Get Paid Twice as Fast and Recoup 8 Hours of Time Each Week with Acquisio

The Problem:
A Finite Number of Hours for a Growing Amount of Work

Find Me Faster is a full-service search engine marketing firm helping companies develop and implement effective search marketing campaigns, including paid search. But for this business that handles PPC and SEO services for 20+ clients, monthly reporting time was excruciating. “There are only so many hours in the first week of the month,” said Matt Van Wagner, President of Find Me Faster. “As our client load grew, so did the amount of data-gathering and analysis we needed to perform, but there were simply not enough hours in the day to make it happen.”

Reporting Delays Lead to Billing Delays
Any delays in monthly reporting led to delays in monthly billing, increasing accounts payable time to between 6-8 weeks after the month of service. “We like to tell our clients what we found and what we did for them before sending them a bill,” noted Van Wagner. “As the amount of time spent generating client reports increased, so did the amount of time it took between when we did the work and when we got paid for the work – not exactly the best situation for cash flow.”

Unfriendly Data Formats Lead to Missed Opportunities
Van Wagner also had concerns that his team was missing opportunities or insights in the data, due to its raw format. “We needed to gather data that could show us what was happening with client campaigns, and would allow us to track trends and intelligently report back to clients what we'd found. But because we were working with raw numbers and Excel spreadsheets, important data points were easier to overlook. We knew we needed a solution that could help us better visualize the data, and that could help us manage our clients' ads across search engines and ad platforms.”

The Solution:
Acquisio's Platform Makes a Believer out of a System Agnostic

Van Wagner did his research and found Acquisio. “I had always been very system agnostic, not wanting to rely too heavily on one system that could potentially become obsolete (and jeopardize our business) if the search engines made a change in how they worked or something happened to the vendor's company. For all of the systems we looked at, we considered the strength of the company behind the solution, as well as the value that the solution offered – and Acquisio went beyond our expectations in both respects.”

The Results:
Automated Reports Save 8 Hours Every Week

Since implementing the Acquisio platform, monthly report time is much saner, according to Van Wagner. “For each client, we set up a customized set of Acquisio reports that gathers just the metrics we need to analyze and puts them together in a way that makes it easy to spot trends and anomalies. It used to take us 8 hours a week just to import a client's data from different applications so that we could start the analysis, but with Acquisio, we've recouped nearly all of that time. Our clients' Acquisio reports are ready at the beginning of each month, and are formatted in such a way that we can present timely, consistent, easy-to-understand data to our clients along with our analysis.”

Less Time Gathering=More Time for Analysis and Action
Because Acquisio automates the process of gathering the data and building the reports, the staff at Find Me Faster can spend more time doing what they do best – analyzing the data and making strategic recommendations that will increase conversions and help their clients meet their goals. “Now, we can focus on analyzing the data rather than gathering it and trying to massage it into a usable form. This also means that we have more time to communicate with our customers, determine the best next steps and take action on our findings,” said Van Wagner. “And because of Acquisio's highly visual data representation, trends and opportunities are much easier to spot.”

Benchmarking One Platform Against Another Improves Campaigns
Van Wagner applauds Acquisio's ability to give both a high-level overview of trends and a granular view of specific data. “Thanks to Acquisio, we can now drill down into the data to easily get to the bottom of what is causing a particular issue. For example, if we see that a keyword is performing well on one network and not another, we can easily identify this and develop a strategy to improve the performance on the lagging network. In essence, Acquisio allows us to use information from one platform as a performance benchmark for the other platforms, improving all of the client's campaigns in the process.”

On-Time Billing Leads to Timely Payments
Late billing is also a thing of the past. “Now, we can provide a report and a bill simultaneously, cutting our accounts payable time by 50-75%,” noted Van Wagner. “We've also enjoyed higher levels of client confidence and trust since we started working with Acquisio. Our clients appreciate the consistency and easy-to-understand monthly reports, and feel good about the improved level of analysis we're able to provide.”

“We Absolutely Love Acquisio”
When asked by colleagues if Acquisio is a good solution, Van Wagner answers with a resounding “Yes! We absolutely love it. Acquisio is a perfect platform for agencies like ours – small and lean and aggressive, and with a real need to keep administrative and overhead costs low. Working with a company like Acquisio, who has a similarly lean and aggressive release schedule, is a fantastic experience. We're still figuring out ways to better take advantage of all the benefits Acquisio can offer us and our clients.”