Trada Secures Funding From Google Ventures To Expand Its Paid Search Marketplace
Trada announced today it has closed a $5.75 million Series C financing, led by Google Ventures, with participation from founding investor Foundry Group. The funding will be used to accelerate the expansion of Trada’s marketplace to serve international markets, grow its agency model and diversify beyond paid search into other types of online advertising, such as display.
Boulder, Colo. (PRWEB) July 21, 2010
Trada (http://trada. com) announced today it has closed a $5.75 million Series C financing, led by Google Ventures, with participation from founding investor Foundry Group. The funding will be used to accelerate the expansion of Trada’s marketplace to serve international markets, grow its agency model and diversify beyond paid search into other types of online advertising, such as display.
Built for businesses and agencies spending between $5,000 and $50,000 per month in paid search, Trada is the first and only crowdsourced paid search marketplace, allowing businesses and advertising agencies to run search marketing campaigns on Google, Yahoo! and Bing.
By leveraging the skills of hundreds of the world’s best paid search experts (http://www. trada. com/ppc_experts. html), Trada enables time-strapped business owners and marketers to eliminate the hassle and cost of managing a paid search campaign in-house. In turn, Trada’s paid search experts work collaboratively and competitively on behalf of the business owners. Compensation is earned on a performance basis by generating profitable clicks and conversions for less than the businesses’ stated budgets.
“I’m thrilled that Google Ventures sees the value of Trada’s marketplace as a model to allow businesses and agencies to successfully run paid search campaigns,” said Niel Robertson, founder and CEO of Trada. “When we made the decision to raise additional capital to expand Trada’s marketplace, build functionality to support the display network and grow internationally, we couldn’t think of a better partner to help us than the Google Ventures team.”
“Businesses today face numerous challenges when attempting to build and manage effective, cross-platform online ad campaigns,” said Rich Miner, Partner, Google Ventures. "Trada's unique model brings search marketing expertise to a wide range of businesses that lack the resources and expertise to effectively run large-scale campaigns themselves. The company's results to date have been impressive, and we are excited to work closely with such a talented team."
“I’m incredibly impressed with Trada’s success thus far,” said Seth Levine, Managing Director of Foundry Group. “When we made the decision to seek additional funding to support Trada’s rapid growth, Google Ventures was an obvious first choice for an investment partner. Their experience in search marketing is second to none.”
Miner will join Trada’s Board of Directors, which includes Robertson and Levine.
“The Trada model scales into new ad networks and other forms of online advertising very well,” said Robertson. “One of the biggest challenges for businesses and agencies is trying out new types of advertising such as Facebook, display or mobile without having to build in-house expertise to run the campaigns. The Trada platform allows them do so with the click of a button. The experts working in the Trada marketplace do the hard work of optimizing campaigns to be profitable for businesses.”
Trada’s innovative approach to paid search is successful due to the expertise of its more than 500 certified paid search experts, who bring a wide breadth of sophisticated marketing strategies and scale to campaigns in the Trada marketplace. An average campaign running in Trada contains more than 6,500 keywords and 110 ads, achieving a level of success that’s beyond the reach of many businesses.
Since publicly launching in March, Trada has increased the number of businesses running campaigns in its marketplace nearly 300 percent, to more than 200. The number of paid search experts in the marketplace has doubled to more than 500.
About Trada
Based in Boulder, Colo., Trada is revolutionizing the way agencies, businesses and paid search experts build and manage search marketing campaigns. Trada has developed the first paid search marketplace that allows agencies and in - house advertisers to leverage the skills of hundreds of the best paid search experts in the world, who in turn earn money risk free by generating low-cost clicks and conversions for businesses. For more information, visit www. trada. com.
About Google Ventures
Google Ventures seeks to discover and help develop great companies – we believe in the power of entrepreneurs to do amazing things. Our investments range from seed to late stage, across a broad range of industries, including consumer Internet, software, hardware, clean tech, biotechnology and health care. We embrace the challenge of helping young companies grow from the proverbial garage to global relevance. The Google Ventures team includes entrepreneurs, investors and innovators, along with some 20,000+ exceptional Googlers whose breadth of knowledge, experience and creativity constitute perhaps our most valuable resource. For more information, visit www. google. com/ventures (http://www. google. com/ventures/).
About Foundry Group
Foundry Group is a venture capital firm focused on investing in early-stage information technology, Internet and software startups. In addition to providing the necessary venture capital to get a company up and running, Foundry Group is committed to leveraging their experience in starting and growing companies, expertise in the technology industry, and network of relationships to help great entrepreneurs turn great ideas into great companies. Foundry Group is based in Boulder, Colorado, and invests in companies located across the United States. For more information, visit www. foundrygroup. com (http://www. foundrygroup. com/).
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