Director, Sem Platform & Strategy
Hotels.Com
London, United Kingdom
Promoted to Director from Sr Manager position within 4 months of start date.1. Devised and executed the SEM platform strategy to work across 70 countries and in 35 languages utilising hundreds of millions of keywords. a. Led the integration and ongoing development of Marin Software, used daily by over 20 internal SEM specialists. b. Designed and built custom SEM tools for Hotels.com specific requirements, such as a keyword mining solution using the Adwords API enhanced with automated classification using Natural Language Processing and probabilistic algorithms.2. In charge of SEM analytics, both with own team and support from internal analytics team: a. Drove quantitative research to define centralized scaled optimizations, including bidding, adcopy and keyword portfolio optimization leading to up to 65% revenue and profit improvements b. Built the SEM data repository for hundreds of millions of keywords’ account structure and traffic reports in collaboration with internal analytics team and Marin Software.3. End to end ownership of Google Hotel Price Ads, an inventory driven auction advertised on sites such as Google Hotel Finder and Google Maps, tipped to overtake Adwords as the key driver of traffic from Google to online travel agencies. a. Implementation of bid optimizations resulting from internal quantitative research resulted in 300% revenue and profit improvement over 12 months. b. Influenced Google to create a tagline feature, and improve auction to allow more granular bid decisions using device, point of sale and length of stay multipliers.4. Supervised development of financial models and forecasts up to 100 million dollars in collaboration with SEM operations leaders and finance.5. Hired, trained and managed a team 5 SEM professionals, including 2 Strategists, 1 Statistician, 1 Product Manager, 1 Financial Analyst.