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Formed in 2003 by Jeremy Chatfield and Richard Jones, Merjis (“combining information systems”) offered a mix of web marketing and technical expertise. Our early emphasis on measurement and evidence driven approaches to online marketing proved useful, and we were soon approached by large companies wanting our expertise. We still work for many of the people that we met in those early days, some of whom have changed companies several times and introduced us everywhere they go.
We’re maximisers, technologists, scientists and marketeers. We like getting the best we can out of what we do. So we continuously test paid search, social media and search engine optimisation, we revise web page contents and measure the impact on users, and we have extended our reach to call tracking and CRM interactions – to help our clients optimise their marketing mix.
Consultancy
We love helping you and your staff to understand the web and how to make it work for you, and we really enjoy SEO troubleshooting! What types of problem do we work on? We’ve helped customers by identifying web server problems that reduced search engine traffic substantially, and worked out why the home page of a brand didn’t appear in search results, and we’ve diagnosed the causes for a substantial web site to lose 40% of its’ traffic in a few hours – and how to recover from the problem.
All that experience of problematic web sites for SEO, PPC and Conversion, means we’re well equipped to audit web sites, and help you improve your sites’ performance. Even if you don’t think you’ve got problems, give us a call – we’ll probably find something that can increase leads and sales, that’s worth much more than the cost of consulting us.
We’re really interested in measurement and measuring systems, too. If you can’t measure it, how do you know whether what you’re doing is working? And we couple that with an interest in statistics – because sometimes a 50% change in response means nothing, and sometimes an 0.5% difference can be hugely important. Sometimes we get despondent calls or ecstatic calls on the basis of misunderstood statistics and measurements – we’ll help you understand when you when you should be raising a cheer or a groan.
Outsourced Web Marketing
If you’re running a business with more than about £0.5M turnover, we’d consider taking over your web marketing – give us KPIs and a budget and we’ll see just how much we can surprise you with insights into your clients, and improvements in online lead generation and purchases. We’re doing this for a few clients, right now, and building our team to take on more.
Packaged Services
Working with partners in specific vertical segments, we’ve used our deep knowledge of effective web marketing to create packages that complement our partner’s offering. If you’ve got a few hundred clients who’d appreciate some help with on- or off-site SEO, Paid Search, Social Media, web analytics, call tracking or CRM usage, we’d love to hear from you.
Web Marketing Tools
Nearly everything we do depends on some deep technology or other. We’ve delivered AdWords automation using OCaml and Ruby on Rails (and shell scripts with awk, and sed, too). We’ve built a CMS in OCaml, and manage CMSs in Ruby on Rails and PHP (WordPress, for example). We’re supporting eCommerce stores for ourselves and partners, using Magento. We do web server log file analysis using shell command scripts and some Ruby on Rails programs – and these programs extend into web site analysis and keyword management.
Our novel marketing tools often fit niches badly served by existing software, or overlooked. For example, we’ve used techniques from taxonomy and “Theory of Experiments” to help inform bidding systems… improving ROI and CPA by anticipating user response from small datasets. We’ve also conducted research into areas such as the use of AI in improving AdWords Display Network performance.
Staff
Our MD and senior analyst, active in R&D and Operations, is Jeremy Chatfield. He’s our senior consultant for AdWords and SEO and does a lot of the more scientific and technical things. He put together his first commercial web site for a niche startup in 1994 and it was driving about US$1.5M in internet-lead sales by 1997.
Our General Manager and project office guru is Dave Johnston, who keeps us focused on what we’re supposed to be getting done. He’s helped by Alison Bancroft and Joel Chudleigh.
Our Account Manager, focused on Customer Service, is Diann Chatfield.
Our Head of Sales and Marketing is Susan Fairbrass, supported by Lynn Manyeza.
We’ve a gaggle of other staff, consultants and suppliers who mostly do specialist service delivery – knowledge management, taxonomy and ontology work, in-site search optimisation for e-Commerce stores, blogger outreach, specialist copywriting and translation or adaptation, etc.