2.5 years paid search experience working on award-winning campaigns for global beauty brand L'Oreal.
Data Analysis
Always looking at data in new, innovative ways. Winner of 'Lateral Thinker' award at 2016 Hero awards, as voted for by my peers.
AdWords Scripts
Creator of AdWords scripts to automate processes and improve performance. Quality score script won 'Best Innovation' award at internal 2016 eXcellence awards.
Portfolio
Some examples of my work, ideas and why I feel i would make a great Cannes Lion.
Cannes Lions
Why choose me?
Circular Heat Map
A new chart idea
Quality Score Audit
An example of my work
Live Revenue Tracker
An example of my work
AdWords Scripts
An example of my work
Sunburst Chart
A new chart idea
About
A summary of my career to date.
2007-2011
University of Surrey
Attended university in Guildford graduating with a degree in Mathematics and Computer Science
January 2012
Business Analyst at WCPC
Started my first permanent job following university, working as a Business Analyst at West Cornwall Pasty Co.
October 2014
Started at iCrossing
Relocated to Brighton and began a new career in Digital Media with iCrossing
December 2016
iCrossing eXcellence and Hero Awards
A fantastic year culminated at the 2016 Christmas Party where the client I work on picked up an eXcellence award for Total Search, I personally won an eXcellence award for 'Best Innovation' and a 'Lateral Thinker' Hero award voted for by my peers.
2017
Cannes
Lions?
References
What my colleagues have to say about me.
Allyson Griffiths
Strategy Director
Rob shines bright as an innovative, influential leader in the iCrossing PPC team. Over the last 12 months he has driven our offering to the bleeding edge of PPC, introducing new ways of looking at old problems and developing new products. His dedication to the cause earned him our internal award for innovation in 2016 and the result has allowed our teams to unleash their clients’ full potential.
Moving from a junior to senior member of the team in the last 12 months, Rob is always on hand to give technical assistance to the rest of the team. He does so with maturity and without bravado – he is both reliable and strategic, and will go far in this industry.
Kinga Dukielska
Junior Paid Media Analyst
"He's a magician"
"His time-saving tricks are outstanding"
"He's the best mentor"
Susie Cox
Account Manager
Rob is a great team member in the Brighton office. He’s incredibly supportive to other junior members of team, he always makes the time to pass on his extensive PPC knowledge. He is also not someone who sits back and gets on with it if he feels something can be done better/faster/more innovatively. He’s curious and regularly asks questions, but also comes up with solutions. Rob’s PPC scripts and ideas have made improvements for the whole PPC team at iCrossing.
Allyson was my line manager from May 2016 to April 2017, Kinga joined in January 2017 and has been working with me on L'Oreal, while Susie has been the account manager for the brands I work on since February 2016.
Contact Me
If you have any questions about my application then please feel free to contact me through the below form.
When creating media plans and forecasts it is important to be able to distinguish between trends that are seasonal vs those that are one-offs. This can be difficult and time-consuming when trawling back through previous years’ data. The circular heat map is designed to display several years data in one place, making spotting what are seasonal trends a much simpler task.
The above graph, created in javascript using the D3 package, was produced with the previous 4 years of revenue data from a luxury makeup brand. The data for each year was normalised to be a percentage of the largest value for that year; this was done so that we can specifically focus on seasonal trends throughout a year, this is of course optional and if you wanted to also view YoY trends you could simply plot the actual values rather than a percentage.
The above example illustrates the issue with merely looking at the previous year’s data when predicting the future. We can see that July was the best month for revenue, however the heatmap indicates that this was a one-off rather than the norm. The general trend in the past couple of years appears to be that November has replaced December as the best performing month – not a surprise with the rise in popularity of Black Friday in the UK.
The strength of this new chart idea lies in its simplicity. The ability to quickly determine what is a seasonal trend vs a one-off is a great tool in an analyst armoury, and this can now be achieved much faster.
Quality Score Audit
Quality Score and CPC bid are the two components that determine where an ad appears in an auction. A high quality score is vital when trying to improve average position and lower CPCs. Despite this very little insight was previously available for this metric.
In March 2016 a new AdWords API was released enabling a breakdown of a keywords quality score to be retrieved at scale for the first time. With a detailed quality score report being unavailable in AdWords or any bid management platform such as Kenshoo or DoubleClick, I developed an innovative in-house solution using an AdWords Script that can be applied to any PPC account, and on up to 50 accounts from a single script.
These previously unavailable insights have led to considerable gains in quality score, which ultimately led to a YoY reduction in CPCs of 42% on the La Roche-Posay account. The script also won our internal eXcellence award for ‘Best Innovation’ in 2016.
Live Example:
Link removed due to client confidentiality
Live Revenue Tracker
The Black Friday sale period has grown dramatically over the last few years in the UK, becoming the biggest revenue-generating period for many businesses in the country. L’Oréal’s luxury division are no exception to this, and with over 10% of their revenue in 2015 coming from the Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend, there was a huge emphasis on the same period in 2016.
With so much attention being placed on a single weekend, and so many stakeholders involved due to the size of the brands, an opportunity was identified to develop something new and different that could set iCrossing apart from the other agencies L’Oréal work with.
Using Google Sheets I created a script that populated a dashboard, updating every 5 minutes with the latest sales data from Google Analytics. Key metrics were called out, such as SEO and PPC performance vs last year, to highlight any areas that were over/under performing. A graph showing minute-by-minute sales vs last year allowed performance to be tracked throughout the day.
Whilst the live revenue tracker could have some practical benefits in spotting underperforming areas early, it was mainly designed as a bit of fun for Black Friday. It acts as an example of iCrossing’s innovation and helps us stand out against rival agencies.
Live Example:
Link removed due to client confidentiality
AdWords Scripts
AdWords scripts provide a way to programmatically control your AdWords data using JavaScript in a browser-based IDE. Common tasks can be automated to save analyst time for higher value tasks and strategic planning.
As the UKs go-to expert for AdWords scripts I have so far created the following:
Automated trackers – save 20mins per day by automatically pulling in performance data
Negative exact match mirror – saves 10mins per upload by automatically applying negative mirrors. Is also more accurate as it updates daily & is applied to all BMM campaigns through the use of a shared list.
PLA Non-Brand negatives – saves 10mins per day by automatically applying non-brand negatives to a PLA campaign. Increases performance by maximising budget spent on brand.
Quality Score Audit – automatically produces a QS report that would take around 1 hour to produce manually.
Out of stock product pauser – uses the PLA feed to automatically pause keywords directing to a product that is out of stock. Saves 20mins per day vs doing this manually.
Sunburst diagrams are ideal for displaying hierarchical data, this makes them a great way to visualise an AdWords account. The above chart has been created in javascript using the D3 package and is interactive, whereby selecting a node will allow you to focus in on that particular entity.
In the above example, each ring corresponds to a level in the account hierarchy, with the central root representing each campaign within the account. Outside of this you then have the ad groups and finally each keyword.
Visualising an account in this way can allow you to gain a greater understanding of how important certain keywords are to your account. It can be used to show clients how many clicks, or how much revenue, certain keywords are driving relative to the rest of the account. This understanding can be invaluable when working with a client to prioritise areas to optimise.
