimisation and removal of duplicate content issues; on the mobile side we used CRM to promote our mobile app to our customers; I took the lead to build the affiliate network by building a relationship with independent consumer organisation Which? including taking free guides on our site, and for example working with 3M to promote a mobile app ‘Shopping Genius’ which was powered by our affiliate feed.
Your level of Google Analytics & Adwords experience?
>I’ve used Google Analytics to measure the success of standard web analytics social SEO initiatives in numerous roles, and used Adwords to research keywords for both PPC and social SEO purposes.
That you have a track record of improving conversion, sales or other metrics?
>Most recently I’ve contributed to the success of Sony EU Q3 marketing metrics by setting up a social dashboard with partner Socialbakers to capture performance against agreed KPIs and feeding that back into improved performance in the order of a 5-10% improvement in both UK and DE.
Despite tough competition Shopping.com UK maintained a steady visitor rate throughout 2011 of 1.5m visits every day, with 17m qualified leads delivered to merchants each month, despite the impact of Google Panda’s algorithm changes.
In terms of the ratio of orders to clicks Shopping.com UK returned a broadly steady 1.5% conversion in Q2 and Q3 2011, achieving sixth place out of the top ten comparison sites in the marketplace.
If you have any Product Management experience?
>After being headhunted to set up the ICAEW community, working with Microsoft UK, I was given a product management role as the community platform was the very first iteration of the code by the software builders. More recently at Sony EU the role involved product managing a social dashboard, starting by crowdsourcing metrics from across EU social media managers, and creating a multi-data driven dashboard from providers including Reevoo, Socialbakers, and Radian6.