LONDON, 20 April, 2021: Merkle, a leading technology-enabled, data-driven customer experience management (CXM) company and part of dentsu, has launched a Total Search offering to provide a joined up search solution across PPC and SEO.  

Merkle’s Total Search solution is a data-led approach that aligns paid and organic search activities to deliver against shared brand goals. It helps marketers in their mission to deliver effective Total Search experiences rather than treating search marketing as an unwanted cost at the point of sale. The new Total Search approach is designed to underpin delivery of the total customer experience across every interaction a consumer has with a brand.

Merkle has created a bespoke tool using its proprietary paid and organic search data, which places clients’ individual business KPIs front and centre. This enables clients to scrutinise the incrementality and effectiveness of their search activity and respond in a more agile manner towards consumer trend opportunities. This builds maturity, embedding an organisational view that search plays a vital role in informing business and marketing activities and contributing significantly to overall customer experiences. It means that brands adopting Total Search principles are able to focus their search marketing on business goals, rather than simply optimising for in-channel metrics.

The launch of Total Search responds to the rapidly changing customer expectations and accelerating technology advancements that brands are having to constantly respond to. PPC and SEO are still often siloed, making it difficult to obtain a joined-up view of the customer and provide a joined-up search experience. This can be addressed by investing in the technological and operational solutions required to deliver Total Search.

Total Search helps organisations to see beyond isolated metrics such as ‘Cost-per-Click’ or ‘Organic clicks’ enabling them to see their combined search performance and collaboratively optimise towards long-term, meaningful business results, such as Revenue from Search.

Total Search combines the strengths from Merkle’s leading and multi award-winning SEO, PPC and Analytics capabilities to help clients to drive more innovative effective, and meaningful search activity. 

Sarah Painter, VP Customer Experience, Merkle, UK, said: “While it is incredible to think that SEO and PPC still operate separately, this is still the reality for many brands. Total Search provides that bridge that enables organisations to deliver a joined-up search experience across both paid and organic activity for consumers. This means that consumers get a complementary search experience across both services, driving better results for brands.”