Search engine marketing startup KENSHOO has secured an undisclosed late-stage round of funding from Sequoia’s Growth Fund, the Israeli company announced this morning.
This marks the fourth time Sequoia Capital has injected capital into the company, which claims it is now profitable and has doubled in valuation since 2009. → Read More
Facebook is ramping up advertising by deepening its ties to other online advertising companies, particularly the ones which offer tools to manage and monitor ad campaigns. Today, it revealed its first set of partners to incorporate the Facebook Ads API into their own products. In addition to Clickable (which we discovered earlier), the other partners are Alchemy, Glow, Kenshoo, Marin Software, Omniture, and TBG.
All of them variously help to manage and optimize ad campaigns across the Web. Advertisers who already use these tools, can now create and manage their Facebook ads alongside their other types of ads. All of this is done via the Facebook Ad API → Read More
The importance of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is nothing new. Yet, it seems that more and more advertisers are realizing that the significance of SEO to their business has risen as they have essentially hit a ceiling with their SEM activities. As the SEMPO State of Search Engine Marketing 2008 report puts it: “Despite increasing ad spend and year-to-year growth in the value of search engine marketing, we are likely nearing a pricing plateau as advertisers near their maximum efficacy.”
A newly launched SEO platform called ‘Drive’ by Jerusalem-based RankAbove wants to assist large websites—ones that range from 1000 pages to as far as several million—to get the most out of their SEO juice. In many ways, RankAbove is the flipside of hotshot Kenshoo, which aims at the same target market but with an SEM solution. → Read More
Conductor, a New York-based provider of SEO measurement and optimization solutions, has raised a Series B round of funding to the tune of $10 million, led by Matrix Partners and joined by FirstMark Capital, who led the startup’s Series A financing.
Conductor markets technology which aims to empower online marketers and interactive agencies to gather reliable data on their SEO efforts, make better decisions on capturing natural search market share and accurately measure ROI for their employers or clients. → Read More
ClickEquations (formerly Commerce 360), a paid-search management optimization business, has launched a comprehensive new software that gives ad agencies and publishers the tools to manage their search campaigns. The platform is pretty nifty. Users can open an editing tray at the bottom of the screen and make the desired changes to their Google, Yahoo, or MSN search accounts with the click of a button. The software allows users to add or remove search keywords easily and create search query reports by individual keyword to target ROI maximization. ClickEquations also provides users to control bid automation. Proprietary algorithms help users to establish bid-to-position, target ROAS, or ROI maximization – and then use defined options and parameters define the rules they want applied at the ad group or keyword level. The software also has plug-ins to allow users to create excel spreadsheets, charts and graphs around all the data provided in its platform, which can be especially useful in generating reports for clients. One of the company’s most prominent competitors in thes search engine marketing space is Kenshoo. Like ClickEquations, Kenshoo is able to find relevant keywords across different search engines. But Kenshoo automatically changes campaign specifics to maximize returns, which is a service that is useful to ad agencies. As we’ve said in the past, marketers should be more focused on building or maintaining higher levels of website traffic, considering the state of the economy. ClickEquations is smart in helping agencies to do this efficiently. eMarketer said recently that search marketing is the best customer acquisition tool in the online space. → Read More
Israel-based search engine marketing (SEM) automator Kenshoo has received another capital injection from its existing backers Sequoia Capital and Arts Alliance.
As with the Series A round, this second round of funding remained undisclosed, although our contact person at the company ensures it that this was an “up-round” financing and that the valuation was “50% higher than the last time” it attracted outside capital.
The startup, based out of Tel Aviv but active worldwide, says it will use the funding to further fuel its expansion and explore new business opportunities in the search marketing space. → Read More
Omniture is extending its SiteCatalyst measurement tool to native iPhone applications, enabling developers and marketers to gain insight on how users are interacting with their iPhone apps, based on real-time information. This should allow them not only to improve the user experience based on analytics, but also make adjustement necessary to generate more revenue by enhancing ad clicks, purchasing and increasing page views.
The new offer, which is basically an extension of its existing SiteCatalyst solution, is called App Measurement for iPhone and will be generally available as from January 2009. To our knowledge this is the first analytics program specifically designed for native iPhone applications, but it’s safe to say other providers will soon follow suit with similar offerings. → Read More
All you search-engine marketing consultants watch out. Sequoia Capital just invested in Kenshoo, an Israeli startup that automates the whole process of creating and managing search-engine marketing campaigns. It is a labor-intensive activity that has given rise to an entire cottage industry. Kenshoo competes with bid-management software from all the giants in online advertising (DoubleClick, aQuantive’s Atlas Solutions, and Omniture), but it goes a step beyond that to look at the quality of the campagns. It finds relevant keywords across search engines, and changes the campaigns to maximize their returns. The company’s press release quotes Sequoia partner Michael Moritz (who invested in Google): Mastery of search engine marketing is the biggest single challenge facing any marketer or advertiser. Sequoia Capital invested in Kenshoo because of its fresh approach to this task and because the company’s battle-hardened software has already paid off in thousands of different search campaigns. Although Moritz sat on the evaluating committee, he is not the investing partner. Yuval Baharav, a partner in Sequoia’s Israeli office, is the one who invested and will take a board seat. This is Kenshoo’s first venture round. Terms were not disclosed, although one report in an Israeli paper puts it at a few million dollars. Previously, the startup raised about one million dollars from angel investors, and has been funding itself from operations. The new money will be used to make a marketing push into the UK and parts of Europe in the first quarter of 2008, and the U.S. in the second quarter. → Read More
