“Kenshoo Local is exactly what we need to serve our clients more efficiently and grow our paid search offering,” said Maxime Baffert, Directeur Général at Publicis Webformance. “Kenshoo Local’s automated technology solutions will help our team get campaigns up faster and the advanced algorithms will help us meet each client’s specific goals. Without Kenshoo Local, we would not be able to scale our business as effectively.”

Kenshoo Local was built specifically for companies managing large volumes of small/medium enterprises (SME), stores, dealers, franchises, or individual locations. Built upon the Kenshoo Enterprise platform used by eight of the top ten global agency networks, Kenshoo Local is the first to offer capabilities that simplify account creation and enable mass management of hundreds or thousands of geo-targeted campaigns so that Publicis Webformance can manage more clients effectively and profitably.

Publicis Webformance will take advantage of the Kenshoo Local’s objective management and budget management solutions to manage and optimize the campaigns of its clients, providing them with the highest standard of quality.

“We’re very excited about the partnership with Publicis Webformance,” said Sivan Metzger, General Manager at Kenshoo Local. “More and more, the SME market is turning to the Internet as a growth channel and Publicis Webformance has carved out a very strong position and turnkey solution. Armed with Kenshoo Local, the Publicis Webformance team will be able to do more for its clients in less time.”

About Kenshoo
Kenshoo is a digital marketing software company that engineers technology solutions for online advertising. Kenshoo’s global platform delivers the control, automation and results needed to make better investments across search, social, and display campaigns. Advertisers, agencies and marketing providers use Kenshoo EnterpriseTM, Kenshoo SocialTM, and Kenshoo LocalTM to direct more than $15 billion in annual sales revenue. Kenshoo powers five of the top ten retailers in the world and eight of the ten largest ad agency networks. With campaigns running in more than 100 countries, Kenshoo customers include Barnes & Noble, CareerBuilder, Facebook, Havas Digital, Hitwise, iREP, John Lewis, LendingTree, Omnicom Media Group, Sears, Starcom MediaVest Group, Travelocity, Walgreens, and Zappos. Kenshoo has ten international offices and is backed by Sequoia Capital and Arts Alliance. Please visit www.Kenshoo.com for more information.

About Publicis Webformance
Publicis Webformance’s mission is to bring the best of digital communication to SMBs and professionals. Based in Lyon, it provides website creation services and paid search campaign management for its clients. Publicis Webformance is a subsidiary of Publicis Groupe, the 3rd largest communication company worldwide and leader in digital communication.

Yodle’s business (not local search) relies on the lack of knowledge of their customers which are predominantly SMBs. It’s not to say that they have succeeded in helping many small businesses but my take is that we should employ better solutions and tactics for SMBs as they are the backbone of the US economy. In the long term, a customer centric solution will provide Yodle improved brand satisfaction and higher margins. Also, for god sakes, to Yodle execs please shift commissions from just acquisition (revenue) and tie it to margins which would force a focus on quality, acquisition and retention. Let’s hope Yodle listens to this bloggers call or has shifted already to be on the customer satisfaction front through quality, innovation, content and technology. By the way, having scoured there NYC offices, and meeting a few folks, I don’t recall ever meeting true online marketers? Hmmm!

Here are a few relatively old feedback from various folks on the web:

Yodle, ReachLocal, Yext – Scams or Just Hard To Please Everybody?
Lawyerist.com: Yodle Takes the Hard Sell to a New Level
DavidPirek.com: Is Yodle a scam?

Also a good attempt to improve search reputation by the Yodle which may have been outsourced: Yodle Reviews.

Speaking of small businesses, I’d love to hear from you folks. Have you used Yodle or any other local search provider? What has been your experience? How have they succeeded? How have they not?

Yodle, a leader in local online marketing, announced it has completed a transaction to acquire ProfitFuel, Inc. ProfitFuel, based in Austin, TX, is the largest and fastest growing provider of local search engine optimization (SEO) services to small businesses across the United States. With over 11,000 clients, ProfitFuel has achieved breakout growth serving small businesses that have a moderate marketing budget. Outrank, the company’s main service, is designed to generate inbound phone calls and emails cost effectively by delivering prominent rankings on top search engines for clients.

“ProfitFuel’s dedication to customer results and sales excellence made it a natural fit with Yodle. I look forward to bringing Yodle’s expanded suite of SEM, SEO, Social and Display marketing products to market more quickly in collaboration with ProfitFuel’s world class team.”

Historically, Yodle has focused its local online marketing services on small business advertisers that typically spend larger budgets of $1,000+ monthly and national brand advertisers; Franchise, Multi-location, and Manufacturer/Dealer organizations that advertise locally across hundreds of locations. With the acquisition of ProfitFuel, Yodle now adds a product and a sales force capable of serving a much broader set of clients who have smaller marketing budgets, but who still want the accountability of measuring their marketing performance.

“With ProfitFuel, Yodle is doubling down on its approach of providing a clear ROI to the local advertiser, delivered through a combined 450 person sales and client service team,” said Yodle CEO Court Cunningham. “ProfitFuel’s dedication to customer results and sales excellence made it a natural fit with Yodle. I look forward to bringing Yodle’s expanded suite of SEM, SEO, Social and Display marketing products to market more quickly in collaboration with ProfitFuel’s world class team.”

David Rubin, previously CEO of ProfitFuel, will join Yodle as SVP of Sales. Mr. Rubin has a proven 20 year track record as a successful CEO and sales leader in the technology space. Prior to ProfitFuel, Mr. Rubin was founder and CEO of HomeCity, an online real estate brokerage that pioneered utilizing web-based content to acquire clients. Before founding HomeCity, David held leadership positions at various companies including Intraware as Vice President of New Services Development, BITSource as founder and CEO and Computize as National Sales Director.

“We felt Yodle was the perfect choice to maximize our future potential for our clients, employees and shareholders,” said Mr. Rubin. “We spoke to many companies in the industry and felt that Yodle offered the best set of products, highest caliber talent and the most comprehensive vision to outperform the competition and transform this industry for many years to come.”

Founded in 2000, ProfitFuel has 220 employees and is consistently recognized as one of the best places to work by multiple sources, including Austin Business Journal and Texas Monthly. Yodle will now boast a 300-person sales force and many more talented staffers across marketing operations, client services and corporate departments.

Yodle plans to grow ProfitFuel’s Austin, TX office, making it a major hub, and to fully integrate the company’s infrastructure and technology by year’s end.

About Yodle
Yodle, a leader in local online marketing and named #35 on the INC 500 List of fastest growing private companies in the U.S., connects thousands of local businesses with consumers in a process so simple and cost-effective that business owners can’t imagine any other way to advertise. Yodle has developed an integrated approach to signing up and serving local businesses that are transitioning their marketing budgets online. Yodle is headquartered in New York, NY.

Source: Yodle

Covario’s U.S. search revenues grew by 37.7 percent in 2010 — the highest growth rate among the top 20 search agencies in the ranking. The San Diego-based firm reported search revenue in terms of net revenue only, exclusive of paid search media fees and Web development work.

“As impressive as our U.S. growth was in 2010, international search marketing now represents more than 40 percent of our business and is growing at a faster rate than domestic campaigns,” said Russ Mann, Covario’s chief executive. “With our global revenue included we would have ranked even higher.” Covario was one of only five search marketing agencies to improve upon its position in the ranking from the previous year when the firm made its first appearance on the annual Ad Age list.

Founded in 2006, Covario was also featured for the first time in the 2011 Forrester Research Wave of U.S. Search Marketing Agencies, along with eight other firms from among some 100 agencies considered. In Forrester’s summary of the report, Covario was noted as “best for SEO (search engine optimization).” Last year, Covario made the INC. 500 list of the nation’s fastest-growing privately-held companies for the second year in a row, as well as the Software 500 list of largest U.S. software firms. The search marketing firm has also won numerous awards — together with its clients — for both SEO and PPC (pay per click) programs, including two first place MediaPost OMMA Awards for paid search campaigns and an IAB MIXX Gold Award for “the best search campaign.” The company has nearly 130 employees worldwide who support about 100 clients, representing more than 1,000 brands and websites. In addition to paid and organic search marketing software and services, the firm provides its global enterprise clients with display advertising support, social media marketing, and cross-media attribution analysis.

About Covario™ Covario, Inc. is among the nation’s largest independent SEM (search engine marketing) and SEO (search engine optimization) solutions providers, offering software and agency services for paid and organic search management. Covario provides large global organizations with robust solutions for paid search advertising, organic search (SEO), social media and display advertising. Covario enables complex and distributed organizations to control their brand integrity; ensure budget transparency; and deliver quantifiable results across business units, distribution channels and languages. Headquartered in San Diego, the company’s growing customer base includes some of the world’s best known brands in technology, retail, ecommerce, financial services, consumer electronics, media, entertainment, publishing and consumer packaged goods. More information about Covario is available by calling 858.397.1500 or visiting online at http://www.covario.com.

Designed to help marketers reach for the sky, Kenshoo Cloudvertizing enables true geographic targeting by going beyond physical locations and into physical sciences. With an API feed from the Total Biological Service (Total BS), Kenshoo uses a patent-pending algorithm to provide 24-hour, 3-day and 10-day forecasts. This data can then be modeled out to determine the optimal level of coverage incorporating key metrics like Cloud Travel Route (CTR) and Cumulus Per Cirrus (CPC).

“With more and more computing being conducted in the cloud, it was only natural for Kenshoo to incorporate cloudvertizing into our digital marketing software suite,” said Alon Sheafer, Chief Strategy Officer at Kenshoo.

Kenshoo Cloudvertizing has been in a private beta for select customers in London and San Francisco where cloud density is highest. The precipitation for this innovation was the industry trend towards hyper-local targeting and location-based advertising. Having already been in market for nearly two years with a local solution and achieving much success, Kenshoo seized the opportunity to round out its offering with an atmospheric solution.

Yoav Izhar-Prato, Kenshoo CEO, added, “We look forward to making it rain with cloudvertizing.”

About Kenshoo
Kenshoo is a digital marketing software company that enjoys April Fools gags while engineering technology solutions for search marketing and online advertising. Kenshoo’s global platform delivers the control, automation and results needed to make better investments across search, social and display campaigns. Advertisers, agencies and marketing providers use the Kenshoo EnterpriseTM and Kenshoo LocalTM suites to direct more than $15 billion in online sales revenue. Kenshoo powers eight of the ten largest ad agency networks and five of the top ten retailers. With campaigns running in more than 100 countries, Kenshoo customers include such brands as Barnes & Noble, CareerBuilder, Facebook, Havas Digital, Hitwise, iREP, John Lewis, LendingTree, Omnicom Media Group, Sears, Starcom MediaVest Group, Travelocity, Walgreens, and Zappos. Kenshoo has ten international offices and is backed by Sequoia Capital and Arts Alliance. Please visit www.Kenshoo.com for more information.

Source: Kenshoo

The good news didn’t end there, Marin hit the news media with another whammy, announcing that it now manages more than $2 billion in annual paid search spend through the Marin platform. What do we think? 1.5% of those billings plus a small amount of service related fees, not too shabby. I would have paced the announcements a bit, to be honest.

The funds will be used to focus growth Internationally with plans to open offices in Singapore and Shanghai, and expand into France, Australia and Brazil in 2011. Marin services 800 clients on search campaigns in 160 countries, expanded its service to Facebook last August.

In my opinion, Marin is laying the foundation for two possible scenarios IPO in the next 12 months or possible buy out.

Below is the release along with coverage on Marin.

Marin Software Secures $16 Million Series E Financing

Marin Software, provider of the leading online advertising management platform for advertisers and agencies announced it has secured an additional $16 million in Series E financing. Crosslink Capital led the round with participation from Marin’s existing venture capital investors including Benchmark Capital, DAG Ventures, Focus Ventures and Triangle Peak Partners. The company also announced that Eric Chin, partner at Crosslink Capital, will join the Board of Directors as an observer and that former Shutterfly VP of Finance John Kaelle has joined the executive team as Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer.

Source: Marin Software