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.
Kenshoo’s flagship product, Kenshoo Search, is billed as an end-to-end SEM platform and essentially automates most if not all of the work usually carried out by marketing consultants (who are of course much pricier than automation software). In that regard, Kenshoo also competes with bid-management software from all the online advertising giants (DoubleClick, aQuantive’s Atlas Solutions, and Omniture) but at the same time goes a step beyond that by taking a look at the quality of the campagns. Kenshoo is able to find relevant keywords across different search engines, and automatically changes campaign specifics to maximize their returns.
In the economic downturn we’re in, marketers should be focused on building or maintaining decent levels of Website traffic and drive better conversions. Search marketing is still the best customer acquisition tool in the online space, so it’s not a surprise that eMarketer predicted continued growth from 2008 to 2013 in a very recent report on the state of SEO spending in the U.S.
If Kenshoo can keep winning customers over by cutting out the middlemen and maximizing campaign ROIs, it definitely has potential to continue riding that wave and keep / make their investors happy.
we recently did a trial….doesn’t do exactly what we want, but it does have a few features that are useful, although we could also build that inhouse via the adwords api.
I think bid-management software is over-hyped. For the accounts as large as ours, i’m sure some people would be surprised that we do most of our work using Excel.
Kenshoo is so much more than just bid management. Its a complete Platform not just bid managment.
We have been using Kenshoo for the last 8 months.
We are Performance based marketers (Affiliates).
So we spend our own money. Not our Clients.
We need to be very sharp and accurate since we dont spend clients money but our own.
Since we started using kenshoo our ROI increased by 140% and the time we used to spend on Excel sheets was cut by 3 hours a day!!!. I am not kidding.
We manage over 50 accounts and over 5 Million Keywords. Our yearly budget on SEM is 7 figures.
Looking back I have no idea what we did for the last 7 years but Im sure not going back. We are Kenshoo Junkies Head, Body and soul
I’m glad it works for you.
I might add that I do not work for an SEM agency. I work for a large retailer. We keep our SEM in-house.
We haven’t found a solution that meets our needs.
@billy
I use Kenshoo and I would say you should give it another look if you can. The bid management tools can indeed help with your workload and the beat the snot out of the current Big 3. Bid management is never a replacement for good old monitoring manually, but I will say that for about 80% of my keywords it helps dramatically and has made me far more productive.
Kenshoo was founded in 2006 in Tel Aviv. Kenshoo’s main product is KENSHOO SEARCH, an automated search engine marketing platform. Kenshoo has also developed a new methodology for managing search engine marketing programs called Quality Management which is designed to improve the quality score of live search engine programs.
If someone ever tested their efficiency against clickable, results will be interesting.
Automated bid optimization platforms do provide value, however, when you are working with a significant spend (+$500k/mo), a competitive vertical (i.e. insurance), complex tactics (i.e. a geo modification, geotargeting and national campaigns for tail keywords), landing page strategy, etc, there is no substitution for having seasoned SEM experts who are continually managing, testing and optimizing the campaigns. Machines cannot do all the work – you just can’t take the human element out of paid search.
If you rely on a bid optimization platform to do all the work, you will be spending too much and missing pockets of opportunities to make profits.
Corey
http://www.thesearchagency.com
Corey Kenshoo is not automated solution.
On the contrary its a tool for human beings.
It is designed to help SEM experts to manage better their campaigns not to replace the experts.
I know I use it every day.
just look at their list of clients:
Zappos.com, Linkshare, Cafepress, Textbooks.com
all very professional SE marketers all human
Like I said earlier, the tool is good for some, but not for others. If you find it useful, more power to you. For my company (multi-million dollar spend, millions of keywords, etc), the platform doesn’t provide value.
WebTrend’s offers Ad Director. AD is battle tested in with clients and already does what Kenshoo cliams to do. Validates what WT has been doing for 3 years!
TS –
I use Kenshoo on a daily basis and have for a long time now. We looked at Webtrend’s Ad Director and it was a joke. *That may be due to the fact they sent Webtrends Analytic sales guys to pitch instead of the actual SEM sales guys. Anyways, Kenshoo for a stand alone tool blows everyone out of the watter when it comes to Campaign Management.
We’re sorry you didn’t have a good experience. If you’d be interested in taking a second look, have product feedback, or any questions I can answer, please feel free to reach me at marta.kazberuk@webtrends.com.
Best,
Marta Kazberuk
Product Manager, WebTrends Ad Director
Marta – Rather than spending time responding to TechCrunch posts on why you’ve developed a bad product, shouldn’t you be working on improving it instead? Great product management.
Laura – that’s a ridiculous answer. I’m sure that Marta wasn’t spending her time trolling around on forums, but was probably alerted to these posts by an automatic system.
No, I don’t work for WebTrends nor do I have any interest in their company – just keep your comments fair.
I’m a PPC super affiliate. I did look at Clickable and Marin before signing up with Buntai which is Kenshoo tool for affiliates.
Honestly Clickable is a joke, too buggy and Marin – they have a very sexy user interface but no real substance behidn it. I like how Kenshoo created a special solution for affiliats like me
They’re at http://www.buntai.com
Billy – you’re right. If your multi-million dollar company is bigger than Zappos, Cafepress and Oglivy (all of which are using Kenshoo) then this is not the right tool for you
Hi Yannick,
I’m with Clickable and regret you had a buggy experience. We take your comments seriously, so I would consider it a great favor if you could provide me with any additional feedback. My personal email is mkalehoff at clickable dot com.
We’ve come a very long way since we released our public beta in late 2007, and our first commercial release in mid 2008. This includes not only the first search experience that is simple, instant and profitable, but highly reliable across ad networks. We’re not perfect, but we listen and iterate at a rapid pace, in collaboration with our customers. (See TC’s recent coverage of us: http://bit.ly/MeFA1)
We may not be appropriate for your individual needs right now as an affiliate marketer, but it would be great to hear your feedback on our current product and roadmap. We have a wide range of customers, from direct advertisers to agencies, but they all have one common desire: the simplest path to profitability in online advertising. I wasn’t able to locate you in our customer list, but I hope to connect.
Warm Regards,
Max Kalehoff
VP-Marketing
Clickable
Incidentally all the pro-Kenshoo cheerleading stuff is spam by the same affiliate; note how Yannick Weil links to the same site Felix does…funny.
Congratulations to the team at Kenshoo. I saw it for the first time at SMX a few weeks ago, and it has some impressive features.
We’re another 3rd-generation PPC management platform called ClickEquations (http://www.clickequations.com), just released a few weeks ago, and I’d invite serious PPC marketers to take a close look before making any decisions.
Hey Craig,
Are you serious? Trying to piggy-back off Kenshoo’s success with your own marketing? That is pretty low. How about you just keep the first paragraph ( the “congrats” part) in your future posts and not worry about marketing your company. If you were good enough you would get your own TC post.
No, I’m definitely not serious. Well, I was about the congratulations, and the fact that I liked what I saw from Kenshoo. In fact, I’ve been telling people that for the past few weeks, and frankly I usually say pretty awful stuff about competitors, at least those that are awful. And I was serious about ClickEquations, I mean – it’s worth checking out.
On the other hand, maybe congratulations aren’t really in order. After all, the team just got diluted. Why does everyone think raising more money is a good thing? It’s a good thing for the company, but let’s be honest, it would be better for the folks involved if it didn’t have to happen.
As to our own TC post, I do wish we were good enough. I assure you we’re working on it.
Someone had mistakenly got me thinking that these comment things were to enable conversation, and within that if you had something relevant to say you could do so, as long as it was polite and those involved in the conversation might find it useful or interesting. Clearly however commercial speech doesn’t belong in a place like this. I’ll find that person and update them.
BTW; what’s your last name? I think I know, but I’m not sure.
Felix and Yannick,
Your transparent cheerleading for this product is counterproductive on this forum, IMHO. The Buntai link screams of “SPAM”! This is not an ecommerce review site you’re trying to game. TechCrunch’s audience can see through hype/BS. Now for all we know, Kenshoo’s products could be the best thing since sliced bread, but you’re not helping it here.
As someone how has worked both on the ‘buy’ side managing millions of search terms as well as internally at a major search ad platform, I can tell you that SEM campaign management tools aren’t a one-size-fits-all proposition. For very large search marketers managing millions of keywords, it’s usually a better investment to do SEM fully in-house (combination of automation tools and expert SEM people). For the more casual search marketers, tools such as Clickable are more appropriate. Agencies tend to use DoubleClick Search or Atlas Seach for the flexibility they provide. I have not used Kenshoo but clearly there’s something there that’s drawing the type of investment these guys are getting. But there will never be a one-size-fits-all solution for SEM, regardless of what anyone claims.
Kirk,
Nice post.
Me thinks the following are all the same person:
* Felix
* Yannick
* Really
Their cheerleading is too obvious, and too transparent.
It’s amusing Max can’t find Yannick – probably ‘cos he doesn’t exist in real life!
laughing,
I think you’re right. But I err on benefit of the doubt, especially when dropping in for an instant reply.
Max
It is posible somebody could compare Omniture with Clickable and Kenshoo or Atlas, Doubleclick?
I will appreciate that, tks
i don’t think Sequoia Capital invests in non relevant stuff.
congrats kenshoo!
insider rounds are not ideal
How much does it usually cost to have an SEM solution like Kenshoo. Is there some literature I can get online? Sorry for being a complete newbie about this..
I would never spam, I was programmed not too.
Comeptitive market place in the SME sector but must be massive potential with larger enterprises spending serious $$.