About Time: You Met PushBy Angelica Malin

Who are push?

Push are a digital advertising agency who specialise in advertising on Google, Bing, Facebook and Instagram. We provide other services like landing pages, website development and SEO. Primarily though our main point of being is to help businesses grow through paid digital advertising while building the advertising agency of the future.

What made you start a digital marketing agency?

Back in 2004, I was in the computer component industry and the industry went through tremendous growth from the mid 90’s to the early 00’s. A lot of businesses and consumers were putting computers in their businesses and homes during this period but I realised that the computer component industry was becoming a commodity driven business and in the background I could see something called the internet happening. People were unsure if the internet was going to be an industry due to the rise and fall of the .”com” saga. However, I could see the potential and where it was going so I decided to change industry completely and move from consumables into software.

I originally started a web development company as the need I could see was many businesses didn’t have a website. That is what led me to think that there is a whole market here. Today, every business needs a website. I had that visionary aspect in terms of knowing that was going to happen. It evolved from there, the internet started with web development and then as it went this company called Google allowed businesses to run ads on their platform. At that time, it was quite easy to scale a business quickly using their advertising platform and I think by having that experience from the early days we know how to make paid advertising work, which is why I’m still in the industry today.

What is your happiest moment at Push so far?

I’ve got many happy moments, the happiest, well.. I have 2.

The first is winning the global award for mobile innovation out in New York. We won that award in EMEA against all the other Google partners and then the winner of EMEA eent through to the global awards and we won that as well! Mobile is the number one source of traffic so to win the mobile innovation award globally was fantastic.

In addition, within the same year about 4-5 months earlier, we celebrated our 10 year anniversary as a business and that was a happy moment because there were moments during the 10 year journey where we didn’t think we would ever make it and we were trying to get through it day-by-day. The UK went through the worst recession we had since the great depression as some would say and going through that as a small business and as a young family that I had with myself as well as my business owner, it was very challenging. However, making it through that and getting to tell the tale 10 years later was a very happy moment and on top of that everyone who came to the party danced the night away

What does PPC mean to you?

PPC is much more complex than it used to be. When I first started it was essentially Google had a system you could advertise on words and it was a very specific type of advertising. Today it is much more complex than that. It includes audience targeting, journey targeting, display ads and  banner ads so it’s become very broad but at the same time very exciting because really any business should be able to harness one part of the product offering of PPC.

Some people may think PPC is just around advertisement on google search engine. The terminology is Pay-Per-Click so essentially you can use any advertisement medium and as long as somebody is seeing an ad and clicking on it then that counts as PPC. All major platforms run ads from Spotify, Facebook, Instagram, Bing etc.

What is your competitive edge compared to other agencies in the same industry?

I would say the competition is not actually the other agencies, we don’t often come up against other agencies. It happens, but it is not the main competition. So what makes us different is having such a great relationship with Google and getting good results for our customers and our ability to understand what a customer should be using as an advertising medium whether that’s Facebook or Google, what type of ad format they are using and really understanding the client’s business and making sure we are using the latest tools available from all different platforms.

For example, if Google release something we’ll typically look at it, test it out, if it looks like it’s something we can roll out to the entire customer base, we will then roll it out on Friday into a training programme. We have a very uniform approach in how we do things and it means we don’t have great PPC people but everyone is off doing their own thing in how they manage accounts in a very structured process. If somebody is away, someone else can jump into an account and look after it in the same way. From all different teams from sales to strategy development to account management, everybody is thinking about accounts and how we are going to manage them.

We are about scale and delivering our service offering to hundreds of businesses. We manage about 600 and we are looking to grow into the thousands. To do that, you need to have processes, delivering good results. I think some of the agencies are like small boutique agencies with a handful of clients. The other piece of competition is actually the customers themselves, the customers can get in the way of success as they will read up something about PPC and think they are more informed than we are which can be a competitor to us in terms of delivering the results.

What is your favourite thing about living in London?

The diversity of the people that you meet. In our office, for example we have French speakers, Spanish speakers, German speakers all from different backgrounds and we are all unified by PPC and our love for PPC.

Anywhere you go in London, you see and meet people from all parts of the world and you want to develop that relationship with them and everyone becomes a Londoner.

How do you stay on top of the latest trends within the industry?

We are lucky in the sense that we work very closely with Google, arguably the biggest brand in the world so we get access to all the very latest beta’s so anything that is going to be released, we are actually testing it for them on some of our customers before it’s released. We get a lot of our clients whitelisted on them, that’s quite easy for us to keep ahead of the latest developments.

In addition, we go to a lot of training events and conferences that will include speakers from other agencies and businesses. You start to see little pieces of information that you have seen but not picked up on and you starting seeing a trend. If you go to a lot of different conferences. For example, AI you can see that a few years ago there were only a few people talking about it but now if you go to an event you will see lots of people talking about it

What are your business aspirations for the next year?

We are continuing our global expansion so we have recently opened an office in Romania, we are now servicing the Greek market as well so we see these as emerging markets where businesses are catching up a little bit. They are years behind the UK because the UK is a very mature market and these European markets are less competitive which means we can take a lot of the experience we have so far in terms of making successful campaigns and growing businesses in those markets by building good campaigns, delivering good cost per lead and cost per sale