PPC

As Geckoboard pushed to dominate search visibility, paid search became a natural extension of our organic content work. The challenge was that Google Ads could easily spend money against loosely related dashboard intent without really understanding our positioning, ICPs, or the difference between a high-fit buyer and someone who simply typed a dashboard-adjacent phrase into Google.

Although PPC was never formally part of my job remit, I managed Geckoboard's Google Ads campaigns at various points over the years, sometimes with budgets of up to £10k per month. I preferred a super old school Alpha/Beta campaign structure because it gave us much tighter control: proven exact-match terms could be isolated and funded deliberately, broader discovery campaigns could surface new search language, and landing pages could be shaped around specific intents rather than generic traffic.

Paid search became both an acquisition channel and a source of search intelligence. The campaigns helped us put budget behind valuable commercial intent, build more specific landing-page experiences, and identify patterns that later fed organic content, dashboard examples, and SEO priorities. When campaign management was handed to agencies, results were mixed, and the account often came back in-house for restructuring so it could operate with more discipline and a better understanding of Geckoboard's positioning.

The lesson was that PPC worked best when it was close to product marketing. The useful skill was not simply setting bids; it was understanding which searches belonged to our market, which promises we could credibly make, and which landing page experience would help a buyer recognise that Geckoboard was the right kind of dashboard tool for them.