Marin Software, a startup that creates search engine management software for advertisers and agencies, has secured $13 million in Series C financing led by DAG Ventures, with Focus Ventures, Benchmark Capital and Amicus Capital participating. Marin received $7.25 million in Series B funding in 2008 led by Benchmark Capital. The company also received $2.5 million in Series A funding from Amicus Capital in 2006.
Marin Software offers a browser application to help advertisers and agencies managing paid search advertising campaigns across Google, Yahoo, MSN and other search sites. Marin’s software is used by Razorfish, ZipRealty and other companies. Marin’s customers spend at least $100,000 per month on paid search campaigns across the major search engines.The company’s main competitors include Kenshoo and Refined Labs.
Honestly, do such software work? When Search Engine ranking is itself considered a natural, organic process, what good would this software do? I simply don’t understand!
May be the software would be useful for giving their current rankings, other search engine related stats in order to improve the website rank.
Is just Marin’s browser application enough to manage your paid search campaigns? How much of input is involved in this or is it just for tracking?
Really, you *have* to change the article title…it should read “Search Engine Marketing” software, NOT “Search Engine Optimization” software.
Otherwise, guys from covario, conductor, seomoz, etc, etc, will all be in here claiming you don’t know the difference between the two sides of the search results page.
You are right about TechCrunch getting the facts wrong. It’s a shame they never get the difference between SEO and SEM right.
On your list of SEO software vendors you forgot RankAbove. Market reviews are rating them best on the market.
This is a great example of using misleading keywords to get rankings for high volume searches.
TC chooses their titles and keywords very carefully, this was no mistake, they just wanted all the SEO fanatics to comment and link. done and done.
Looks like your title is wrong – should be Marin raises $13 million for paid search management software. SEO and paid search are different things.
Coming from a bootstrapped company I find it amazing how much capital venture backed companies like this need to keep going.
yea isn’t VC funding supposed to be down 40-50% or something like that?
Sounds Good! Marin Software is one among the companies getting good buzz. Revenews gave them a good thumbs up earlier this year, too
Well I guess the investors can see value in it or else it was a heck of a good pitch. Personally I struggle to see much value in tools around paid search, but that is probably just me being too cynical.
Its not Marin, Its Mazic, World’s Best Meta Search Engine. Do try out Mazic Widgets @ http://search.m...;sa=Search#1055
Well done by Marin Software. These guys are among the very top SEM software vendors. Marin together with Kenshoo.
Anyhow , the space for enterprise SaaS solutions to maximize marketing productivity and ROI% is sizzling hot. This investment just proves that.
puters puting
Dont know yet if the software will be effective in getting a higher rank in search engines or not.
Marin needed to raise this money because they are almost out of business. They have had massive layoffs recently and a few months ago ditched almost their entire sales staff.
Thier technology is for paid search and is another example of pretty interface but no real technology to drive results and optimization for paid search campaigns.
There is much better and more established technology out there from companies like 360i and Efficient Frontier. Marin and Kenshoo are really all marketing and no substance which is why they haven’t been able to gain market share, run their business off their own cashflow and keep needing to go back to the VC well to keep the lights on.
Don’t believe the hype.
sounds like the typical FUD from the incumbents in the space. big surprise.
Does your post even make sense? What VC company dumps cash into a failing business? That’s illogical, especially in this environment.
With regard to layoffs, you’re misinformed as well but I guess I’m not surprised. It’s not reasonable to expect all open forum participation to be of the educated sort.
I note you specifically lauded Efficient Frontier in your post, excellent example of someone who has actually experienced the recent type of layoffs you claim Marin has: http://www.clickz.com/3631392
Get your facts straight, you’re simply spewing venom. Either someone has pissed you off or you work for a Marin Competitor.
I am with Informed user. DLB is obviously threatened. You should be ashamed of yourself DLB. Please apologize to the nice people at Marin Search Marketer who are creating useful paid search management software.
The one platform not mentioned here, but by far and away the most mature and fully automated is http://www.searchforce.com
I don’t think TechCrunch mentions them because they were not funded by VCs and they have focused on engineering a real product that works, as opposed to just the arm-waving and marketing that Marin and Kenshoo do.
My agency has been using Searchforce for a couple years now and it is by far and away the best SaaS platform out there for SEM. Marin, Kenshoo and whoever ‘refined labs’ is don”t come close.
Headline should be changed. Marin Software makes Search Engine MARKETING software not OPTIMIZATION.
I haven’t used Marin, but have heard good things about their services. The large PPC management company that I have used ($8 million in annual spend on B2C products) was SearchRev (purchased by AKQA a few years ago). They are worth a look as well from an optimization stand point.
why do companies you SEM software? it boggles my mind.
why would that boggle your mind? is it surprising that an advertiser spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on PPC would want to make sure they are maximizing their efficiency? are you able to manage tens or hundreds of thousands of keywords by hand with the same effectiveness as a data assisted algorithm?
tens of thousands??? I wish I only had to manage tens of thousands.
I manage millions using nothing more than excel.
and before someone chimes in with “it could be done better with software”, here’s a tidbit: Google (yes, our reps at Google, real people) says that we out-perform our competition. Who is our competition? anyone you can think of in the consumer electronics industry.
I’m sure you’re brilliant, but why do all of that by hand? You’re probably using similar (likely simplified) methods to the SEM platforms anyway. How much time do you spend building reports?
Real people said that huh? It doesn’t take much to get assigned a rep (CSR) in the OSO group. I’ve been to the ‘plex more than a dozen times. The food’s gone downhill in the last few years.
Are you by chance working at a shopping comparison engine? gotta love the arb business!
Let’s hear some spend figures heavyweight.
http://www.Prosper202Pro.com just launched, has more features then these other products and costs a good deal less so I expect them to be major competition in the months to come.
http://www.tracking202pro.com rather. I used the wrong URL above.
No, I do not working for a shopping comparison site.
We have our own account reps at Google…they just work for us.
Reports don’t take much time at all.
Slow day is low $10k.
I know what you mean, although the amount of benefit they provide really depends on the quality of the ‘googler’.
kudos to you on managing all of that by hand. I’m sure you’ve got all of the workflow down to a science.
We’re in the same range… $10-$15k/day in spend w/ google.
thanks.
I’ve been involved in search for 5 years now with 3 different companies. Not one of them invested in software to manage search.
If you’re spending a lot of money, chances are the software is going to cost you $10k-$30k/month. I really don’t think the cost/benefit is worth it. There are some manual processes that we could benefit from some automation, it’s better that we have our development team build it in-house so we get exactly what we need without the additional cost.
cool!!! marine sofwtare is also one of the companies getting the buzz.
I’ve been trying to get on their site for like a week now and keep getting page cannot be displayed – Is my computer f#**’d or are they gone?
Your computer is f#**’d Jim.