Founded way back in 1998 under a different name, we’ve been here since the very early days of the World Wide Web and have seen some tremendous changes over the years.
We started when the web was in its infancy and being a “Webmaster” and having an animated gif of a spider bouncing on your website was a big deal. People were learning how to create websites using software such as Microsoft Frontpage they got from a CD on the cover of “.net” magazine and the hardcore webmasters would boast on the WebmasterWorld forum that they write their code line by line using only Notepad.
Then along came Macromedia with software such as Drumbeat and Dreamweaver as well as server-side scripting languages such as Coldfusion and Microsoft’s ASP. These were game changers and we were suddenly able to connect websites to databases to collect, store and display data.
Around the same time, a company called Actinic launched its “Actinic Catalog” software which really opened the doors to ecommerce for small businesses. We partnered with Actinic and started developing ecommerce stores for clients and one of them (a pet brand) won a prestigious award somewhere around 2001.
Macromedia kept developing Dreamweaver and it later evolved into Ultradev. Third party extensions became possible and we found ourselves able to create our own full custom websites built from the ground-up with shopping carts, databases and the ability to collect online payments through PayPal and WorldPay.
Online advertising was limited to banner advertising only. Text ads on websites don’t yet exist and neither did advertising on search engines. Websites were designed around specific layouts with slots to accommodate a number of banner sizes, and advertising on websites was sold on a CPM (cost per 1000 banner impressions) basis.
Then it happened.
Seemingly overnight, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising exploded onto the market. There were a lot more search engines back then with some old names being Altavista, Infoseek, DogPile and GoTo (renamed to Overture) and we paid to advertise on them all. There was a thread on the WebmasterWorld forum announcing that Google has started its own PPC advertising service and on the very first day, we started using it for ourselves and our clients.
There was originally no minimum cost per click. We were paying just a couple of pence per click. 25 years ago we were spending over 30k per month on Google ads and driving over a million customers per month to our own and our clients’ websites. These days, that amount of traffic would cost at least £1.8m per month in ad spend. Ads on Google were confined to pastel coloured boxes on the right of the screen and there was no Google Shopping or ads at the top or bottom of the search results. Mobile websites didn’t yet exist and all browsing/searching/advertising was on desktop. We created one of the first ever WAP “websites” which was a very early version of a website for a mobile phone back when mobile phones were just text based with no colour screens and luckily for ecommerce, the next generation of smartphones had colour screens and proper web browsers.
With the dawn of PPC advertising, the internet became a mix of the wild west and the gold rush at the same time. We stood with a client in Trafalgar square who shouted “I have a website and need an investor” who was approached by a board member of a publicly traded gold mining company who funded their ecommerce project powered by us and driven by Google Ads. They were wild times that we look back upon fondly and are happy to say we were a part of.
Today.
We took a break to start our own families then came back with a vengeance as RAPTOR; an ecom-only Google Ads agency with an unprecedented 25+ years experience.
We’ve evolved along with the web which has become a vital part of daily life for everyone. Businesses simply cannot afford to not have an online presence and ecommerce businesses in particular cannot afford to not be advertising on Google.
Ecommerce stores looking to start advertising on Google are now faced with endless choices. Google tries to make it easy to get started by guiding new users towards setting up automated Performance Max campaigns “and the system will do the rest”, but this can be a fast way to lose money. Careful planning, execution and management of Google Ads campaigns is crucial, which is where we shine.
We work with both new and established Shopify stores and over the years we’ve developed robust Google Ads strategies and advanced software which squeezes every last drop out of an advertising budget while avoiding wasted spend.
We’re stronger than ever, have been here since the beginning and we’re ready and able to help your business grow.
