Using Google AdWords for search advertising is necessary for many businesses but choosing the right keywords to bid on can me a challenging task for those who are unfamiliar with the process. There is an art to search engine marketing when it comes to choosing contextual keywords on Google AdWords, which is why SEM agencies have emerged to help businesses with this process. But Y Combinator-backed AdGrok wants to allow business owners to automate the process of choosing and bidding on keywords on AdWords through its newly launched platform.
AdGrok’s web-based platform allows individual users get the kind of ad buys you’d get from an SEM agency, without the cost of the agency. The SaaS suggests keyword buys carries them out, and then collects and displays stats about their performance. AdGrok essentially becomes a business’ interface to AdWords, replacing Google’s platform with a more user-friendly software.
The startup’s web spider, the “GrokBot”, will crawl a website looking for product pages. When it finds one, it builds the AdWords campaign structures in order to send traffic to that page, generates keywords for that product, and builds text ads from a template library to accompany the keywords specific to that product.
One of the key features of AdGrok that makes it contextual is the GrokBar, a plugin that sits on a website, and pops up anytime the user is on a page that is being advertised on Google. Users will see a full breakdown of impressions, clicks, costs, and conversion. If a keyword isn’t performing well for a given page, the software will suggest alternate buys.
AdGrok’s co-founder Antonio Garcia-Martinez says that he is trying to create the Charles Schwab of online advertising, hoping to democratize the SEM world by allowing users to handle keyword bidding without the help of an agency. And as many businesses, both big and small, flock to search advertising on Google, a easy-to-use, affordable platform like AdGrok could come in handy. AdGrok faces competition from Clickable.
