Kristina Baus tends not to let the grass grow under her feet. Her career in PPC has taken her from Croatia to Austria to Ireland to the UK, where she currently serves as PPC & Display Specialist at Teradata Interactive. Even here, she remains constantly on the go. Within the last 12 months she's been the top performer in the agency, increasing the average return on investment of her clients by 350% and the overall managed budgets by 155% over the previous year.
PPC is the ideal arena for a person with Kristina's energy levels. "Search advertising constantly evolves and demands constant training and focus," she affirms. "Secondly, it is such an integral and important part of any digital customer journey. It feeds itself with insights from omnichannel user activity in order to achieve the best possible results."
To be sure, it takes a can-do attitude to stay on top in this game. Although she has nine years' experience in the digital marketing industry, Kristina isn't the type to rest on her past achievements. "Because search is such a dynamic channel, a big part of my knowledge was and still is gained through training, conferences, webinars, search blogs and specialised search websites." Once she learns about a new trend, tool or trick, she's quick to apply it for the benefit of her clients. A case in point: her average last year for implementing a new AdWords feature was less than three days after each feature launched.
With a track record of embracing what's new and powerful in search, she's well placed to offer predictions about trends we're likely to see in the coming months. "One is greater visibility of search data and its use in multichannel planning and customisation," she says. "Another is brands' utilisation of more specialist analytics tools and multichannel platforms, providing greater insight into search-initiated customer journeys to allow us to better understand the context behind search journeys. Also, utilisation of customer data to drive one-to-one targeting across search."
Perhaps not surprising for one who likes to stay in constant motion, mobile has been a key area of Kristina's focus in recent years. "Mobile completely changed peoples' search habits in terms of time of day when they are using search engines, day in the week when they are performing searches, location at which they are performing searches as well as types of keywords they are searching for. Mobile will become the most important digital channel because it is able to give the largest number of insights when delivering omnichannel campaigns. It understands the location and the situation in which the user is in, so it allows advertisers to act upon the data they receive from users' behaviour."
For this forward-thinking marketer, several innovations are cause for excitement, including using first-party data to drive retargeting and ad personalisation, and combining search with channels such as email, programmatic display and social. Meanwhile, cookieless technology — especially when it comes to programmatic media buying — is another area of particular interest. "This is a technology that will again change the way we set up campaigns and optimise them, and in a matter of months it will completely take over current tracking and reporting options. It will change the way we work and deliver our multichannel campaigns as they will become smarter and more efficient," she asserts. "I'm excited by it!"
