Loyalty 360 had the opportunity to hear from Covario founder and CEO, Russ Mann about their recent partnership with Kenshoo.  Below, Russ shares insights into what brought these groups together and how this new partnership will influence the marketplace.

Loyalty 360:  What was the genesis of the partnership?

Russ Mann:  Covario’s award-winning paid search and social agency services have grown in such demand that we decided to turn to a specialist bid management platform that could meet our team’s needs.  Our focus was on a partner with an industry-leading software platform that would blend seamlessly with our  vision for the integration of SEM, SEO, and social data technologies and agency services.  At the same time, clients of our software have been asking for better integration with a bid execution platform in order to help them optimize paid search spend and conversions relative to SEO traffic and conversions.

L360:  What value is it going to create for the client brands, users and the company?

Mann:  Clients want to maximize the effectiveness of their marketing and advertising.   Managing paid search in a silo does not do this.  It does not account for the high ROI potential of SEO, as well as both paid social and earned social media.  The integration of Kenshoo Search and Social together with the Covario Organic Search Insight solution will yield the most robust, analytical platform for cross-media management and attribution on a global scale.   This will enable advertisers and agencies to truly maximize the ROI of their digital marketing efforts.

L360:  How is this offering unique to today’s marketplace?

Mann:  There are very few productized SEO-SEM integrations to begin with.   The Kenshoo-Covario integration will be the first SEM-SEO integration to also include paid and earned social metrics as part of the potential bid rules and algorithms.  Additionally, it will be unique in that it will leverage more SEO metrics than current basic integrations, and be optimizable in more international languages.   We also intend to implement the patent-pending Covario Search Synergy Score (S3) and process within our implementation, leveraging the best of both technologies. 

L360:  How are you going to measure effectiveness of the partnership?

Mann:  We’ll measure the effectiveness of the partnership by the measured ROI increases we see with our clients, as a result of managing these various media types in one integrated platform.

L360:  How active was VOC / market demand used in the development of this product?

Mann:  Clients have been very active in demanding this type of innovative integration.   For years, expert search marketers have been trying to optimize their paid search bids against their SEO traffic.  Too often, they just focused on all-or-nothing approaches or basic rank/bid rules (ie: If I am ranking low on SEO, bid higher on PPC or if I am ranking high on SEO, don’t spend at all on SEM).   Our approach is a more nuanced and sophisticated strategy that examines the accretiveness or dilution, and attempts to achieve an equilibrium in the process.

Russ Mann, Founder and Chief Executive Officer -  Covario

 Russ Mann is chief executive officer and founder of Covario. Under Russ’ leadership, Covario has grown a high-performance team of over 130 members globally and expanded its client portfolio to include more than seventy Fortune 500® and Internet 1000 advertisers representing over 1,000 brands and websites.  Most recently, Russ was voted San Diego’s 2010 E&Y Entrepreneur of the Year in the Emerging Business category and the company was listed in the top 25 mid-sized places to work in San Diego.

Read more about the Covario and Kenshoo partnership here.

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