When I joined Google at Buckingham Palace road in 2006, the Direct Sales Organisation (the part of Google that serviced its biggest clients) reorganised into “verticals” or industries; based on the idea that industry expertise would create more value for both the advertisers and Google.

My job, as “Maximiser” was to understand how Travel Vertical customers were searching for flights, hotels, cars or holidays and then match that more effectively to the products that our clients like Hilton Hotels, Expedia and Opodo were selling. At the time, I realised that the Google Ads (then Adwords) account structures weren’t organised correctly - the adgroups (groups of keywords and adverts) were organised by product (flights), whereas in Travel they should have been organised by destination and product (flights to Zanzibar). By changing this fundamental element in the account structure, it shepherded holiday-goers to more relevant pages on the customers’ sites, raising the conversion rate and their investment into Google’s Ads significantly.

In 2006 this reorganisation of Google Adwords account structures was done by concatenating batches of text in Microsoft Excel and then importing .xls files into the Adwords system which would then recognise the new structure and overwrite the old one. Often, because the size of the files was so big (over 1m lines) I had to work with Google’s Customer Sales Engineers to figure out how we could do this work at scale.

I soon realised that if we made a tool that could do this at scale, it would allow this process to be done outside of Google by agencies and even customers themselves. This thinking lead to me being part of the team that created and launched Google’s Ads Editor which significantly contributes to the ~$224bn it makes annually.

In 2008 I got the opportunity to relocate to South Africa and open up a DSO office there. A nascent outfit, the idea was to identify, name, land and expand Google’s big customers across all of their verticals ahead of the FIFA World Cup in 2010. My team successfully landed 100 customers (including FNB, Yellow Pages and Takealot) across various verticals including Finance, Local, Automotive, Retail and Travel eventually contributing $10m in our first year.

As part of Google’s contribution to the FIFA 2010 Football World Cup, I helped to launch Google Maps as well as Streetview to make it easier for new tourists to find their way around. With my knowledge of the local landscape, I again collaborated with Google’s engineers, this time to map out the area we needed to photograph so tourists could identify local landmarks. We successfully launched the product before the World Cup with over 5m views after the event.

I earned numerous awards including “Be Google” awarded to the top 5 Googlers in the region. I was also awarded the Google Country Manager award for my services to revenue generation in South Africa. In my spare time, I was a founding member of Google’s Culture Club: tasked with ensuring Google’s culture traveled effectively from the mothership to satellite offices worldwide.