Digital marketing technology company Adchemy announced Wednesday the launch of its new search engine marketing software solution, WordMap, which will allow advertisers to tailor ads to specific consumers. based on user intent. 

More than half of all online ads are paid-search advertisements, and the average number of keywords per search is growing, which is generating a lot of unnecessary complexity in the search terms that advertisers are attempting to bid on.  

Search queries are now 10% longer than they were two years ago, meaning users are now entering more words per search query than before in an attempt to narrow down search results to the most relevant pages, according to recent research from comScore.

In an attempt to keep up, advertisers are simply adding more words to their ad groups, which simply leads to overloaded ad campaigns.  But while advertisers are bidding on more and more keywords, they are not able to bid on variations.  A person looking for a cheap laptop might search for “cheap laptops” or “refurbished laptops” or “used laptops.”  All of those words essentially mean the same thing: cheap.

But increasing the relevance of each paid search ad and landing page used in massive paid search campaigns has long required an exhaustive manual effort that has made it difficult for companies to provide relevant responses at scale across thousands or millions of keywords. 

What does this mean?

“Online marketing conversion is not as effective as it could be, which results in lost revenue,” said Anurag Wadehra, senior vice president of product and marketing at Adchemy, in a phone interview. 

WordMap operates by translating user intent based on keyword variations related to value, brand, size, use, and more to reduce the number of keywords in a search.  “WordMap will take the complexity of millions of keywords and reduce it to 100 or less,” said Wadehra. 

WordMap’s technology automatically groups keywords based on the similarity of the intent, resulting in highly relevant ads delivered to specific consumers.  It also provides ad copy for each word group, and marketers can customize a landing page for each intent.

Adchemy has been quietly testing out the product for the last six months, with some promising results.  According to the company, a number of Fortune 100 companies in the fields of insurance and online retail have tried out the software solution and have reported significant improvement in the relevance of their paid search advertising and have increased the number of online conversion of searchers to buyers by 400%.

Founded in 2004, the Foster City, Calif.-based company has its background in algorithm-based performance marketing, and has been catching the eye of investors.  The startup has raised a total of $60 million in financing and last year Accenture, the technology consulting and services group, made a strategic investment in Adchemy, joining Mayfield Fund and August Capital in a $31 million financing round.  

In previous interviews, Adchemy chief executive Murthy Nukala has referred to Adchemy’s technology as “statistical personalization,” explaining that while the company does not necessarily identify a person, it utilizes data from click streams and other data sets to identify types of people that advertisers want to target.

One of the people who was brought in to advise and help develop Adchemy’s technology was Rajeev Motwani, a computer science professor at Stanford who also co-authored the paper that inspired Google’s PageRank algorithm. Motwani died last year in a drowning accident.

Image source: comscore.com