Grab yourselves a cuppa – this is a long one! But so much has happened here at the agency in the last 3 months, we couldn’t miss out any of these successes!

The Re-Brand

We re-branded what was AGY47 (a search agency) into Ortus. Our very own specialist, boutique agency that ONLY delivers paid marketing – with a laser-focus on e-commerce brands.

We decided on the name “Ortus” after a lottt of creative sessions and team voting. In Latin, it means “rise”, “beginnings”, “birth/re-birth” – and that is exactly what we give to our clients. The excitement and spark of starting again, the support to help their brand and its performance rise, to shake things up with a new beginning for their paid accounts. Our clients all have one thing in common when they come to us – they are seeking ambitious growth through their paid channels.

Any decent agency can generate results short-term, but our performance doesn’t just see an initial rise then a plateau: it’s sustained. We are one of the few agencies that really invests into the client relationship – because we know it’s going to be a long-term partnership. We really care about what we deliver through our combination of un-ignorable results with a personal touch.

Any decent agency has an expert working knowledge of the platforms and technology that allows a client to drive performance. We’re untouchable in this area, but we also have a reputation for long-term results. Why? Well, not because we love Google more than anyone else, but because our people know exactly how to unlock, tinker with and use their creativity, ingenuity and tenacity to ensure that long-term performance continues to impress the brands we choose to partner with.

New Client Welcomes To Ortus

Whilst in the midst of our re-brand, we’ve welcomed an incredible amount of new clients in the last quarter for ALL of the Ortus paid services we offer. This is a real testament to our team, our strategies and our results across what was still a very uncertain quarter in the UK climate. We’ve said a big hello to our new clients and rolled our sleeves up getting into the nitty gritty of their objectives, aspirations and accounts. Expect some brilliant new case studies on our site very soon!

We are even more over the moon to announce that a lot of our new clients are within the sustainable and eco-friendly market. So, as we grow our clients’ accounts, we’re also indirectly making a difference to the planet, to their charity partners and to the communities they support.

Our People

With the flurry of new clients we’ve seen during Q1 and this looking set to continue into Q2, we recruited our first newbie to Ortus! Carl joined us from a full-service global agency in London, after deciding to get himself back up North to his roots. He joins us with great experience, especially in the world of display, working on clients such as Specsavers, Estee Lauder and Virgin Trains West Coast.

As a result of the continued client growth we are seeing and pre-empting further account growth with both new and current clients in 2021, we’re on the hunt for some Paid Social specialists. So if you know someone who’d fit right in at our agency, please don’t hesitate to send them to our careers page for more information on our current roles available.

What our team has been busy with in Q1…

Price Intelligence Tool (still in Beta)

We have been busy bees creating a new tool, which we’re currently testing with some of our clients.

The tool allows us to:

• Crawl pricing data on Google Shopping for our client vs their competitors’ pricing for the same product
• Create an in-depth report which is shared with the client, giving them all of the details needed to inform pricing decisions, strategy and next steps internally
• Make advanced shopping rules dependent on the price competitiveness of each SKU, for use within our clients shopping campaigns.

Watch this space for some cracking case studies and roll out of the new tool in the coming month!

Spring Cleaning

The team has been cleansing our new and existing client accounts in line with a mix of the latest platform best practices and guidance and our own Ortus best practices after lots of account structure/automation testing we’ve been carrying out.

Some of our key highlights from this have been:

• Re-structuring a client’s shopping feed, campaign structure and bidding strategy for their US account. ROAS has increased by a whopping 55% since the team re-structured the account!
• Re-structured a client’s search campaigns to give each more data to work with and opened up the opportunity to test highly relevant bidding strategies for the client’s objectives. Since adopting a new structure and bidding strategy, the account has seen a 49% drop in CPA.
• Supporting one of our clients in the online planning of their store re-openings ahead of April. We segmented their on-site user data into who has shown interest in either the store or contact us page for display retargeting, as well as testing the Google form extension (currently in Beta) to help drive leads for in-store appointments. Initial results show great engagement figures which are significantly higher than the account averages.
• Re-structuring a client’s shopping campaigns based on extensive feed rules based on price and stock levels. The team also implemented new display campaigns and tested DSA structures too. These actions have contributed to the footwear clients 31% conversion rate growth and we even smashed Jan-Feb paid conversions YoY sales by 42%, which were obviously pre-Covid months last year too!
• We have built an extensive non-brand campaign structure on one of our clients’ accounts to help them move away from their previous over-reliance on branded terms. We also tested this alongside display activity to nurture users through the purchase funnel. These campaigns generated a 100% increase in non-brand revenue, alongside a 23% uplift in new users.

Ortus are Finalists!

Last month, it was announced we have been shortlisted as finalists for 5 awards, all within highly competitive categories nonetheless. This really has been the cherry on the Q1 top, for the team and our snazzy new agency brand. We’re finalists for biddable team/agency of the year at BOTH the Drum Awards – Search and at the UK Biddable Media Awards. We’ve also been nominated for two client-work specific awards at the UK Biddable Media Awards: Best Use of Data and Shopping Ads Campaign of the Year. We’re brushing the dust off our frocks and getting the fizz on ice for the virtual ceremonies later this month!

When we’d just about finished celebrating the shortlists of these prestigious awarding bodies, we found out we are also finalists at the Company Culture Awards for the Best Flexible Working Policy too! This award is super important to us as an agency as we place such an emphasis on happy staff, happy clients. One of our main USPs at Ortus is our amazing team of people. After all, it is they who deliver the exceptional and astounding results and service to our clients day in, day out. So we strive to always provide them with the best working culture out there.

Here’s to Q2!

Sarah