*** From the Archives ***

This article is from May 7, 2008, and is no longer current.

Greenlight Applies Wall Street Tool to Online Ads

Greenlight, the largest independent search marketing agency in the UK, today announced the U.S. launch of Quant(TM), an artificial intelligence-driven program that enables marketers to forecast the success of pay per click (PPC) advertising campaigns. Drawing on long established portfolio management models developed on Wall Street, Quant analyzes the hour-by-hour return on investment (ROI) that specific keywords and bid prices will generate, making “best-fit” ad placement decisions on the fly. The program, including financial market algorithms and direct links to search engines, is applied by Greenlight to maximize ROI on its clients’ PPC campaigns.
“For all its stunning growth, the pay per click market has only reached the multi-billion dollar stage, a fraction of the size Wall Street has to manage on a daily basis,” said Hannah Kimuyu, PPC Director at Greenlight. “We’ve applied the tools that Wall Street uses to manage trillion dollar markets to make pay per click campaigns predictable – and much more profitable.”
By definition, the vast majority of PPC campaigns are rules-based, tightly constricting their ability to adapt to changing conditions. At a rate of 100,000 calculations per second, Quant mines a paid search campaign’s historical and ongoing performance data and reconfigures it hourly with the best combination of keywords and bid prices. Its predictive model algorithms also identify obscure or minute profit margin patterns that can be quickly exploited to deliver even greater traffic and orders. Quant’s artificial intelligence engine enables it to learn, improving its predicative capabilities over time.
“Marketers may be happy with the profits search engine marketing has delivered, but it’s my privilege to point out that they’ve just scratched the surface,” said Warren Cowan, chief executive officer, Greenlight. “Knowing how keywords will perform means campaigns that consistently beat the competition’s and deliver every possible return on an investment.”
The launch of Quant follows a series of innovative products, services and strategies that Greenlight has introduced to the online advertising industry. A recent entrant to the U.S. market, the company has been tapped by top brands operating in Europe for its consulting, search engine optimization, pay per click advertising and training offerings. In the last year, clients such as American Express, Audible.com, Radisson Hotels & Resorts, and Monarch Airlines have credited Greenlight with boosting sales by as much as 344 percent. Greenlight itself reports 476 percent revenue growth over the last three years.

>