40 Under 40 2022: Anubha Upadhyay, Google

Anubha Upadhyay

APAC audience growth manager
Google
Singapore

As the first woman in her family to enter the corporate world, Anubha Upadhyay has had an inspiring rise to her current role as APAC audience growth manager at Google. Her first job in 2008 was to lead offline brand marketing, but she quickly realised that expertise in online channels is vital in order to climb the ranks. After stints at startup Stellar and London-based Quido, she eventually made her way to Google where she joined as account manager. Within one year, she was promoted to manage small business marketing for Google India. 

Presently, Upadhyay has worked in global, regional and local roles in Google. Some of her career milestones include the launch of the first global Premier Partners Awards across 52 markets; rolling out the rebranding of Google AdWords leading to 100% adoption within six months; and revamping over 5,000 assets and scaling the company’s B2B Year in Search report globally by managing a paid-media campaign in 66 countries. 

That’s not the end of Upadhyay’s exhaustive list of achievements at Google. She also rebuilt core amplification channels for Think With Google that garnered 4.5 million monthly engaged users and three million subscribers—a significant increase from the years before. Then, she led a combined paid and organic search strategy that over-delivered on targets, leading to high improvement in traffic across all channels and solidified Think with Google’s presence across the region on search platforms. Additionally, she launched a LinkedIn Nurture programme pilot that promoted 18 retail articles across five content topics over three months—this significantly lifted large customer sales. 

Executing and scaling successful projects is one thing, but Upadhyay also finds the time to revamp internal processes and paid-media programmes that have inspired APAC and global leads. And across these projects, she is known by her colleagues to be a reliable leader who can orchestrate processes and tasks efficiently. She also possesses a brave, no-regrets streak, manifested in decisions such as comfortably saying yes to taking on the Global Year in Search portfolio. 

Upadhyay is a core member of Google’s DEI marketing team and often helps externalise communications that are important for the industry. She doubles up as the editorial lead of the company’s quarterly APAC marketing DEI newsletter that shines a light on key projects locally and regionally.