14 DAY TRIAL // Trada, a search advertising consulting marketplace, has closed its third round of funding bringing in $5.75 million from investors. The interesting part is that the round was lead by Google Ventures, Google’s venture capital arm. Trada is independent of Google and offers services for all three main search engines.
“Trada closed a $5.75M Series C round of financing lead by Google Ventures and participated in by our other existing (and awesome) friends at Foundry Group. For many obvious and some not so obvious reasons we are over the moon about this,” the company announced.
The company specializes in setting up small companies wanting to create a search advertising campaign with experts which will make it happen. In a way, it uses a crowdsourced approach to paid search consulting. The lure for the companies is that they can get professional help without going to a dedicated agency or expert which can prove too expensive. It also takes out some of the guess work from trying to find someone to run a campaign.
For the search marketing experts, Trada provides an easy way of getting smaller additional contracts without the hassle of having to find them. The company also encourages experts to work together to diversify the number of keywords for each particular customer.
One's concern about Google leading the funding round is that this may affect Trada’s neutrality. The company says this is not the case and provides several arguments. First, it’s not Google directly that is investing, but Google Ventures which has few direct ties with the company’s product teams.
Google Ventures was setup to invest in exactly the kind of companies that Google may not go after and has made some interesting choices so far. Obviously, Trada’s business is very close to Google’s bread-and-butter AdWods. But the company is quick to emphasize that Yahoo and Bing are just as important and says nothing will change in the relationship with those search engines now.