Trada Raises $5.75M From Google Ventures To Crowdsource Search Engine Marketing

by Jason Kincaid - Techcrunch



Google’s AdWords may be one of the most successful products in Internet history, but it’s fair to say that most small and medium-sized business owners aren’t exactly experts when it comes to writing their ad copy or picking out keywords — in fact, there’s a whole industry of consultants and firms who specialize in doing just that. Enter Trada, a startup that launched in March that’s looking to help turn the industry on its head with the power of crowdsourcing. The company just closed a $5.75 million Series C round of funding led by Google Ventures, with participation from previous investor Foundry Group. Google Ventures Partner Rich Miner will be joining the board. And yes, this means Google’s VC arm is taking a dip into paid search marketing, which is sure to raise a few eyebrows.

The basic premise of Trada is to make running an online ad campaign as easy as possible: specify a budget you’re willing to spend on ads, decide which advertising platforms you want your ads to appear on (the site currently supports Bing, Yahoo, and Google), and enter how much you’re willing to pay-per-click or per acquisition. Finish those steps and you’re done — the site sources the heavy lifting, like choosing thousands of keywords to target and writing ad copy, to its community of experts.

At first glance, the fusion of crowdsourcing with online advertising campaigns sounds like a terrible idea — it’s easy to throw away money when someone clueless is managing your account. But Trada CEO Niel Robertson says that the company goes to great lengths to ensure that their “crowd” consists of a group of vetted, seasoned advertising experts. Each expert must be AdWords certified, and they also have to pass Trada’s own 45 minute exam. And users tapping into the platform can see the track record of each expert, so it should be fairly easy to tell if someone isn’t up to par.

Each ad campaign actually has multiple experts working on it, which Robertson says can help diversify the number of good keywords your campaign is targeting (an average campaign on the site has over 6,500 keywords and 110 ads). Each expert is incented to create ads that perform well, because they get rewarded for each click/acquisition their ad receives in the wild (Trada takes a 25% cut of this reward). Trada is also experimenting with incentives that will encourage experts to work together — for example, experts could receive a bigger cut of the proceeds if the aggregate click-through rate of a client’s campaign hits a certain threshold.

Given the fact that this directly involves Google’s bread and butter AdWords, the Google Ventures connection is obviously going to draw some scrutiny. Robertson says that Trada fully expects this; to stay as above-board as possible, it has gone through its policies and practices with Google account managers to ensure that everything is in order. That won’t silence the critics, but it’s a start.

Trada plans to use the money in part to grow internationally and also to work toward launching support for display ads. When the time comes to launch display, Robertson says that Trada will likely help solve another piece of the puzzle: you’ll be able to outsource both the placement of your ads and have another set of professionals working on creative.

Including this round, Trada has raised a total of $7.95 million since it was founded two years ago.
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Google-Funded Pixazza Raises $12 Million For Crowdsourced ‘AdSense For Images’

Pixazza, a Google-backed photo tagging service that has been compared to an “AdSense for Images,” has raised $12 million in Series B funding led by Shasta Ventures, with Series A investors August Capital, CMEA Capital and Google Ventures also participating in the round. This brings the startup’s total funding to nearly $20 million.

Pixazza allows publishers to identify, tag and match products found within online images on their sites and then link them back to the inventories of Pixazza’s network of advertisers. The service, which can be integrated in a site by adding a single line of code, allows consumers to browse the photos featured on a site and mouse over it to reveal information and pricing about similar products, and if desired, click to purchase.

The startup has a vast database of products to include images and tags related to the entertainment, fashion, travel, home and sports industries. Pixazza’s tagging technology is also compelling; the startup crowdsources workers to list products and tag them with the appropriate link to a retailer. Additionally, Pixazza shares advertising and affiliate revenues with publishers.

The company’s co-founder and CTO James Everingham thought of the idea for Pixazza after his wife was trying to find a pair of designer shoes that were worn in the movie “Sex In The City.” Upon realizing the astounding price of the shoes, Everingham’s wife ended up buying a similar-looking shoe in a store for half the cost. Everingham says that he felt that the experience of finding similar items you see in photos could be a valuable business.

Turns out he’s right.

The company has also announced that it reaches more than 25 million unique visitors per month through its 75-plus publishers, which include US Weekly and Access Hollywood. Of these visitors, more than 70% are based in the U.S. Additionally, Pixazza says that the startup delivers commerce-enabled photos at a rate of 8 billion image views per year, a 60% increase in the last three months.

Pixazza plans to use its new fund fuel product growth and expand to international markets. Already Pixazza has been launching new products in the past year to help make its technology more interactive. For example, Pixazza just launched Shopdot, a service for creating branded, hosted storefronts for publisher websites. And today, the company has announced the availability of a new self-serve publishing tool that allows anyone to turn static images into more interactive ones.

Previously, Pixazza was working on a client basis with its service. But today, the self-service platform, which is still in private beta, helps make Pixazza even more like an ‘AdSense for Images.’ Publishers can identify, tag and match products within the body of online images and immediately link them to Pixazza advertisers’ product inventories. Pixazza’s platform will aggregate datafeeds from merchants into a catalog of more than ten million apparel, home, electronic, sports, travel and automotive products. Pixazza also provides full text search to find similar products to those in the images on publishers’ sites.

There’s no doubt that interactive advertising technologies like Pixazza are catching on and even attracting the attention of search and advertising giant Google. Everingham declined to name exact numbers but says that click through rates are significantly higher than regular banner ads.

Everingham says that Pixazza is only at the beginning of what could be a very successful and profitable experience. “There’s currently three trillion images on the internet,” he sad. “We want to turn every one into an interactive experience.”

Pixazza faces competition from Like.com, Image Space Media, GumGum and others.
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