Startup Spotlight: SEMPAD

SEMPAD, founded by CEO Peter Elmhirst, was born from a combination of marketing expertise, technical ability, and entrepreneurial spirit. Elmhirst and his development team hope to provide an intuitive and efficient tool to help smaller adverttising agencies to run great campaigns.

Meet the founder

Founder Peter Elmhirst is a serial marketing entrepreneur, Google 5pecialist, and Pay Per Click (PPC) ad-expert who specializes in managing online ads for lead generation.

His online marketing career began with his first venture as owner/operator of Cheapdogpoopbags.com, an online eco-friendly packaging and promotional items distributor.

The company outsourced its production to China and offered a branded line of dog waste bags, selling more than four million units online.

Building on his PPC advertising and online marketing experience, Elmhirst moved onto digital marketing roles at Future Buildings and Skin Vitality Medical. He continued to develop his digital marketing career over the next few years before setting out on his own once again by founding the The Ad Managers Inc., an online advertising consultancy that implements ad strategy for business in a variety of industries.  

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His most recent venture is SEMPAD, a PPC programmatic ad platform that is designed to help advertising agencies manage multiple campaigns in one intuitive interface. Elmhirst developed the platform after he found that many of the existing ad tools have not been designed with the needs of agencies in mind. The company focuses on creating software to help improve efficiencies for smaller agencies, allowing them to manage more clients, while saving time and money.

SEMPAD’s software focuses on helping SME agencies to run multiple accounts, with search and display campaigns across various networks, including Google, Facebook, Bing ads, and more, from one centralized spot.

What’s so special?

Traditional ad tools available for agencies are designed for in-house teams and typically cost upwards of $1,000, with pricing structures based on ad spend managed. This can be risky for new businesses. Instead, SEMPAD is dedicated to providing a reliable, low-cost, and simple solution for smaller agencies, regardless of monthly revenue. SEMPAD software is available on a monthly subscription, from $99/month for 5 clients, up to $399/month for 100 clients.

Elmhirst developed the platform along with the team at The Ad Managers Inc, his other successful online marketing venture. The team built SEMPAD using inside agency knowledge to create a tool tailored for agency needs. Running the platform on Google servers also provides the foundations to let SEMPAD run at faster speeds while scaling at little additional cost.

Product Spotlight

SEMPAD is a PPC programmatic ad platform, designed for ad agencies to manage multiple ad campaigns in one intuitive interface.

The dashboard provides an overview of performance, showing account groups and key statistics – including costs, impressions, clicks and conversions – broken down by network. Performance is measured against defined KPIs, highlighting accounts in need of optimization, be this daily spend goals or target cost per acquisition (CPA).

By automating these calculations SEMPAD saves marketers from complex spreadsheets and lengthy manual work. The platform offers branded client reports that can be generated in just seconds, providing account overviews and a breakdown of individual campaigns, top keywords and ad copy.

SEMPAD provides simple manual optimization suggestions, as well as automated programmatic campaign optimization, utilizing bidding algorithms which make daily adjustments to optimize performance, leaving agencies free to focus on other activities.

The digital ad tool makes media-buying even easier; running multiple ad campaigns with KPI measurements, automated optimization and transparent bidding.